On Bastille Day, July 14, Brandon Tartikoff made his announcement—but with no fall schedule as he had promised. Two days later, the major studios presented their plans to put a couple dozen network and syndicated programs back into production. Some of these were reality-based shows, some were rehashes of network news, and some were revivals, like The Hardy Boys Mysteries, made by using old scripts from the 1977 series. And a few were actually original scripted shows.
During the strike of ’88, during what Robert Thompson and many other critics now call “Television’s Second Golden Age,” no new scripts were written for L.A. Law, China Beach, The Wonder Years, thirtysomething, or Cheers. But Freddy’s Nightmares, The Munsters Today, and Charles in Charge went into full swing. Perhaps the greatest consequence of the strike was to prove how irreplaceable writers had truly become in television.
I wasn’t the only one who passed on opportunities to work. Not a single WGA member ever crossed the picket line (at least publicly). Though, as the strike wore on, a growing bloc of writers let it be known that if the union leadership didn’t settle soon, they would not only cross, they would leave the guild. On July 14, the same day as NBC’s botched proclamation, twenty-one WGA members asked the National Labor Relations Board to nullify the WGA’s rules that kept them from working. These writers were the lead dissidents in a group called the Writers Coalition (formerly the Union Blues). What this group had in common was that they all worked regularly. Most were high-income hyphenates, writer-producers like Robert Singer (Midnight Caller), Bill Blinn (Starsky & Hutch), David Milch (NYPD Blue), and Lionel Chetwynd (To Heal a Nation). You have to understand. These were guys who ran things. While they certainly saw themselves as writers and identified with the cause of writers, they drove 7-series BMWs, lived in multimillion-dollar homes in the Palisades, and sent their kids to Harvard-Westlake. These guys weren’t exactly like the writers of the past.
On August 1, 631 WGA members (according to Chetwynd) signed letters stating that they wanted to leave the union by opting for court-approved “financial core” status. But two days before this happened and the WGA was busted, the guild leadership settled with management. In the end, it wasn’t the studios that concluded the strike. The internal struggle between regularly working and occasionally working writers eventually forced the union’s hand.
After 1988, it was clear that the era of writers as simply workers was over. Consider John Wells. In 1988, Wells was earning about $400,000 a year. He had just become an executive story editor, your basic working TV writer. Eleven years later, in 1999, he had a net worth that I guess would be in the nine-figure range, and he became president of the WGA. He had a stake in several shows on the air and the resources to develop more. He was a writer, yes. In many ways a writer’s writer. But he was also someone who made hiring and firing decisions about everyone working on his shows, including fellow writers.
Look at the significance of this. After 1999, Hollywood writers were essentially represented by management. Yet this was not the conflict of interest that it might seem to be. Writers had never had this kind of representation before, mainly because writers could never have attained this kind of control and wealth before. Wells was not so much a powerful anomaly as he was the poster boy for the New Hollywood Writer.
Today, most working television writers participate in the management of their shows. Whether they are called story editors, producers, or consultants, today’s TV writer has a say in everything from story to casting to editing. What most people I meet never seem to understand about television writers is that writing is just one aspect of what we do.
The 1988 strike really had no clear-cut winner. Writers gave up a little in foreign residuals and received a little in the cable markets. The new contract was essentially a compromise. Still, over the next ten years, from 1988 to 1998, writers’ earnings doubled. This was due not so much to specific contractual gains made during the strike but to the rising importance of the writer in television, a business that was about to explode.
In general, TV writers get paid in three ways: 1) for work that might become something; 2) for work that is being done; and 3) for work that has been done.
“Work that might become something” basically means a development deal. Simply put, this is when a writer is paid to develop or think up ideas that might someday become a television show. Writers receive anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than ten million (plus additional compensation if their projects actually go forward) for this kind of work. As the demand for TV writers and new shows increased exponentially during the nineties, so did the amount of writers offered development deals and the amount of money they were paid.
“Work that is being done” means writing a television script and/or working on a series staff. Writers are paid a fee for every script that they write. These fees go up every year when new contracts are negotiated. In the late eighties, for network prime-time shows, this was about $11,000 for every half-hour script and about $18,000 for every one-hour script. As of this writing, those fees are $20,956 and $30,823 respectively.
Staff work is the bread and butter of most working television writers. This kind of employment means providing a wide range of writing and producing services required to run a series. Nearly all writers who work on a staff do so under an agent-negotiated contract that guarantees payment per episode for a specified number of episodes. The WGA stipulates minimum payment levels for staff work but, as in professional sports, very few people really get the minimum. Although all writers receive the same stipulated payment for scripts, staff salaries are highly negotiable. Here are the basic staff positions and their ballpark compensation levels:
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Again, these are averages. As writers move from show to show, their “quotes” (what they earned on their last job) almost always rise. If a writer is in demand—if he or she has multiple offers from different shows—there is no cap on what a studio can pay for that writer’s services, or what title that writer can be offered. Many writers earn well over six figures an episode. Bruce Ferber was paid $6 million just for his writing-producing work on twenty-eight episodes of Home Improvement—that’s more than $214,000 an episode. He got script fees and residuals in addition to that.
