There is a Writers Guild strike that is currently and deliciously finally meting out justice to producers who do not value the written word despite their phony, opposite, claims, and I fully support the strike and the effort for writers -- the instigators of original inspiration and creation -- to get their fair share of future DVD and online entertainment profits.
Fight to the death. Let the producers find their bloody end.
The entertainment industry rarely values the writer. Movies and television shows are star vehicles and even directors and producers are less important than the famous names attached above the project's title.
That unfortunate disconnect between the performance and the script is disturbing. Most untrained, everyday, people believe they are writers because they "do it" every day -- they type emails, make grocery lists, blog and do live text chats -- and they think that means they understand the structure of storytelling that few professional writers know or ever use in the marrow of their bones.
Stars, however, are less close to the common and the ordinary and are, therefore, more impossible to pretend to imitate. Stars are, by their very nature, unique, beautiful and amazing. Few in the real world can begin to compare with that kind of shining, external, beauty that sells movie tickets.
So we are left to wonder about the importance of spectacle over plot -- why must the face outweigh the page -- and what are we authors going to do about it?
Stars value good scripts because they know fine writing makes better performances, but producers and directors despise the author and reject the script as master and that's where the Star can step in to help the author to help the production by providing the writer protection from the producer's wind and the director's rain and thereby providing the word proper standing perched upon their famous shoulders -- and the result will be happier writers crafting better movies and television shows and even bigger Stars shining from the awards podium.
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