My Hollywood tenure has been filled with hits and misses, lowering of expecations, and a whole lot of laziness. This is the year of actually getting out there and doing something (or, in terms of writing, staying in and sitting down and doing something).  I have a bunch of ideas just gathering dust and its high time I did something.

Currently, I'm a story producer in reality television.  I'm basically the middle step in the process. Footage is shot, I work to pare it down and mold it into a story and then hand it off to the editors so they can add music, transitions, and make it sing. It can be interesting work but it's also mind-numbing.  If you think reality television is bad, imagine sifting through the hundreds of hours that don't make the actual programs. On the bright side, because I work in reality TV I'm not on strike right now. While part of me feels like a scab, most of me simply wants nothing to do with the WGA until I have to deal with the WGA (after I, hopefully, sell a script). 

The Writers Guild tried to organize reality TV but failed.  The one group of writer they actually talked into striking (America's Next Top Model) all got fired. The producers realized that their show was so formatted that they could get away with skipping the middle step and just giving the editors the footage and notes from the directors and producers in the field.  The show continued to get ratings (even if there was a  reported decline in quality) and suddenly other producers followed suit.  More and more reality shows are going off without a story team.  Not that I can blame them.  Some shows are so set-up that you simply don't need the middle man. A lot of dating shows or faux-reality (The Hills, for example) can survive with the editors just working off of the notes someone takes during shooting.  It's not like The Real World, Survivor, or Big Brother in which hundreds of hours of footage are shot and it takes someone to collect all of the moments and put them together as a story.

In the end, I support the Writers but I just don't see how they can win.  If the producers can make deals with the directors and actors, I'd have to imagine that the writers will start getting pressure from all sides to come back to work. The actors will want to get back to work and the below-the-line crew members will really be pushing for the writers to get off the picket lines so that they can get back to making a living.  The first ones to cross will likely be the film scribes because most of the major issues deal with television.  I wouldn't be stunned to see a number of top writers crossing over and simply negotiating their own deals.

Now, this isn't to say the WGA isn't in the right on most, if not all, of the issues.  The problem is that they are dealing with studios that aren't studios anymore.  In the past, studios and networks would feel the pinch if there was a strike.  But now they are all parts of big corporations. NBC is owned by GE. The strike just means that the entertainment arm of GE is in trouble and that they need to up the revenues in their other departments.  Unless the strike is going to become a boycott of all GE merchandise, it isn't going to have a crippling impact to anyone but the smaller studios and the writers themselves.

Sad to say, but that's the world we live in. Now I remember why I got so lazy.