Writers on the staffs of network shows also receive program fees. At about $500 an episode, it’s a kind of hazardous-duty pay.
And for “work that has been done,” writers collect residuals and a variety of other fees, including recurring-character payments and character “spin-off” payments. If a writer creates a new character who appears for the first time in that writer’s script, the writer is compensated $443 every time that character appears in additional episodes, whether or not the writer wrote the additional episodes. If that character “spins off” into a new series, the writer is paid $1,598 per episode for each half-hour show produced and $3,036 per episode for each one-hour show.
A single episode of television can earn a writer income in perpetuity. Let’s say a writer was hired to write a one-hour drama episode in November 1997 for a network in prime time.
The writer would initially be paid $25,116 in three installments.
In March 1998, the episode receives a network prime-time rerun, for which the writer receives $16,640.
Two months later, the series is sold to foreign free television, for which the writer receives $5,823.
Subsequently, the series is sold into syndication, where the episode has its third, fourth, and fifth runs over the summer of 1998. The writer receives $4,992 for the third run and $4,160 each for the fourth and fifth runs.
In September 1998, the series is sold to basic cable for a license fee of $750,000 per episode. A residual of 2 percent of the license fee, $15,000, is due to the writer.
Then, in November, various episodes of the series, including the writer’s, are licensed for in-flight usage at $25,000 per episode. A residual of 1.2 percent of the license fee, $300, is due to the writer.
If you consider that most writers on staff are credited with about four scripts a season, you’ll see that a writer on staff of a popular show earns $304,764 for the scripts he or she writes. Add that to say, $20,000 an episode (an average writing producer’s salary) for a normal season of twenty-two episodes, and the writer is now up to $744,764. Add on program fees and recurring-character payments and you can see that a typical mid-range TV writer on a staff earns close to $800,000 for one season’s staff work, about nine months. Add to that a standard pilot development deal, say $250,000, and you can see how twenty-five-year-olds earn more than a million dollars a year writing TV.
Most lucrative of all, writers have back-end participation in the shows that they have developed or created. In short, most writers receive 5 percent to 17.5 percent of the revenues their shows earn when sold into syndication. Some highly successful writer-producers can get as much as 25 percent. (More specifically, today writers receive a percentage of the MAGR—the modified adjusted gross revenues—meaning that distribution and overhead fees are deducted before the profit participants are paid. Thoughout the nineties, most studios, particularly Sony, paid writers a percentage of the pure AGR—the adjusted gross revenues—which did not have these fees deducted.) In addition, included in the revenue side of the equations are moneys from ancillary markets and products. Think about what a cut of the merchandising proceeds from hats and T-shirts and coffee mugs can be worth to the writer-creators of the Star Trek: The Next Generation franchise.
Finally, in addition to the staff salaries and script fees, the studios and production companies are also contractually obligated to pay another 15 percent of those wages to the WGA Pension and Health Fund. In other words, when a studio pays a writer $100,000, that studio must also contribute an additional $15,000 to the fund. Currently, with more than $1.8 billion dollars in assets, the WGA pension fund is one of the most quietly well-funded pension plans in the United States.
After 1988 it became much more lucrative to be a TV writer. However, paradoxically, the 1988 strike caused irreparable damage to the network TV business. When the fall season started late in December 1988, 9 percent of the audience did not return. Entire families that used to gather around TV sets after dinner disappeared entirely from the Nielsen radar. This began the acceleration of network audience erosion that has continued to this day.
One of the greatest beneficiaries of the strike was the newly developing cable networks, which began to grow as many viewers, in search of something to watch, bought cable for the first time. Nineteen eighty-eight was the first year that a cable network had a large enough audience to qualify for an entry into the Emmy Awards, which allowed it to compete with the major broadcast networks. HBO received several nominations that year and won its first Emmy. In 1979 about 90 percent of the audience watched the big-three nets. By 1988 that number had dropped to 70 percent. By 1996, less than half of the prime-time audience, 49 percent, watched the big-three networks.
As network ratings dropped, advertising revenues dropped. The networks, whose only real source of income came from that advertising, studied several possible new business models that could ensure profitability. One of these was to look at several successful nonscripted shows like America’s Most Wanted and 48 Hours, which the studios developed in 1988 as a defensive response to the strike—and consider making more like them. These were shows that did not use writers.
So an interesting thing happened during the decade after the strike. As writers grew in importance due to their greater involvement with producing as well as writing TV, and thus became much more costly, seeds were carefully planted to develop programming without them.
