Heroes season two Eleven episodes long; how do you feel about it?
POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 22:01
VIEWED: 5138
PAGE 2 of 4
I think the story is more effective if it moves along.
We watched the first season of 24 and while it was a rollercoaster and the suspense nearly did me in, I found it annoying how it seemed forced to keep it going through 24 episodes. I know that sounds stupid as there had to be an episode per hour of the day, but really I thought it was a 12-hour story, not a 24-hour story. Sometimes a story can be told better in a shorter time than a longer one.
And I think that makes no sense at all... But it sounded much better in my head.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Grizwald:Quote:
As an aside, how much do screen writers make? Is the strike really necessary? Or is it more like the baseball strike, where people who make 6, 7, and 8 figures playing a game can’t make 7,8, and 9 figures playing a game. Because quite frankly, the baseball strike ended my intereste in baseball completely. I haven’t watched a game since.
It's more an issue of what will they make in future. The technology is so fluid right now. Under the current contract, the writers get a little money for every DVD sold. It's not much, just a few cents, but it's something. Maybe in 7 years we won't be using DVDs anymore, so what will it help to get a few cents per DVD sold? Nuttin. They are trying to write something into their contracts to allow for still getting paid when the technology shifts to, say, all online viewing or direct downloads.
Essentially correct. Most writers only bring down $62'000 a year, which is middle class (especially for those living in L.A.). These aren't multimillion-dollar celebrities here, they're more like Mal & company, just scraping by when things go well.
Most writers are well paid when they're working on a show, but we (as fans of Joss, Tim, Marti, and others) know that jobs don't last forever, and writers tend to end up with a lot of downtime.
Residuals are what make this possible. Everytime an episode of Buffy or Angel is shown in reruns (on Sci-Fi, or Space, or some small local network at 2 am), Joss (or whoever has the writing credit for that ep) gets a bit of cash. Likewise, writers only get about 4 cents from each DVD sold (yes, you read that right. 4 cents), and a big fat nothing from web-based media (like the advertisement-laden media streams that many networks offer --which do earn income for the networks, because there's advertising there).
The trouble is that reruns are drying up (networks don't show reruns during hiatus anymore, they bring out new mid-season series), DVDs are in transition, and internet media is heating up.
The same amount of money is coming into the system, but now it's going to the network owners (let's call them "Badger," or "Fanty & Mingo") rather than to the writers who actually do the work. The loss of those residuals will be enough to put some writers past the poverty line.
What the writers want is more per DVD (say 8 cents instead of 4), and some share of internet rights. In fact, just before the strike, the writers had taken the DVD increase off the table, but the networks still aren't budging.
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Quote:I was feeling a little better about this until I saw this. $62 grand a year is pretty reasonable pay for television screen writers, it seems. That’s not far removed from the median income of physicians - who do far more important work then writing stories for fictional tv.
Originally posted by Cybersnark:
Essentially correct. Most writers only bring down $62'000 a year, which is middle class (especially for those living in L.A.). These aren't multimillion-dollar celebrities here, they're more like Mal & company, just scraping by when things go well.
I guess I can see the job security angle, but they better fix this quickly, because my sympathy for them just dropped a letter grade.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
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I've lived in LA, and like in New York, or Philly, or Boston, or Minneapolis, or many other places, $62K doesn't go all that far. Plus they are trying to avoid a pay CUT, when prices of everything we need to live on continue to rise. I don't think it's unreasonable.
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My sympathy is with the writers and against the studios.. and the so called 'talent', the actors.
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Finn, the best place for more info on the strike might be here: http://www.fans4writers.com. It can tell you everything the strike involves.
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Quote:That's if consistently employed, like on Buffy or ER or something. Take Tim Minear- I saw he wrote sporadically...X-Files story editor for a year..5 eps of Lois And Clark, various writing for pilots and such...it wasn't until Angel and Firefly that he worked steady for more than a year. And he's a success story. So, there's a hundred for every one like him that write one ep of a series, or write one pilot or something a year then go back to managing a video store or whatever. It's not as avaricious as you think to ask for secured royalties...I have a friend the worked as a stuntman for the last two seasons of Buffy...he's pretty successful in Hollywoodland, but if you average what he's made per year in the last 5 years, it's like, 30,000 a year (in Tinseltown that gets you a small studio apt. if you have a roommate)! The spikes and valleys are that severe.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
I was feeling a little better about this until I saw this. $62 grand a year is pretty reasonable pay for television screen writers, it seems. That’s not far removed from the median income of physicians - who do far more important work then writing stories for fictional tv.
Plus: 9-11 severely changed Dark Angel- they opted to pump up the sci-fi, and almost lose the terrorist 'pulse' angle in response to it (a BIG mistake IMHO), so yeah, politically truncated, but Heroes won't be doing that- they're just, as was said above, removing the 'hook' for the next 'volume', not changing their story around to be comfortable with the times.
BTW, did you see the original Heroes pilot on the DVD? It's fascinating to see HOW heavily terrorist-connected it was, and actually, the switch from terrorist-connected 'gifted' ones to secret-society dudes served it very well, I think.
Home again w/the sick kid Chrisisall
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Quote:
Originally posted by MisterG:Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
When Heroes season 2 turns out like Dark Angel season 2, all you A's are to blame!
The writing is too consistantly high quality for that to happen. Then again DA wasn't very good from about the 3rd episode on! (ducks and runs)
Go ahead and run. You'll just die tired:)
Not really, but I think DA was great all the way up until season 2. The first few eps of that year had their moments, but afterwards it was just painful.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:Quote:I was feeling a little better about this until I saw this. $62 grand a year is pretty reasonable pay for television screen writers, it seems. That’s not far removed from the median income of physicians - who do far more important work then writing stories for fictional tv.
Originally posted by Cybersnark:
Essentially correct. Most writers only bring down $62'000 a year, which is middle class (especially for those living in L.A.). These aren't multimillion-dollar celebrities here, they're more like Mal & company, just scraping by when things go well.
I guess I can see the job security angle, but they better fix this quickly, because my sympathy for them just dropped a letter grade.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
Keep in mind, that figure is an average. Guys like Akiva Goldsman who makes a million or two per script, or even Joss, really skew the number.
Plus, in LA 62 grand isn't much. Then factor in that many writers go a couple years or more between script sales, and you can see why residuals are important. Without them, many, if not most writers would have to find other careers, and then the stories go away completely.
Another detail to keep in mind, that 4 cents per DVD is flat. So, on a TV show DVD, which could have contributions from a dozen or more writers, that 4 cents is spread out between them. And when it comes to the internet distribution, the writers are only asking for a small percentage. thus, if it doesn't make money online, they get nothing from it.
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Quote:
Originally posted by jarhead:Quote:
Originally posted by MisterG:
Then again DA wasn't very good from about the 3rd episode on! (ducks and runs)
Go ahead and run. You'll just die tired:)
Not really, but I think DA was great all the way up until season 2.
First season of Dark Angel was almost Firefly quality as far as I'm concerned. The second is just good-to-okay sci-fi/action, with a few really bright spots, most noteably the last ep directed by Cameron. Jessica and Michael make the second season worth having, but many eps are almost worthless to the larger story.
His DA button was pushed Chrisisall
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