While the actors unions mull their contract negotiations, one actor feels slighted by the video game industry.  Actor Michael Hollick portrayed Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV, providing voice work and motion-capture acting over a 15 month period.  Hollick earned $100,000 for his efforts, which came out to $1,050 per day he worked, almost 50 percent more than the standard $730 rate.  GTA IV earned $600 million within its first week, none of which Hollick will see.  And that’s the way it should be.

Hollick negotiated his contract for a fee he found reasonable at the time - you can’t renegotiate after the fact just because you think you didn’t get enough before.  I’ve express issues with royalties before, but Hollick’s complaint shows an lack of understand the economics of his business rather than mistreatment by evil corporations. 

As Hollick admits, he was paid a premium over acting guild rates.  He just wants a piece of that huge GTA pie.  But who bought GTA IV because of this no name actor?  Even a big name actor wouldn’t pull me into a video game I didn’t want to play anyway.   Hollick had every right when negotiating his contract to ask for royalties and GTA maker Rockstar had every right to throw him out and hire someone cheaper.  And it’s hard to believe Hollick didn’t know GTA IV would make hundreds of millions of dollars when negotiating.

The media industry has evolved itself into a corner with royalties turning into an entitlement for actors and writers rather than entertainment’s form of profit sharing.  Some companies give employees stock options to give them incentive to make the company more money.  Actors and writers argue royalties are their way of getting a fair share of the millions media companies make off their hard work, but who said business is fair?  Royalties are

I do see royalties serving a purpose with big name actors.  Major movie stars do attract large audiences and are often worth their expensive salaries.  These stars then promote their movies on talk shows and at press events, work they do months after filming finished.  With royalties the actors are encouraged to promote the film because the bigger the box office the bigger the paycheck.

But what promotion did Hollick do?  Does anyone think he did a half-assed job because he wasn’t getting royalties?  Was $1,000 a day not enough?  Or is Hollick just doing this as a publicity stunt (probably)?  Hollick was willing to do the work for $100,000 and that means the job was worth $100,000 then and now.  Hopefully the experience would net Hollick a bigger paycheck for his next job, but after this publicity stunt, video game companies might stop calling.

With the non-event called the Golden Globes behind us, the entertainment industry now looks to how the writers strike will affect the Academy Awards.  The Golden Globes aired as a one hour press conference announcing the winners, costing NBC an estimated $10-$15 million.  The Academy Awards, however, are an industry unto themselves. 

The Oscars are the second biggest event each year after the Super Bowl, bringing in $210 million in advertising last year and reaching 40.2 million viewers.  Adage estimates another $100 million is generated in publicity and revenue for fashion designers who parade their clothes on the red carpet.  Magazines, news shows, parties, and advertising markets will loose hundreds of millions of dollars if the Academy Awards do not take place.

The writers, of course, make very little money from the Academy Awards directly - they just have to write some jokes (they don’t even have to be funny).  And mostly, the WGA needs to let the actors into the event; most actors refuse to cross picket lines. Of course, awards will be given out no matter what, but all the publicity, advertising, and fanfare will be lost because of what now degraded into petty posturing.  But causing the cancellation of the Academy Awards will likely hurt the writers more than they expect.

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The Golden Globes has become the first awards show casualty due to the writers strike.  Presenters won’t have profound scripts to read and actors refuse to cross the picket lines.  So instead of a lavishly televised party with lots of self-congratulations, montages, honorary awards, and unbearable acceptance speeches, we get a press conference announcing the winners.

Best idea ever.

Every year fans and pundits complain about the self-aggrandizing speeches and the almost four hour runtime when the entire thing could so easily be crammed into a 20 minute announcement (including technical awards).  For the first time, the writers strike is giving us something we want.

The downside?  Uh…um…we don’t get to see the pretty dresses?  Jon Stewart was supposed to host the Academy Awards again.  It’ll be a little disappointing to miss that.  Can they release his what-would-have-been opening monologue on YouTube after the strike ends (since they’ll have internet residuals then)?

 Adweek estimates the award show’s cancellation will cost NBC, the network to air the Globes, $10-$15 million in ad revenue.  ABC is scheduled to air the Academy Awards on February 24th, one of the biggest ratings nights of the year.

But yeah, not too many negatives for the common man and woman.  It’s not like the entertainment industry would go a year without giving out awards.  That would be mean.

