Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Answering a comment on my first post.

"Obviously, they stopped things because the actor wanted to re-write lines. The producers didn't move forward with script while the actor is off writing lines. Filming slowed down and was costing money."

"Obviously," huh? Yeah, not only is it not obvious, it's not true and it's not what I wrote. The director and studio were fine filming the actor's line. The production would not have slowed down for one minute. The studio would not be out one dime. Luckily, the producer didn't like it, so he asked for my help.

You know what would suffer? My film. My art, even though you mock the term. The film would suck and it would have my name on it.

You think it's selfish to want to avoid that? Okay. I'm selfish. I want my work to sing.

And I made a lot of sacrifices to get where I am. More than you can imagine. So don't tell me I chose not to sacrifice. I've suffered FOR MY ART. If that's a foreign concept to you, maybe you're not an artist.

"You are in a union. You made the choice to join the union. Hollywood is a union town and you made the choice to do union work when you took the writing job. "

No, I didn't have a choice. I was told to do it. I didn't sell my script "to do union work." I sold it to get my movie made. I didn't know that ficore even existed until the WGA blacklisted a bunch of writers last month.

Again, I took not a dime. I took no one's job. But I protected my art, and if you don't think that's more noble, then you're more worried about unions than movies.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I can't tell you how many hundreds of TV and feature writers turned in scripts the day the strike ended. Big names. People who were really public about supporting the strike.

And the studios knew that shit was coming in. It helped them hold off. They didn't have to lose pilot season since they knew they'd have the scripts the second it ended. If it had been pencils down, pilot season would have been lost, so the strike would have been over a month earlier.

But let's go after this guy for trying to protect his movie from scab actors who want to destroy it.

My guild.