Allow me if you will, to share the working woes of a writer. Writers get trampled on. We work in a specialized field that not many fair well in. Fresh out of college, you’re lucky if any written media company even looks your way. When you’re finally hired, you work for scraps, while marketing and sales people start out their careers making 50 percent more than writers (per my experience). Then you discover just how many people can’t even write a coherent paragraph – be it in a news release or out-sourced article. Yet, writers continue to write because that is what we are meant to do. We are writers at our very core, and we will stop at nothing to get our written words read.
The latest in the list of writers’ monetary woes is the Writers Guild of America (WGA) shredding evidence that it failed to paid guild writers their earnings. In leading the charge against the WGA, Eric Hughes discovered that the WGA was shredding its payment records and diverting 92.5 percent of writers’ pay from foreign airings of their works to Hollywood studios, producers and the WGA West itself, reports LA Weekly. More than $20 million in withheld checks have been acknowledged by Don Gor, WGA’s Chief Financial officer.
Writers are the core of the film industry. Without a script, there is no plot, no lines of dialogue and no scenes to shoot. Before the next time you gloss over a writer’s name in a review or news post on Cinema Blend, be sure to peruse the comments section below each post as a reminder of what the world would be like if there were no writers.
