One Contract To Rule Them All

Like this, but less evilIt is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Brothers and sisters, we writers are living in the darkness, and all I hear around me is cursing. The companies that employ us change the rules, they slip through loopholes, they invent new definitions and theories and business plans, and we’re constantly running after them, wondering why we’re always behind.

We have two real weapons. The first weapon is unity.

We’re not so good at that. I’ll talk about unity some other time, maybe after I pop a Xanax or something.

The second weapon is knowledge.

We’re awful at that. Every deal we make, every contract we sign, every bit of business we do as WGA members is governed by a master contract. The Minimum Basic Agreement. We can always do better than the MBA, but we can never do worse. It holds the keys to our minimum salaries, our residuals, our credits. It is the DMZ between us and the companies. It’s the battlefield where we wedge our way towards victory or get clobbered in defeat.

It is, in its enormous totality, the evidence of our struggles and our collective history.

And none of you have ever read it.

When I ran for the Board of the WGAw a year or so back, one of my campaign promises was to do what I could to help educate our membership, and one of the ways in which I promised to do that was to publish the MBA online. Traditionally, the MBA was available only by calling the Guild and having them mail you the book.

Yes, it’s a book.

The problem wasn’t one of mere reluctance. Typical of a monopolistic bureaucracy, the word processor files for the MBA were archaic and weird and not even pdf-able without a lot of work.

However, the DGA had managed to get their contract online, as had SAG. And so, with much pushing and forcefulness and nudging, I finally made good on my promise.

The 2004 WGA MBA is online, available to anyone. Because of its size, it’s been split into a few pdf files. The good news is that each file is searchable.

This seems as good a time as any to recommend the excellent PDF Plugin for Mac OS X. It allows easy viewing of pdf files right in your browser.

The MBA is enormous, and it’s a legal document, so it can be confusing and bewildering and, well, boring. There are some spots, however, well worth peeking at.

Article 1 contains the definitions that govern the document that, in turn, governs us. Learn who meets the definition of “writer,” for instance.

Articles 6 and 7 describe how the WGA and the AMPTP companies create the exclusive relationship between us, and under what conditions we can strike and under what conditions they can lock us out.

Article 9 explains how you can’t do worse than the MBA terms, but you’re always free to do better.

Article 13 lays out what “scale” is for every kind of job writers can do. If you’re wondering what you’re supposed to get paid, this is the mother lode.

Article 16 is the complete and definitive version of my skinny on separated rights.

Article 48 contains the slowly-advancing “creative rights” that we have made over the years, and should give you a sense of what we’ve been able to achieve…and what we haven’t.

If you don’t read anything else, read Article 51. Entitled “Supplemental Markets,” Article 51 is ground zero of our residuals battles. It defines residuals, it delineates the various formulae that govern them, and it contains the odious clause that, in 1985, slashed our residuals down to a fifth of their size. That little clause caused not one, but two strikes.

It may yet cause another. Read the Article. Educate yourselves.

If you only want to read two things, then after you’re done with Article 51, read Theatrical Schedule A. Boy, that sounds sexy, huh? Theatrical Schedule A is the basis of all of our credits guidelines for feature films. Within Theatrical Schedule A, you will find definitions of screenplay, story, literary material, and practically everything else you’d ever want to know about how and why our credits work (or fail to work) they way they do.

Okay, one last one. It’s an easy one.

As the MBA gets renegotiated, it’s often easier to create “side letters” that amend the main contract, rather than go into the main contract and start rewriting.

There is one extremely important side letter in the 2004 MBA, and I believe it will be this single three page document that will rest at the heart of not only our negotiations with the AMPTP, but SAG’s and the DGA’s as well.

You can find it on page 563. It’s very short. What it says of particular relevance is:

Where the subscriber pays for the program either on a subscription or per-picture basis, and where the payment is in exchange for the right to view the motion picture for a fixed and limited period of time or a fixed number of exhibitions, the Company shall pay to the credited writer an aggregate sum equal to one and two-tenths percent (1.2%) of the license fee paid by the licensee for the right to exhibit such picture on the Internet.

This sideletter gives us 1.2% of 100% of the companies’ gross on internet rentals, versus our formula of 1.5/1.8% of 20% of the companies’ gross on DVD sales and rentals.

The battle will center around internet sales. We believe we are legally entitled to sales by our definition. They do not. And so it goes.

There’s a larger point here, of course.

I know this stuff isn’t fun. I know it’s homework.

Do it anyway. Don’t rely on your elected leaders to do it for you. They’re just writers like you, and in my experience as a member of the Board, most of them aren’t particularly well-versed in the MBA either. Educate yourselves. Be smart. You’re going to be asked to make decisions soon that will affect your livelihoods in serious ways.

The only bad choice will be an uninformed one.