FIVE
Written By
“It occurred to me that maybe it was a good thing not to be the first stop—getting what everyone thought was the best material. Maybe nobody really knows what’s best.
Maybe best is making your own choice, on its own sole merits, not its buzz or bloodlines.”
—BARRY DILLER
Turned out my dad was right. The day the strike was over I called the Universal vice president. I told him that I would now love to work for the studio. I don’t know if it was just enthusiasm for my work or guilt, but he sent my spec scripts to several producers on the lot. Rick Okie, the supervising producer of Simon & Simon, responded to (which means “liked” in agentspeak) my writing.
Now, if you step back and think about it, this was a pretty amazing thing. My quirky romantic half-hour comedic spec, Molly Dodd, about a single woman looking for love in New York City, got the attention of the producer of a one-hour drama about two brothers that solve crimes, carry guns, and have frequent high-speed car chases. But what I would soon learn is that this sort of thing happened all the time in TV, mainly for two reasons. First, what we’d all like to believe: Good writing transcends form. And second, what is often a greater truism: You never know what people are going to like. Over the coming years I learned that this simple fact, more than anything else, defined the television business.
When I worked in advertising, I saw our clients create products that everyone knew consumers were going to like. One client created a new insecticide that worked better than the competition’s and could be used safely on your tomatoes. It was a slam dunk, and everyone knew it was going to be from the start. I saw another client create a new fast-food breakfast, one of those artery-clogging sausage-and-egg deals, which they offered for half the price of the competitors’. Again, we all knew it would be a home run, and we were all right. In TV, there are no such sure things. There are guesses, hunches, gut responses. People’s careers, mortgages, kids’ tuitions, entire lives, and an entire industry—all predicated on pure subjectivity. That, I began to see over and over again, is television.
When I started my internship, the human resources exec who hired me suggested I read William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, a book she felt defined the movie business. Well, as right as I thought Goldman was that “nobody knows anything,” I thought this was even truer in the TV business. In TV, where there is no tracking, no testing and changing, nobody ever knows what will work because nobody ever knows what anybody is going to like. And not only do programming executives never know what audiences will like, but writers on staff never know what the studio will like. New writers never know what showrunners will like. If before the executive sent my script around the lot someone had given me a list of all the dozens and dozens of shows in production at Universal, Simon & Simon would not have been one that I would have guessed would have “responded to” my Molly Dodd.
This sort of thing drives new writers crazy. When I got together with other writers who were also trying to break in, the number-one topic of conversation was always specs. An unbelievable amount of effort has always gone into the prognostication of the spec market, though it does little good.
Every season, certain specs are “hot.” Every young writer I met seemed to know what these were. Particular shows, even if they’re not broadly popular, become hip in the L.A. community. Word gets around of the shows and scripts most liked by showrunners. Agents look at what’s working in the spec market and on the air, try to anticipate what will work next, and add their views to the mix. When I first got to town, endless stacks of Cheers and Murphy Browns were written and sent around town. A few years later, it was the Seinfelds. Then the L.A. Laws and NYPD Blues. Followed by The Sopranos and Sex and the Citys and The Shields, and right now, I’ll bet Entourages and The Offices are flooding Hollywood. Yet despite this lemminglike rush of hot scripts—maybe because of it—many producers inexplicably want to read the offbeat Molly Dodds. You just never know.
Complicating matters even more, writers never know exactly what genre of script readers want. Some showrunners will only read movie scripts. Some want plays. Some will only read scripts in the
same genre as their series. Some want the exact opposite. Readers not only have different tastes, but different needs for their staffs. Some want a female voice for their hard-edged drama. Some want a dramatic touch to their goofball sitcom. And every season, every reader, it’s something new. This is the main reason that the first thing an agent does when she falls in love with a writer’s spec is to make him write another one. Immediately after signing me, Beth Uffner had me spec an It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. Delbert thought it was very funny. I’m not sure anyone else did.
And in addition to all the various schools of thought about what to spec, new writers immediately hear a wide variety of rules about how to spec. I often heard that you’re not supposed to write a “typical” episode for the show. You know, not the one where Sam and Diane sleep together. I heard that you’re not supposed to do anything too out of the ordinary, not a crossover episode where characters from one show appear on another. Oh, and the golden rule that everyone always hears: You’re not supposed to write a spec of the show on which you really want to work. All new writers quickly learn the supreme decree that showrunners never want to read a script for their own show.
But here’s the problem. Just like most everything else in television, none of these rules really hold up. Over the coming years, I would see these rules successfully broken, again and again.
What I eventually figured out is that what most showrunners really want is a writer who has a fresh and distinctive voice; but at the same time, they want a writer who can suppress his or her fresh and distinctive voice and conform to the voice of the series. But since no one quite knows how to find this, let alone explain what it actually is, the one thing everyone agrees that they are looking for in a spec is good writing.
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