“tongodeon” is a blogger whom I know as “mrneutron” through our mutual association with Andre Torrez. He writes about all sorts of things, but last week he had a post about the Writer’s Guild strike where he suggested that the writers and other creative people in the TV and movie industries take a lesson that musical artists are beginning to learn: screw the studios and do it yourself. The reason we have movie studios, recording companies, and television production companies in the first place is that when those media first arose, the only way to get your film/song/series made was to go through big companies who could afford all the production facilities and who eventually used their positions to solidify their dominance into the distribution of said products. The combination of cheap professional-grade production and post-production tools available to anyone with a computer, and the arrival of the huge new distribution system called “The Internet” has already empowered plenty of amateurs to try their hands at making their own movies and TV programs, so surely these professionals could end-run their corporate masters to some degree.
There are some weaknesses to this argument, namely that those same media industries are beginning to exert their control over Internet distrbution as well (hence the reason for the strike in the first place), and that there is no shortage of people who want to be screenwriters and producers to take their place. But the idea’s definitely in the right direction. A number of other online acquaintances appear in the comments on this post, some of whom are in fact the very people presently affected by the strike, and they bring some much-needed insider knowledge to the discussion.
I, for one, am astonished that the writers’ strike has gone on for even this short amount of time, because everyone surely knows that the jig is up for the studios and television networks on this. There can’t be anyone who doesn’t seriously believe the industry line that “digital is an unknown quantity”…the only unknown quantity is how many freaking boatloads of cash they’re going to make, not whether they’ll make any at all. The writers deserve their cut just like everybody else. But I think I would love to see some TV folks try the same thing Radiohead tried with their latest album.
