Every now and then I peek in on The Morning News, an online magazine that’s full of good stuff from good writers, including Maggie Mason at Mighty Girl. And thanks to the peeking in on both sites, I found this blog, from a screenwriter named Josh Cagan, who moved to LA just in time for the writers strike. His Letter From Hollywood is hilarious (and has a grain of truth to it that I find kind of scary), but the constant Letters to Hollywood are pretty great, too.
Really, in the grand scheme of things going on in the world (like, say, starvation, oppression, genocide), not getting paid for the digital or online rights to your work seems fairly insignificant, but it’s a battle professional writers face all the time. And as anyone who uses the Internet more than once a week knows, it may be a relatively new medium, but there’s a ton of money to be made there. In fact, if you think it isn’t being made right now, you’re fooling yourself (are you listening, Big Studios? Are you?) Let’s hope the producers and other big-wigs who bring us our daily doses of film and television recognize that without the people who write the words, dream up the stories and punch up the punchlines, our living rooms and theaters would be full of static (or the next-most-horrifying thing: endless hours of reality programming).
Here’s hoping the scribes get a fair shake this time around, becuase I, for one, will not watch a reality show called Eye Swap.