Desperate Hollywood: Screenwriters try to make the movie moguls pay

The twin threats of the internet and reality TV have LA's screenwriters on the verge of a first strike since the 1980s. Andrew Gumbel gets to grips with the world's glitziest industrial dispute

David Mamet once told his fellow screenwriters that their best formula for success was to read Aristotle's Poetics and then write a lot until they got good at it. That might be the purest, most high-minded way for aspiring writers to get their heads around Hollywood's rigid adherence to a three-act structure for feature films, but it doesn't do much to answer another, arguably more pressing question: how to make a decent living writing in Hollywood.

For some people, that's not a problem. If your name is Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail), or Marc Cherry (Desperate Housewives) - or, for that matter, David Mamet - Hollywood will have been good to you: buying you that house in the hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean, sending your children to the most exclusive Californian private schools, allowing you a little quiet time in a luxury cabin in the mountains, booking you the best tables in the finest restaurants, and on and on.

Most Hollywood writers, though, are working grunts like the rest of us, only without the luxury of a guaranteed salary. True, when they hit the jackpot, the rewards can be considerable: a hot screenplay can sell for hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. Work on a successful television show can be similarly lucrative over the long haul - find yourself on the original team for Friends, or The Simpsons, and a happy, comfortable life beckons for decades to come.

For the most part, though, those opportunities are all too rare and are interspersed with years of struggle, rejection and unemployment. Of Hollywood's 12,000 unionised writers, fewer than 2,000 can expect to make money from screenplay writing in any given year. Typically, writers will try their luck at a handful of television pilots, which will either fail to be picked up or languish within the first season or two. They'll almost certainly have a film screenplay or two on the go as well. These will either go nowhere or spend years in development, as one draft succeeds another, different generations of producers insist on their own changes and new concepts, and an actual finished movie remains a distant dream.

Often, the quality of a writer's work has little or nothing to do with its fortunes. Anyone who has been to a multiplex recently knows that the relationship between good writing and finished films - even widely distributed, commercially successful ones - is tenuous at best.

For that reason, writers like to build as much certainty as they can into an otherwise highly uncertain lives. Since the 1930s, the Writers Guild of America - the union that represents them - has wrested certain guarantees out of the producers and also established funds to provide health insurance, retirement benefits and other elements of a middle-class lifestyle. The WGA has also negotiated a system of royalty payments so that a writer on a successful show can continue to feed his or her family even after the show's run is over, while the next job is still taking shape.

Those benefits, however, have become ever more contentiously over the past generation - a period in which the American union movement, as a whole, has dwindled to near-insignificance, and the entertainment industry has become an adjunct to vast multinational media conglomerates which care not a jot about writers (or actors, or directors, or any other humans in their employ) but focus their attention, rather, on pleasing their shareholders by maximising profits.

The two sides came to blows, most memorably, during a strike in 1988 which lasted five months, caused havoc in television and film production schedules, and ended up costing the industry, and the economy of southern California, about $500m (£250m) in lost revenues. The writers certainly had a justifiable cause: the advent of home video, for which they felt they were not being compensated adequately, if at all.

Hindsight suggests, however, that while the most immediate damage was inflicted on management, the writers suffered the most in the long term. Network television lost almost 10 per cent of its audience - an audience that never really came back because it migrated to the emerging cable stations instead. The number of shows on offer declined overall, so the benefits the WGA won could be enjoyed by a smaller pool of writers.

Fast-forward to our own decade and we see a similar dynamic. The WGA came close to striking in 2001, this time over the question of royalty payments (or "residuals", as they are known in the biz) for the new generation of media platforms including cable, DVD and the internet.

Both in 2001 and in 2004, the writers were deeply divided on the wisdom of threatening strike action. Few disputed the justice of receiving equitable royalties for their work, no matter where it was distributed, but the guild leadership was also worried that a rerun of 1988 would have similarly damaging results. Their worries were certainly warranted: just the threat of strike action by the writers prompted the networks to shy away from scripted dramas and comedies in favour of reality shows.

