writers strike

Dear Wally:

What can we do to get the Hollywood writers happy and back on board? I’m tired of staring at the snow banks and cleaning my fingernails. I want (I need) my Desperate Housewives back!

-Gil (Kingston)

Dear Gil,
Agreed. And kudos to you for ‘fessing up about Desperate Housewives, if Gil is even your real name. The lack of fresh TV viewing material is accentuating these long cold, winter nights. Thank God we’ve had a presidential election in process for the last 2 years to carry us through these fallow times! I’m beginning to feel like it’s mid Feb, I live alone in a bear scat hut in the Yukon, and I’m opening up my last can of ‘fresh’ lettuce from the pantry. The hairball in the throat, as I see it, is that TV writers are not getting enough greenback respect (read: money) for their material sold on the internet. (I think they are fighting for something miniscule like .04 % but I’m too lazy to look it up. The point is, no one’s getting rich here). In fact, the same goes for musicians’ cds and authors’ books, for the most part. The internet is, of course, paradoxically good and bad in many respects, this compensation aspect being one of them. The same used book can get sold again and again (and then again some more) with no continuing royalty schedule to the rightful author (The work is only officially sold for royalty purposes once, to wit, the first time). A popular song can move digitally, virally, around the world for free, leaving the musicians who wrote it no choice but consider an unglorious life of burger flipping and/ or petty crime—unglorious relative to the booze, hookers, limos and room service they were promised by the records execs. Certainly most non-cheats would agree that’s not fair (though a dexterous guitar player could probably flip 10 burgers at once and still rip a suitably toothy ‘Stairway to Heaven’ solo between grease fires). And certainly some folks would like to compensate the authors, especially when they are paying only $2.99 for that author’s used book (or CD or DVD). Ok, so you get the preachy point already…Here’s a possible solution: EBAY and Amazon (the dominant online sales outlets, for now) could easily add a field/ button in the checkout / shopping cart screen that allows buyers to contribute a small amount of their choosing directly to the authors (who would have set up personal free Paypal accounts or (less purely) to performance (etc.) rights groups like BMI and ASCAP. Logistics aside, this is a low cost, low risk experiment that might just well give those of us who value the writers’ efforts, the opportunity to show our thanks directly. Especially if we know there are not a lot of hands in the pot. Imagine an interactive button that says ‘Want to pay the author a little something directly for their contribution?’ (Then you would have the option to enter a dollar or cent amount and it would be added to your total. Like a tax, but one you are not forced to pay) A very little programming on EBAY and Amazon’s part, a very little accounting, and a little supportive pressure from the public and we may just have a situation that appeases writers in some meaningful, fair way. And then you may get your Housewives back. Harrumph!

-Wally.

Ps: Now if I can just figure out a way to get a interactive authorial donation button at the bottom of this newspaper page…(ahem).

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