The writers strike is turning into an amazing case study of idiocy in big media. From obnoxious greed (on both sides) to misunderstanding of new media and the internet to giving viewers months of reasons to look elsewhere for entertainment, the writers strike will do more harm than any spin machine can handle. But that spin is months away. This week, the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP) and Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) released bitter statements in regards to their recent three-days of negotiations revealing how far we are from the strike’s end.

WGA’s negotiating committee chair John Bowman said yesterday producers left talks “in a bit of a huff” in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. The AMPTP responded with a four-page statement with explaining their position. They said “Negotiations broke down [Dec. 7] primarily over one of the most old-fashioned issues of all: the desire of the WGA’s organizers to increase their own power and prestige by expanding the jurisdiction of the union over reality TV and animation writers.” The AMPTP challenged many of Bowman’s statements saying producers had wanted to start talks much earlier and do not rely on giving ultimatums as the WGA claims.

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Looking into the writers strike again, some writers reveal that they want something between getting paid when producers get paid to every time someone views their content. At a forum at MIT yesterday, Mark Warshaw, a writer, producer, and director who works on developing transmedia opportunities for the TV show Heroes, spoke about the writers strike. He gave a rhetorical question “Is it fair that Sting gets money every time his song is played on the radio?” to prove his point. Unfortunately, he kind of mixed up his facts.

First, Sting, or any musician in fact, gets no money for playing their songs on the radio. Even the producers don’t make any money. In double fact, for decades, record producers paid radio stations to play their music for the promotional value.

Further, let’s try to understand fair compensation. No one, writers, director, producers, or actors, are paid for each television viewer. Let’s remember, we don’t pay for TV shows. Producers and networks make money on advertising, using the number of viewers to decide on how much to charge for the advertising. That money then gets split between all parties involved (with the vast majority going to the network and tiny percentages going to those hard working writers and actors). Even movies and DVDs, which are paid for in part by each viewer, have many revenue opportunities from product placement, endorsements, etc. (if a line from Spider-Man appears in a Pizza Hut commercial, does the writer have to be paid?). I’m not saying it’s fair, cause it’s not, but let’s look at the real business model.

Now the internet, the source of all our conflict. It is unrealistic for writers to expect compensation for every appearance or viewing of their work. Aside from them never enjoying this kind of business model, the internet encourages widespread use of content that trying to reimburse the original creators for every page would be staggeringly time consuming (just try to get permission to license a song legally and in three years we’ll talk).

Warshaw told MIT that NBC has 10,000 pages of Heroes content and I guess he wants a couple of cents for each page. Unfortunately, NBC is not likely charging advertisers over and over again for each page. Web advertising more often trends toward bulk buys (advertising across the entire site or section) or pay-per-click like Google AdWords. And the reason people would even come to the NBC site is because there’s 10,000 pages of Heroes content. If there was only one or ten pages, viewers would find their information other places.

Let’s not forget, writers are often paid salaries in addition to residuals on their work. Their residuals might suck (four to eight cents for a DVD split between all writers) but writers are getting paid initially for their work; work which is paid for by the networks and producers. Only the entertainment industry enjoys lifelong expectations of residuals for their work (I don’t still get checks for websites I made).

So maybe writers should reconsider how they’re demanding residuals for new media. As I wrote about before (referencing Techdirt’s excellent article), having a rock hard contract might limit revenue opportunities for writers, forcing them into a one-size fits all agreement that can’t possible cover all possible revenue avenues coming over the next several years. And the internet is still so new, media companies still need to experiment on how to make money. It’s not just throwing a video up with ads.

So writers, it sucks that I have to be critical of you guys (I feel everyone else is already beating up on those greedy producers) but be more future looking than your media company overlords and maybe try figuring out what the internet is really all about.

So the writer’s strike is in full swing. Fox now plans to postpone 24 indefinitely so as not to interrupt the season and you can be sure this isn’t the last casualty. Lost only has eight episodes to air and who knows how much Battlestar Galactica we’ll get (if any).

Now I believe the various mega-media companies are being tight wads, unwilling to share their growing revenue and profits - growing not only in the current media, but in new arenas. So will all that money, you’d hope people could pay someone to teach them to be civil and share.

But no, instead of sacrificing a couple of percentage pennies from your web clicks, we have to spend an indefinite about of time without our favorite shows and should this go on long enough, seeing great movies a year or two after their intended release.

