Business Insight Zone

As the Hollywood writers’ strike wears on, I’ve been thinking about what’s at stake in it, and what the the potential outcomes of it might be. I’ve also been looking around for informed (not impartial!) views on it.

Thanks to Justine Larbalestier, I found this long post from Doris Egan, a writer-producer on the popular show House. Egan is now on strike, and she offers her perspective on what it is that the screen writers are standing up for:

It hasn’t always been easy. Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh wrote the first four seasons of I Love Lucy. As you read this, that show is playing somewhere in the world, but Carroll and Pugh never saw a dime of residuals from the huge amount of money their scripts made. That money still rains down today on a huge conglomerate, where no one in the executive offices has any connection whatsoever with the series, let alone contributed to its success. It’s simply free money for them, forever and ever. This is one reason I would go back in a time machine and stop Hollywood writers from giving up copyright, for with copyright went respect and fair treatment; but you can never wrestle from the hands of a corporation that which they now believe is theirs.

The post is worth reading, whether you’re starting from a point of sympathy with the writers or the corporations (or neither).

Also worth your time are these two posts from serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen.* The first, “Suicide by strike,” is the more adamant:

Many of your current lifeblood properties are not growing anymore or are in outright decline, and you don’t own enough of the vital new properties to offset that, nor are you certain how you would make money with the new properties even if you did own them. And the consumers you rely upon for revenue are so frustrated with your company’s inability to supply them with what they want, when they want it, that digital piracy of your content has become mainstream and socially acceptable behavior practically overnight, and all of your efforts to stop it seem to only make it worse.

And your company’s culture is not prepared to deal with the shift. Your company was founded 50 or 80 or 100 or 150 years ago by different people in a different time, and the overwhelming majority of your people now — smart and well-meaning managers and bureaucrats, but still managers and bureaucrats — have to be retrained and reoriented toward entrepreneurial thinking in a viciously dynamic and startlingly fast-changing world not of your, or their, creation.

Is this really the right time to pick a fight with the writers over royalties from DVD and Internet sales, leading to an industry-wide shutdown and massive economic pain for all sides in the world of traditional scripted film and television content?

The second post, “Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s image” goes further in envisioning a post-studio Hollywood. This future would emulate Silicon Valley’s culture of venture-backed entrepreneurship, a culture in which the “alignment of interests between creators and financiers is near-perfect”:

in the event of a long-term strike, out of the ashes of the traditional model would — I believe — come the birth of certainly dozens, maybe hundreds, and possibly even thousands of new media companies, rising phoenix-like into the global entertainment market, financed by venture capital, creating amazing new properties, employing large numbers of people, and rewarding their creators as owners.

How the strike will unfold, I can’t guess. But Egan’s account makes me sympathetic to the writers, while Andreessen’s whets my appetite for a future driven my creators of content rather than stifled by packagers of it.

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Previously: Joss Whedon on the writers’ strike.

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* Andreessen could do me a favor by being a little less smart and reasonable, a little less of a good writer/effective blogger, a little less rich, a little less admirably philanthropic, and a little less close to me in age. Okay, so that’s five favors.