Writers and wages

Re “Can the strike be settled?” Opinion, Nov. 17

Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers President Nick Counter was quick to share the average salary of the Writers Guild of America’s 4,434 “working” writers. The fact that he had to put “working” into his sentence speaks volumes. While he listed a producer’s woes, he left out the parallel writer’s worries, such as the reality of multiyear unemployment, the fact that a show can be canceled for reasons other than the quality of the writing and that because of ageism, an American writer has a very short window of employability. And finally, because we now know the average salary of working writers, I would like to know the average salaries of the industry’s “working” producers.

James Dutcher

Los Angeles

I’m a striking writer who just learned that the composer of a 1980s sitcom theme song receives 11 cents every time someone buys it as a ring tone. Compare that to the 4 cents that television and movie scribes get when their creation is purchased on DVD or downloaded. Funny, I’ve never heard a guild member brag about having simply jotted down the screenplays for an entire season of an Emmy Award-winning series on a napkin after dining at Applebee’s. Counter doesn’t mention that even when a writer brings a producer a “spec script,” a fully completed screenplay or teleplay written on the writer’s own uncompensated time, he or she faces signing away authorship to the studio. Studios, networks and major distributors are owned by a handful of major corporations, a Hollywood oligarchy, and even top-name writer/producers no longer are allowed to own the series they create. It appears that the Internet is our only potential salvation; if writers manage to produce their own work, they can distribute it online as well.

Jon K. Williams

Goleta