Slashdot Mirror

I can't find a single thing you said that is factual. His music was sold with copies of Harry Potter DVDs, which I'm fairly certain were rather profitable.

Writers Guild of America members do not get paid exclusively based on profit, but rather based on the size of the budget of the production. See pages 1-4 of the document specifying their pay scale. They get a minimum pay for specific tasks for works with a budget under $5M USD, and a higher minimum pay if the budget is over $5M USD. They can negotiate a contract that additionally includes profit-sharing, of course, but they are guaranteed the minimum amounts, regardless of profitability of the work.

Similarly, actors who are in the Screen Actors Guild have a similar document with similar terms. Profit-sharing comes in addition to it, meaning that they should not face a situation where they go unpaid because the work was a flop.

And at this point, I'm too lazy to correct you for musicians, but it's the same deal there too. In fact, something like 90% of musicians lose money for the studios, yet they still get paid anyway. That's part of the cost of being a studio.

Now, that's not to say that all of those folks can't get screwed over by Hollywood accounting and other legalese, but that has to do with any pay that's in addition to the minimums specified in those documents. Their minimum pay is always guaranteed, and they always get paid.

Just throwing this out there...

I'm a white collar worker, a sound designer, (I'm on a deadline this morning so I'll be brief) and the entire film industry is unionized, at least everywhere in the US that matters w/r/t film production, LA, NY and Chicago. I think that a union can be a very good thing for white collar workers given a certain configuration of the benefits, and I think our industry is a pretty good example of how it can work.

Some points

• My union is IATSE, and my particular classification is under the jurisdiction of Local 700, the Motion Picture Editor's Guild. All of the different jobs in film production are essentially under one gargantuan union (except for electricians, but this is minor). It never strikes against the industry as a whole (unlike some jerk unions I could mention), just against individual productions or producers that break the rules.
• Our retirement benefits and health plan are union benefits. But UNLIKE the UAW arrangement, the health plans and retirement bennies are administered by a half labor/half producer board of directors, and there is no continuing liability to the producers. In short, once the producer pays the fringes on my weekly salary, they're never liable for another dime. The money goes into a trust and the trust pays for the health and retirement. Production companies and studios can go bankrupt left and right, but our benefits (and their liabilities) are insulated through the trust fund mechanism
• Because most of the people in the film industry are freelancers, or because production companies and studios tend to do a LOT of hiring and firing on a just-in-time basis, my benefits follow me wherever I work in the business, as long as I work for a studio that's a signatory to the guild's collective bargaining agreement. I can work 5 months at Sony, 3 months at Disney and a month for an independent company, and as long as I work a minimum number of weeks every year I'll keep my benefits and stay up on my pension.

The system is not without its problems: I rarely ever go to union meetings, I don't really know people that are Big Into The Union and a lot of us complain about some of its weird work rules. Many of the people in the union are very tight with management, and many people in management used to be, or are currently in the union, so there are lots of conflicts of interest and going through the formal grievance process can be politically... fraught. But the benefits, particularly the health, are excellent, completely portable, and I make a very good wage (which is important if you're trying to live in LA).

It could be a model for IT folks if they find that suddenly the truly talented ones among them are being hired and fired in flocks and shipped across the country like cattle, which is about where the film industry was in the 1930s.

I think that it'd be a straight up financially bad idea for almost everyone. In addition to making the barriers to entry for new developers and IT professionals higher, we'd all suffer in terms of the actual money we take home. Union contracts base pay around seniority, not productivity. In fact, most unions violently oppose productivity-based pay scales.

Not all unions are the same, you know.

Professional baseball players have a union. You think they're getting paid based on seniority?

Actors and writers have unions. You think they're not getting paid based on their performances?

A union is whatever the workers who form it make it. Those workers know the facts of their industries and form their unions accordingly. Just because some unions stress seniority doesn't mean yours has to.

Although frankly, if they want residuals in the games industry, they can get the fuck in line. Behind the programmers, artists, animators, fx guys, et al. (Same goes for the actors - fuck you! You want royalties on a performance that took you at most a week? We slaved over that game for over three years, working evenings, weekends, you name it).

Unions are great at representing manual workers who perform repetitive tasks and who have a very horizontal organisation structure. If there are 100 people on your production line reporting to one supervisor even if you churn out more gizmos than anyone else you do not stand much of a chance at becoming the supervisor. Hence why it is in your interest to bargain collectively and have all of your standards raised.

If on the other hand your job involves a high level of innovation and metal agility these attributes may well contribute to you rising through an organisation. Such organisations are often far more vertical in structure. In this case, it is unlikely that you would benefit from collective bargaining where the curve is straightened out.

newsflash! I don't know about rock stars, but artist have a union ... SAG http://www.sag.org/ They are all workers after all

Look at white colar unions to see what it would likely look like. For example SPEEA, or maybe SAG. The point is, in professional unions, pay is often still determined by your manager (+ a garunteed COLA) and layoffs don't necessarily hapen by seniority. In a union, you would be the membership, and the goal would be to collectively bargain what works best for the membership.

While I think this lawsuit is absolutely neccessary it's not really an anticompetitive move. The monopoly would become an ancillary benefit to be sure, but they really are just trying to curb pre sales piracy. This move does NOTHING to stop the massive flow of DVD-R images that flow after a movie is released. Why buy it at Best Buy when you can DL it and burn to a $1 disk?

