This is the last of the four cartoons produced for the Hill & Range Company and aired annually on Chicago's kid's shows. If you want a DVD of them all, here's where to get one.
This is Suzy Snowflake and like the previous one, it was animated by Centaur Productions, the company run by master sculptor and special effects guy Wah Ming Chang. I'm told that the vocal group in this is the Norman Luboff Choir and that the female soloist is Norma Zimmer, who was one of Lawrence Welk's "Champagne Ladies" for around six hundred years. Take a look.
Here and there on the 'net, I see people making the suggestion that the WGA abandon its demands about representing Animation and Reality Writers. These are two areas near and dear to my aorta. I have worked in Reality Programming, back in the eighties when it was all represented by the WGA. I still work occasionally in Animation and was one of those who spilled a lot of corpuscles to try and move that area under the umbrella of the Writers Guild. It's important to note that the WGA does represent writers on some so-called "reality shows" — Dancing With The Stars, to name one. As far as I know, that series is still successful and has not been destroyed by its WGA contract.
We should also underscore that the WGA already represents some animation writing at some studios...and in some pretty significant venues like The Simpsons and The Family Guy. One of the sillier claims that's being made is that WGA coverage of animation writing would hurt the studios and cause profitable ventures to become unprofitable. The amounts of money involved are, to the studios, petty cash. They'd mean a lot to the writers but in the overall budget of a show, they're pretty insignificant. More to the point, shows already covered by the WGA are for the most part doing pretty well, and the ones that have failed would not have succeeded with cheaper writers. The Family Guy is a wildly lucrative cash cow and The Simpsons may soon prove to be the single most profitable TV series ever produced. So why would it kill someone else to make the same deals with us?
Equally important: Keep in mind that our current demands also would not give the WGA jurisdiction over all Animation Writing, either immediately or in the near-future. In fact, on the WGA site, it says that what we're now asking for is to...
Modify the definitions of "television motion picture" and "theatrical motion picture" to expand coverage of the MBA to all theatrical and TV animation except those that are covered by other labor organizations.
Those are my italics there. Disney, Warner Bros. Animation, Sony Animation, Fox Animation, etc., are all currently covered by another labor organization...The Animation Guild, Local 839. Writers on some projects at these houses have been repped by the WGA and that will probably continue and expand, but that's not what the current bargaining is all about. It's about allowing the WGA to organize where no one else currently has jurisdiction. Obviously, there's a long-term goal to cover everything but what we're presently asking for are some alterations of language that will make it easier for the WGA to bargain for Animation Writers not currently covered by 839. We will not wake up one morning soon — and perhaps not even in this century — to find that everyone who writes cartoons in this town is WGA.
I'm curious as to which AMPTP companies are stonewalling on this issue and how much they really care about it. Is Disney willing to keep the industry shut down over it? Even though the WGA isn't asking for jurisdiction over writers at Disney? True, expanding the WGA's representation of animation might impact Disney years in the future...but not now. Now, I suspect, the studios are a lot more eager to get the issue of "Distributor's Gross" off the table. One of the six areas they said had to be dropped before they'd return to the bargaining table is the one to which they responded as follows...
...we cannot agree to any new residual formula based upon the concept of "Distributor's Gross." That is, any residual formula that requires payment to be made based upon the receipts of an entity other than the signatory Company is unacceptable to us. Our agreement to share revenues with you must be limited to those revenues actually received by the signatory Company.
As I explained here, Distributor's Gross is the money that the company actually receives. It's easier for an outside party to monitor Distributor's Gross and less prone to bookkeeping shenanigans, which is why we want any formulas that pay writers to be based on it. The studios would prefer to base deals on Producer's Gross, which is not only a lower figure but a number from which they can deduct darn near anything they want. A studio could offer to pay you 110% of Producer's Gross and then make so many deductions that Producer's Gross equals zero.
That has to matter a lot more to them than the WGA demands in the areas of Reality programming and Animation. When they say they won't come back to the table until we drop the six demands they listed, those aren't the ones they most want us to abandon. The Animation one won't change that much, at least for quite a while. The one about the Distributor's Gross is where the money is. (So, to a slightly lesser extent, is the one about "Fair Market Value.")
The strategy behind the Six Demands is to get us bickering over how much we want to hold out over Reality and Animation. They hope that we'll crater over that, agree to back off on those points...and maybe the ones about Distributor's Gross and Fair Market Value can quietly disappear along with them in a kind of package deal. Personally, though WGA representaton of Animation matters greatly to me, I don't think that even if the studios give us what we're asking for, it will change that much...which is as good a reason to keep it on the table for now as it is to take it off. It won't matter either way if we hold fast on the money issues and we ought to hold on those. The issue of Reality Programming is more complicated and I'll try to address in a future posting why I think that's still a noble and proper area for the WGA to assert itself.
Really though, I don't believe Animation and Reality are true obstacles to getting the Alliance back to the negotiating table. This strike is still about their determination to lower the compensation not just of Writers but for Actors, Directors and anyone else whose deals would be impacted by ours. And it's also about the fact that at some point, the AMPTP is actually going to have to negotiate with us instead of deciding what they want to give us and shutting down the talks if we don't accept it. I would hate to see their Six Demands strategy succeed because it will just lead to the Six More Demands strategy. And then Six More and Six More or however many it will take until we don't have any left.
December 11, 2007
