WGA Candidate Statement
I’m Van Robichaux. I’ve been a feature writer, a scripted TV staff writer, a Comedy/Variety writer and, for one beautiful day, the co-showrunner of a pilot. Having worked so many different WGA jobs I’ve been able to learn that no matter what writing job you have, it seems like there’s always someone trying to screw you. Whether it’s with shorter seasons with mini-rooms, free work, endless rounds of pitching or whatever unfathomable indignations are surely inflicted on our unionized Jeopardy writers—sometimes being a writer is so frustrating all you can do is literally scream. At least that’s been my experience. This election, instead of screaming. I’m running for the board.
Before you read any further, I want to share some good news. This statement is available to listen to as a podcast. Open up a web browser on your phone and type www.podcast.link/wga then hit enter. Keep reading if you’d like but also feel free to just listen to me in your car.
Now with that out of the way I’d like to discuss briefly why I want to represent you on the board of directors, what I would like us to accomplish, and what I think we can do together to improve the condition of all writers.
THE UPCOMING CONTRACT
I don’t want to go on strike. Nobody wants to go on strike. I think we are probably going to have to go on strike.
Inflation is at 40-year highs. If we accept the contract the companies are likely going to propose as their final offer (3% raises at best—and a few “rollbacks”) it will mean that while media companies make record profits, professional writers will end up working for the lowest real wages in 40 years.
But…I can hear the companies claiming there’s a looming recession and they simply can’t afford to pay us. It won’t matter if that recession means people are going out less so spending more money on their streaming platforms or that profits (even accounting for inflation) will be at 40-year highs. They are still gonna claim they can’t afford to pay us what we deserve, and they are going to try to frighten us into believing them.
I’m ready to stand up to them and also to clearly communicate with the concerned parts of our membership that may want to give in and accept what the companies want to give us. We will need solidarity and that is going to take patience and lots of dialogue with the membership. If I’m elected, it will also probably mean me thanklessly taking a lot of shit from certain angry members. I’m ready and willing to take that shit for you! If you don’t think it’s worth threatening a strike (and quite possibly going on strike) to get what we deserve, please don’t vote for me. But, if like me, you want to keep the jobs of screen and television writer jobs people who aren’t already wealthy can survive in Los Angeles doing, I hope you do vote for me.
BETTER ENFORCEMENT
We’ve won plenty of rights over the years in our contracts that go unenforced. Some of them are on the little wallet sized card we get when we join. It’s mostly a list of things we’ve been promised but are actually unable to get because there’s no enforcement. Why is it a wallet sized card? Am I supposed to take it out and wave it around when a producer asks for a free rewrite? We don’t need a list of rights, we need better execution of enforcement.
The easiest place where we can improve enforcement though is internally. There are things we can do to police ourselves that we don’t do. Did you know you can be fined for doing a free rewrite? It never happens but it’s possible under our current constitution. I would gladly turn myself in, pay a $500 fine, and tell every producer for the rest of my life: "Sorry, last time I did a free rewrite, the guild found out and fined me." Right now, all I can do is tell them it’s against the rules. They don’t give a shit about rules, but they care about money. The fines don’t have to be big to have a huge impact. Some people will say our struggling members can’t afford something like a $500 fine, but what I think our struggling members can’t afford is to keep doing thousands of hours of free work a year.
Speaking of free work, I think fixing that problem starts at the top. High earning writers need to stop doing free work. I understand why when you are paid $500,000 for a feature script you don’t care about doing a free rewrite. You feel like you’ve been paid enough to cover it. The thing is, the writers at the top are going to be the ones treated the best. The studio will never treat a writer working for scale as well as they treat our top 1%, so when the top 1% lets them bend the rules, they will insist everyone bend them. To the top 1% what I say is, if the studio values you as much as you think, they will pay you your polish fee, and the next time a scale writer asks to be paid scale for their polish instead of doing it for free, it will be harder for that exec to pretend no one has ever been paid for one.
FUTURE ISSUES
I enrolled in college as an engineer (before having an existential crisis and switching to a liberal arts degree). I took advanced calculus for fun…I fix everyone’s computers… you get the idea. In addition to the present dilemmas we face, I’ve got my eye on an issue that is going to affect writers in the future: Artificial Intelligence.
The companies are already using AI to analyze (and pass on…) scripts. Eventually (and soon) they are going to attempt to use it to generate original material. Do a google search for “DALL-E 2” and what you will learn is that Artificial Intelligence is getting very good at taking any written prompt you give it and generating realistic photographs and high-quality drawings of whatever you ask for. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s good enough that graphic designers, advertising agency illustrators, and professional visual artists are rightfully freaking out. Can it completely replace professional writers? No, but it can already do tasks like coming up with 100 episode ideas for a showrunner to look through. If you thought mini-rooms were bad, wait ‘til they only need us to write a day’s worth of prompts….
But here’s the secret about these A.I. systems. They can’t actually create anything original. The way they work is they’re "trained" on large datasets of existing information. An AI that writes newspaper articles first has to read and study every article on the internet. The art AI, Dall-E 2 had to be trained on millions of original photos and famous works of art. Without this training data, these AIs can’t do anything. So…what will the AI that our employers attempt to replace us with be trained on? Our own writing. We need to keep an eye on this issue and lay the groundwork to get protections into our future contracts that guarantee that if material is generated using algorithms trained on our union covered written material (which it will be), we will be compensated for that “algorithmic reuse.”
As far as I know, this issue is not on the radar of anyone else running for the board and while I might sound like a paranoid lunatic talking about it today, in 10 years I’m confident you’ll be glad I brought it up now.
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
I’m a cisgender, white male but I’ve got a secret. A secret none of my employers have been told. I have a hidden disability. I’m on the Autism Spectrum. I have what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s exhausting to mask, but I’ve seen how our employers treat people of color, women, pregnancy, visibly disabled writers, etc. and also how execs in this business are terrified of anything complicated or confusing…so I’ve hidden it.
I was diagnosed later in life. When I was younger, I just thought I was really weird and got confused a lot. Having grown up without a label made it easier for me to rationalize keeping it a secret but frankly I’d like to stop feeling like hiding it helps me financially. (Especially now that I’m telling everyone…) But, to come back to enforcement, I think what we really need to keep everyone safe from discrimination is to actually enforce California’s strong anti-discrimination laws. Publicly shaming the networks and studios can only get us so far and it has mostly gotten us a new set of frustrating excuses. As writers, we often think because it’s so hard to get a job, when we suspect we are passed over because of our race, gender, or a disability, who can say if we’d have gotten hired anyway?!— Well, I’ll tell you who can say it: a California court—and they do it all the time in other industries. If for example, you’re a working, union writer and then someone with hiring power asks if you plan to have kids then doesn’t hire you? Guess what. You can win a lawsuit against that employer in California and the guild should be helping you to file it.
The point is we can do more than just push for more inclusive hiring and a more diverse membership, we can make sure that those diverse members are protected and not discriminated against.
IN CONCLUSION
I’m proud to be a WGA member and I want to keep it a union we can be proud of. I have a unique, broad perspective on the issues facing writers. I think the guild can do more to help every one of its members and I want your vote so I can help us do that. We need to work together and improve working conditions for all of our members now and in the future.
In Solidarity,
Van Robichaux
