As season two of NBC's Heroes drew to a close, viewers found themselves wondering if the show would be returning in April, or if like many other shows, it would continue to be affected by the ongoing strike by members of the Writer’s Guild of America.
What viewers may not understand is what the striking writers are for, and what impact the strike has not only on film and television but also video games, animation and, yes, comic books.
Brian K. Vaughan, cocreator of the comics Y the Last Man and Ex Machina, recently started his second season as a writer and now coproducer on ABC's cult series Lost with fellow writer Damon Lindenlof, scripter of Ultimate Hulk v. Wolverine for Marvel. Like other WGA members, Vaughan, sporting a strike beard, is now walking the picket lines, waiting to go back to work.
Vaughan and other writers are fighting for what they consider a fair percentage of the revenue generated by their work in areas of new media—DVD sales and Internet downloads being two key points. Like many recent TV hits, Lost is a highly serialized show, and as such has little audience for reruns. Viewers catch up on missed episodes or simply fill the gap in between breaks with iTunes downloads or by purchasing the DVD.
According to Vaughan’s Web site, the WGA is asking for approximately eight cents—“that’s eight stinkin pennies” he writes—for every DVD sold as opposed to the four cents writers currently receive.
“So we’re fighting for us to receive a fair percentage of the money that our work makes on the Internet, and it’s really not just on iTunes," Vaughan told PWCW. "I really think in the not so distant future, our televisions and computers are going to merge. So that’s why we need to have the fight now because the landscape is changing so quickly.”
Currently, eight scripts for this season's Lost have been written and will presumably be shot and aired starting January 31. The season was originally planned to last 16 episodes, but it is unknown what will become of the eight episodes that haven’t yet been written.
Luckily, the strike has not affected Vaughan’s work in comics.
“I can continue working in comics because comics are sadly not unionized,” Vaughan said. “I think smarter creators than I have tried to do that in the past and failed, and I doubt I’d be able to succeed.”
Vaughan thinks that, unlike television and film, comics are more difficult to unionize due to the number of small companies and because of the number of overseas creators.
Like Vaughan, Mark Evanier is a WGA member who works extensively in comics. He believes that the frontier is changing and that we will begin to see a merging of comics, television and movies.
Though Evanier did not walk off a specific project, he was in negotiations for a screenplay that is now likely lost. He has, however, continued writing all of his comics work on schedule. An industry veteran, Evanier has faced strikes in the past, yet with the advent of the Internet this strike is somewhat different.
“The Internet is a new industry and that’s kind of opened a lot up for new frontiers,” he said. “The strike is not about what’s available today. It’s about what will be available in the next three years. You don’t negotiate for these things after the fact.”
Evanier, who has done substantial work in television writing Welcome Back, Kotter; Scooby Doo; Richie Rich; and many others, had in some instances seen payment for subsequent uses of his work by in some cases negotiating special deals to receive a larger percentage of DVD sales. In other cases only receives the four cents he is entitled to as a member of the WGA—a percentage he says is practically nothing. And sometimes he receives nothing; for instance, Evanier has received no payment for the DVD sales from Welcome Back, Kotter.
Picketing in New York and L.A., Evanier sees the strike as a chance for the writers to receive the funds they are justly owed by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
“To me, this is just a strike about who’s going to get a cut of the pie. There’s a lot of money to be made in new technology, and the producers want to keep it for themselves, and we deserve a share,” he said.
Another industry veteran, Marv Wolfman, is also walking the picket lines. Aside from his work with comics and graphic novels, Wolfman is currently writing a video game, a new media industry that, though unaffected by the strike, the WGA considers a new media category. According to Wolfman, the trend of writers being involved in video games is so new that many companies have not yet signed contracts with the WGA, although the guild is interested in working with that industry.
“It [sould take] a well-known writer in the field—where a company desperately wants [that] one specific person—to come back and say that I’ll only do it if it’s under the WGA,” he said. “It just takes some time. We’ve got to get past the current strike.”
Wolfman has also done considerable work in animation, an area that is traditionally covered not by the WGA but by local 839, a separate union. Whether or not an animated show can be represented by the WGA depends on whether or not it is already represented by 839, and if the company that owns the rights has an existing agreement with 839.
Wolfman said that the WGA’s ultimate goal is to have all writers represented by the WGA. “They’re pushing on animation, they’re pushing on video games,” he said.
In the past, Wolfman created such notable characters as Blade, Nightwing and Tim Drake, and has felt the pain of not being properly compensated for his work. Though he receives payment for his work on Teen Titans, he said, he has never seen a penny from any of the three Blade movies, nor the Blade television series.
“This is a move to try to stop compensation to the talent,” he said of the AMPTP’s failure to ratify a contract with the WGA in more than four months of negotiations. “I would have loved to have seen money off Blade or Bullseye, who appeared in the Daredevil movie.”
When the strike will end is unclear. Some observers think it could last as long as six months, the length of the last strike, in 1988. And while they wait, Vaughan, Evanier and Wolfman will all still picket, waiting to go back to work.
“We just want to get back to work. No one wants the strike to be over more than us,” Vaughan said.