What started as a relative trickle, with Survivor, Big Brother andWho Wants To Be a Millionaire?, has turned into a flood - with Simon Cowell's American Idol, transferring the success of the UK's Pop Idol and sparking a deluge of similarly formatted talent shows spanning everything from dancing (So You Think You Can Dance) to fashion (Project Runway) to cooking (Top Chef) to home design and even, thanks to a new series on Fox called On The Lot, film and television making. While these shows are a lot more scripted than they like to let on, none employs WGA members to do the writing.

Now, in 2007, the industry finds itself at a new crossroads. The WGA membership is angry about the reality show surge and angrier still that it has come without a satisfactory deal on residuals for new media. In other words, writers have seen the sources of available work dry up and are still not being fairly compensated - in their view - for the work they do get. A newly militant leadership is threatening strike action again and they're being taken more seriously than at any time since the late 1980s.

The guild, whose negotiators include Mr Cherry and Dreamgirls writer-director Bill Condon, held two days of fractious negotiations with studio representatives last week but made little or no headway. They will have at each other again this week. Since the strike deadline is still more than three months away, it seems unlikely that peace, love and understanding will break out between the two sides soon.

And that, in turn, is having its own curious knock-on effect. Studio executives are rushing projects into production, just to make sure they have enough product to cover any strike-affected period. That is another way of saying they are approving scripts without really reading them - meaning that filmgoers across the planet should brace ourselves for a tidal wave of crap hitting our screens starting sometime in the latter half of 2008.

The writers' tough stance is, meanwhile, rippling out to the unions representing actors and directors, both of which have contract deals set to expire next June. The worst-case scenario has the writers going on strike just as the actors and directors start their own heavy negotiating, and then the actors and directors walking out as the last available pre-writers' strike scripts are ready to go into production.

Union advocates hope that the three guilds can set aside their differences and present a united front to the studios, forcing them to pay decent residuals on DVD releases, internet downloads and the rest. History suggests, however, that this is unlikely. The studios, meanwhile, are making hardly any effort to back their position with intellectual argument. They are placing their bets almost entirely on their ability to win this battle through brute strength. After all, it's not as though a bunch of union leaders are going to kill the Hollywood dreams of those aspiring writers and actors across America who are willing to do just about anything for a break.

"We are about to begin a year that undoubtedly will be stressful," the head of CBS, Les Moonves, said last week, in a line that carried an unmistakable tinge of menace. "None of us wants a strike, or anything bad to happen." In the past, studios have taken advantage of strikes or threatened industrial action to hiring non-union workers - from actors and writers to technical crews. They may not get the same guarantees of quality work, but they can certainly save a bundle of money. In a lot of cases, quality doesn't matter much anyway. When was the last time an actress won an Oscar for peddling toothpaste in a television commercial?

The writers, for their part, are well spoken - who would expect anything less? - and have taken care to place their fates in the hands of hardened professionals. The head of the guild, David Young, cut his negotiating teeth in the notoriously tough building and clothing industries. Its chief negotiator, John Bowman, has a business degree from Harvard and is already proving adept at calling the studio chiefs and their corporate masters on what he regards as their attempts to blow smoke in the guild's eyes.

In particular, he has laughed at the suggestion that the moguls can't afford pay rises for writers because of the uncertainty surrounding their business models for new media platforms. Bowman points out that the same moguls have been taking those business models to Wall Street and bragging how much money they expect to earn from them. He has also laughed off suggestions that writers should sign a new contract now and await the results of a three-year study on new media platforms. "We don't need a study," he said as negotiations got under way last week. "We need a fair share of the revenue our work generates. Management has no problem paying the person who made the DVD box before a film turns a profit; they shouldn't have any problem paying the artists who created the intellectual experience that came in that box either." Despite such eloquence, it's hard to predict a happy outcome for the writers. Theirs is a profession that has been undervalued in the Hollywood system - unlike writers in almost any other publishing sphere, they don't own the copyright to their work, which means the studios can reserve the right to mess around with them as much as they please. In Budd Schulberg's celebrated Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run?, the wildly ambitious protagonist, Sammy Glick, first breaks into the movie industry by stealing the ideas of a writer friend of his. In Robert Altman's equally celebrated film The Player, a producer murders a screenwriter and gets away with it.