If you don't grok why the indie makers are pissed think about how much it costs to make a movie. If any of the actors carries a SAG card they cost a fortune. It's like hiring out $75/hr union workers to hold a sign for you. Young budding directors don't have that type of money so they have to seek investments. Investors, as a rule, would like to see a return on their investment. ROI just like in the tech world. Awards provide a goal for the movie to reach. If they attain an award then they essentially get free marketing and a chance to actually profit off the film.

A friend of mine worked off a total shoe string budget and it still cost him $15k to make an independant film. 15k was barely enough and he had to do things like buy hard drives and return them after 25 days. Film makers like Robert Rodriguez went to human guniea pig labs like Pharmaco and took non FDA approved drugs to raise a few thousand for their films.

Why not just leave the MPAA wouldn't that really be the meaning of independent? Or, does anyone know if you must be a member of the MPAA to qualify for the awards? Another option would be for them to send them out anyways and disregard teh MPAA altogether on this. I am no longer part of the movie scene ( though was once a member of NATO) might such an action cause repercusions from SAG et al?

Don't let the name "guild" for a union turn you off. Movie actors belong to the Screen Actors Guild.

It's more than just the visability. Both the Screen Actors Guild (North America) and Equity (UK) require that names of performers are unique. That's one reason why many younger actors are known by 3 names, eg Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Robert Duncan McNeill etc. The system isn't perfect, you will find duplicates occasionally, but it certainly has the vast majority of performers with unique names.

So it doesn't matter that an elected representative, most of whose constituents are either employed by, or run, an entertainment company might have an opinion? I'll grant you that what amounts to a trade-union of interested companies providing the "Vote for Me" cash for advertisements smells to high-heaven of "buy-out", but what does the Screen Actors' Guild think? That group, and it's contituent members, might have opinions that disagree with ours. If, after all, the *AA is correct, and p2p makes problems making money for an individual record label, won't the individual artists feel it too?

By the way. I didn't see any notice of the Screen Actors' Guild's position on this topic. They and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have already been thrilled that the Senate as told the FCC to submit a review of media consolidation, the likes of which goes to Clear Channel.

(As an aside, I recommend browsing Aerosmith's
website for their thoughts on their record contract.)

.... and there a courts to take this issue to before one resorts to picketing.

On the issue of risks, you are correct to an extent. But, that has it's limit -- look at OSHA and workers compensation.

ON finances, how much research are you supposed to do? There has been cases where courts have held that On a job interview, I asked if the company had income or if they were getting angel funding. I worked for a place that owes me over $20k in back pay, but they have no money. It's common in the .bombs. In one place, my first paycheck bounced.

There'sa load of info on the potential Hollywood shutdown.

Right now, SAG's 135,000 members (most of which make drek for pay) are working under a new contract. ( A link to NewCity-Chicago referencing the end of the strike; a link to SAG's own web site about the new commercial addendum.)

The Directors' Guild contract expires on 30 June 01 (AFAIK: correct me if I'm wrong), and the Writers' Guild contract terminates on 30 April 01, and I am trying (unsuccesfully) to dredge up web info confirming this.

The SAG contract also expires 30 June 01.

Without writers, no new scripts are made.

Without actors, no motion cinema is possible.

This means that Hollywood shuts down.

Maybe this also will mean that the MPAA will focus more on the contract dispute and send Proskauer Rose LLP (sp?) against the big bad unions as opposed to the little indie hacker 'zine.

(Wishful thinking never hurt anyone, did it? :)


Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)

According to the Screen Actors Guild there is a threat of an actor's strike. This is expected to impact the fall season.

Will we have yet another scale for Warp speed?

According to the Screen Actors Guild there is a threat of an actor's strike. This is expected to impact the fall season.

Will we have yet another scale for Warp speed?

But it doesn't stop there. Some creative jobs are organized. Hollywood is very unionized; actors belong to the Screen Actor's Guild (SAG) or the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), musicians belong to the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) directors belong to the Director's Guild of America (DGA), drivers belong to the Teamsters, and most of the support people belong to the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Workers (IATSE). Lucasfilm's animators and CGI techs in Northern California belong to IATSE, which is trying to organize online entertainment shops. If you're doing web design or involved in running a web site, it might be worth talking to an IATSE organizer. They send people to ACM SIGGRAPH meetings in SF, so they're not hard to find.

A union shop is a great advantage in an industry with heavy time pressures. It gives the employees an effective way to push back. Anybody in those unions who works a 12-hour day gets paid major overtime. Get called in for a weekend emergency, and big bonuses apply. This discourages employeers from understaffing and overworking their employees. If a job needs to be done 24/7, it takes four full-time employees.

Organizing in the US is very tough. Over 90% of employees who try to organize a union are fired, even though this is illegal. Canada, for example, has stronger labor laws, and it's much easier to organize there. This is the main reason for declining union membership in the US.

Despite the obstacles, temps at Microsoft have successfully organized a union, and won a lawsuit against Microsoft.

The Screen Actors Guild didn't have a beef with Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood and Broadway is beefin' with Madison Avenue because they're the ones making the product ads. Voiceovers (and character voices) in movies are also done by the SAG, after all.

Regarding the possibility of movie-related computer firms (like Manex Visual Effects) having unions: see NYT on High Tech Unions and and find out if it's a good idea.