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THE
SCREEN
WRITER
AND
TELEVISION
plea, together with writers’ failure to conceive even a vague notion of the real value of their own properties and the properties they created for weekly wages, amounted to writers subsidizing radio and motion pictures through their infancies.
The owners of television may be expected to make the same plea, despite their great financial resources. It will come in forms familiar to those who worked in radio in the early Thirties. “Audiences are small,” — “The revenue from time sales is limited,” — “The writer must play ball for a few years and adjust his fees to what the market can afford.” Older writers will remember “This-is-where-they-came-in” — on pic¬ tures and radio.
Most other crafts and guilds whose services will be needed in tele¬ vision have already turned a deaf ear to these pleas. Musicians, sound engineers, cameramen, projectionists, actors, electricians, set dressers, scenic designers, etc., through their guilds and unions are demanding that television contracts be equal to or better than existing contracts with picture studios and radio stations. The only possible place the tele¬ vision producer can cut production costs is by reducing writers’ wages or cutting royalty fees. The theory underlying the position of the guilds and unions is one of refusing to retreat from their wage gains in order to subsidize a new industry.
The writer as an individual contractor has special problems in estab¬ lishing equitable royalty fees and wage rates, but the same underlying theory of refusing to listen to the “ability-to-pay” argument must hold for writers, too. It will be easier for writers to hold fast to this position, because the financial dossiers of most television operators will prove they are financially able to subsidize their own growing-up period. Writers will not share ownership of the huge networks the monopolies are creating, so why should we be asked to contribute to the building of them?
Because writers failed to take this position and accepted the wage rates and royalty fees dictated by advertising agencies and networks back in the early Thirties, radio writing remained a badly-underpaid vocation for many years. It took a world war, a manpower shortage, an absence of newsprint, and an unprecedented industrial boom to hike radio writers’ wages and royalty fees for literary properties to a point that might be
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