So what’s gained here? Former CEO and chairman of Disney Michael Eisner had a surprisingly logical point saying: “For a writer to give up today’s money for a nonexistent piece of the future — they should do it in three years, shouldn’t be doing it now — they are misguided they should not have gone on the strike. I’ve seen stupid strikes, I’ve seen less stupid strikes, and this strike is just a stupid strike.”

Eisner goes on to say that even if studios were to agree to digital revenue, they don’t know what to pay since there isn’t any real money there yet.

Techdirt had some excellent insight into truly why the writers’ strike is in more ways than not a mistake.

A one-size-fits-all writers’ contract made a certain amount of sense for Hollywood in the mid-20th century when it was relatively homogenous and dominated by a few large firms. But it’s looking increasingly anachronistic today. Thanks to the Internet, Hollywood is on the brink of a difficult transition…The studios will need imagination and flexibility for the old studios to maintain their dominant position. They’ll need to experiment with new technologies and business models. Given how quickly the marketplace is likely to change over the next decade, it’s a little silly to expect a single industry-wide contract to fairly determine how writers will be compensated for the next few years.

Techdirt goes on to predict unseen consequences of this writers’ strike that couldn’t have taken place during the 1988 strike. With the internet in full swing to level the playing field of independent writers and content makers, many of us missing scripted TV might find solace in original internet content. More attention might be paid to those non-guild members who produce content shockingly without a contract.

Yes the studios are exceptionally greedy. But the Writers Guild of America is just as close minded. The collective bargaining power may have a destructive effect either limiting their own profitability or worse, leaving out new revenue avenues that might develop in the next couple of years (what happens when the 30 second commercial finally dies to their precious residuals?). And from a technology stand point, media companies, already scared to innovate on the web, are going to be even more afraid since now they have larger up front costs to pay to writers instead of negotiating on a case-by-case basis depending on the size of the new product. Something like content for the big rollout of Joost might net a writer more money than a more experiment content system. But until the writer strike ends, we won’t know what could be. And frankly, no one wins in this scenario.

The Writers Guild of America, the union representing most of the writers of our favorite movies and TV shows, might be going on strike at any time as negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were broken off . The two groups have been at odds for months, particularly fighting over the royalty issues over new media revenue. Obviously this is one big fight over money. Producers want to keep more. Writers want to be paid more.

But I must say, this threat of striking and ruthless contract negotiations is sickening. The WGA went on strike back in 1988 and made similar threats in 2000 and 2001. And here we are again. The reason I feel so frustrated reading about this strike (and the risk to missing out of Battlestar Galactica) is that I have no sympathy for either side.

Movies and television, ever year, just keep making more and money. They have more avenues for revenue than ever before. So why do producers have to be so damn greedy. And while I’m certain writers get regularly screwed by producers, I have long wondered why writers believe they are entitled to live forever on royalties of some TV episode they wrote 50 years ago. And when their precious royalties are threatened, they threaten a strike. The WGA is just fodder for arguments against unions. I think Wal-Mart workers have more need from a union that a bunch of middle class writers.

But I’m not trying to get into a political debate here about unions. I’m simply disgusted by the greed that permeates the entertainment industry. Producers try to argue the, as they claim, money lost due to piracy hurts the little guys, like the writers who live paycheck to paycheck. If that’s true, than why do the producers want to pay the writers even less? And if that’s the case, then why don’t we just pirate stuff so the producers make less money? Then they’ll have a much better argument for not paying the writers.

Now the writers demanding royalties is somewhat understandable. They’ve been getting money for no work since the 1950s. The argument for royalties is a way of sharing the profits of a successful movie or TV show. And royalties serve a purpose, for a time. Maybe for five years. Ten years. Keeping these royalties and similarly copyrights over their work indefinitely goes against the point of giving these writers copyrights - to promote creating more. If a writer can make a living for 50 years off a single television series, what’s the incentive to create more? Of course, I would argue that producers shouldn’t hold copyrights indefinitely, but again, step by step.

In the end, this is just a bunch of greedy Hollywood folks who can’t figure out how to share billions upon billions upon billions of dollars. There’s not some easy solution and I’m kinda just venting here - venting over the idiocy and the shock that the writers and producers keep getting away with these games. Striking won’t help the writers. Movie producers will just make reality films, just like TV: who needs writers.Well, I have the perfect solution. Give me all the money. Then no one gets it. Except me. That’s fair, right?