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FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

There Will Be Blood For Oil:
WGA Royalty Wars!
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 1/29/08

The meek shall inherit the earth – but not its mineral rights.  – Rule of Life, from “The Official Rules”.
 
Also, consider Woody Allen’s observation, odd for a peacenik liberal Jewish intellectual: Someday the lamb and the lion shall lie down together – but the lamb won’t get much sleep. [Also in the “Official Rules” by Paul Dickson.]
 
Lambs of the WGA are lying with producer lions, and aren’t getting much rest, as the try to wrest some ‘rights’ from the producers that equals a fraction of what directors and movie stars get for their ‘contribution’ to a film or TV production. A shame they don’t get the same treatment some states give to royalty owners of mineral rights for petroleum deposits lying beneath their property. While the owner had nothing to do with the formative process, he or she ‘owns’ them by virtue of a deed to that land – though in some states the minerals do not convey necessarily with the surface rights.

But whoever owns the minerals, owns the oil, and the production company acquires production rights by paying a fraction of the revenue yielded from the black gold brought to the surface for refining.  There’s usually an up-front payment plus the royalty, commonly in many states that royalty being a minimum of three-sixteenths, sometimes as much as 25% of what cash is generated by that cache of oily goo wedged in the porous rocks many thousands of feet below the growing crops and farm structures.
 
Hollywood producers must ‘mine’ or extract the talent of writers, whose talent came with them in the birth canal.  Without producers to bring the production equipment and matching talent of director, editor, camera operator, actors and a potful of skills that can, and does, fill a lengthy book of job listings, that resource has no expression.  Without the resource, all those other folks are without work – producers can’t produce with nuttin’ to produce, actors can’t act with nuttin’ on the page in character and dialogue, and ditto for director, stage hands, camera crew, set and costume designers, lighting gaffers, et al.
 
In stage theatre, it’s observed that It’s not on the stage until first it’s on the page.  In theatre the writer has more control, and in some TV productions there is the writer-producer, one hyphenate who gets a ‘royalty’ akin to what a mineral rights owner gets for the gasoline in our car being first found on his property.  But basically, the writers are now hoisted on their own petard, indifferent to what producers do, or directors, or actors – merely having worked quietly in their lonesome garret and handing the pages thru the door, up the ‘pipeline’ of the production chain and expecting reward for their mental deposits.
 
Since they take no interest in how the process works, they think it will just magically happen – as many of them think that gasoline in their car magically arises into the gas station storage tank, interested only so far as slamming the petroleum sector in such as the Oscar-nominated “There Will Be Blood” and Viggo Mortensen’s colorful T-shirt emblazoned with “No Blood For Oil” on many of his ego-ridden public rants.
 
If writers were as shrewd these past decades with their royalty rights as landowners often are – though not always, as “There Will Be Blood” faintly portrays – and were protected by legislation of the kind in Oklahoma and other oil-rich states, they would have a three-sixteenth’s minimum revenue stream for every thing they put to paper, plus whatever one-time, up-front payment negotiated.  As a lease-owner gets paid for the signature on the contract, though the well often does not pay a dime in production – more dry holes in the oil patch than ego-holes in Hollywood – so could WGA members negotiate a ‘petroleum royalty’ for the setting up of drilling rigs on their intellectual property.
 
They each need the other, as the lease/land owner needs the producer with the rig and roughnecks and pipelines and refineries and station locations.  It’s highly symbiotic, but in Hollywood, the two are hostile, the writer not allowed most of the time to even visit the shooting set – much as a landowner is kept off the rig filled with roustabouts.  But the landowner gets paid that minimal three-sixteenths once the oil-bearing rock is hit by the drill bit and the hole is cased in and the black gold flows toward your gasoline tank.
 
A shame writers don’t have Sacramento’s sympathy, as Oklahoma’s legislature gave a right of 3/16 minimum to mineral rights holders for their ‘resource’ located on their land.  Is a writer’s ‘land’ in his mind, with art-bearing formations in his brain cells of any less worth?  That may be where Meathead’s millions might be focused, as a master of political skills, were Meathead a writer!  But he’s a director, and can hardly write his name on a credit card slip.  Imagine if his writers had a right to have a check written for three-sixteenths of the millions ‘produced’ by the celluloid-gold that began on the page, in the writer’s rich vein of brain power.
 
If only films about the oil industry actually taught something rather than ranted, Muslim-like in their jealous, envious rage, against the oil industry’s practices and success, then the writers’ minds would be rewarded with a royalty befitting a resource-owner.  
 
Try that logic, WGA – go for blood for oil, the blood being the producers’ revenue stream, and oil being your resource-rich vein of membership.  Go to Sacramento for the sacrament of legal mandate that you get rich the way landowners get rich – or, become a producer and ‘refine’ that product and sell it and market it and do the hard work of putting all that ‘rig’ together so the rich vein of writers’ talent can become a revenue-producing production.  
 
It’s smarter than standing in front of Paramount making faces at the execs. ExileStreet

copyright 2008 Steve Finefrock

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