I’ve written a short piece about the WGA strike and the Democratic presidential candidates elsewhere. In response, one of my WGA friends sent the following email, with some interesting tidbits:

As one of the thousand or so writers who voted not to strike, I can’t believe I’m going to [clarify] some of your stats that actually support your argument. While it’s true that the Guild minimum is $100G or so for a big-budget script, there’s also a fee of about half that for a low budget film; and a lot of writers agree to the lower figure even though they know they’re writing a film that’s going to be budgeted much higher than the stated budget. The big guys, of course, don’t work for minimum, just as the DVD and download revenue streams are written into their contracts at rates far exceeding the minimum being demanded.

Further, the “average” of working writers may be $200G, as you say, but that figure is wildly [skewed], given that there are many, many writers working for several million per script and sometimes three-quarters of a million PER WEEK on uncredited punchups just before production–the kind that the movies that were canceled/postponed recently hadn’t yet gotten. So in a guild of 12,000 members, those dozens and dozens of millions will wildly skew the averages.

Then, too, my guess is that no more than a thousand writers are working at any given time. So my estimate is that the average writer (if you throw out the high and low, as in Olympics scoring) earns about $60K–which you’d concur with, I think, if you saw the cars parked on the side streets around the picketing locations.

This is great:

Michael Cera hosted. Yo La Tengo was the musical guest. Horatio Sanz and Rachel Dratch returned alongside Kristen Wiig, Darrell Hammond, Seth Myers, Amy Poehler, Kenan Thompson, Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Jason Sudeikis and Will Forte for super-dirty sketches written by the SNL writers.

It was broadcast nowhere. Proceeds from the live event went to support “Saturday Night Live” crew members laid off due to the 2-week-old writers strike.

Talk you off what, Pop-Pop?

Still working on that Heroes post . . .

But in the meantime, a couple NFL thoughts. First off, I don’t think Chicago should be worried in the least about Donovan McNabb’s health. He’s going to be ready to start for them next season, and, unlike this season, he’ll be at 100%.

(Pained aside: Over the weekend, I mentioned to the Galley Wife that McNabb left the Miami game with an injury. The Galley Wife knows absolutely nothing about football. She replied, without missing a beat, “Well, it is that time of year.” Ouch.)

But let’s back up and talk about next week for a second. What’s the line on the Eagles-Pats game going to be? +20? +25? Would you take the Birds +27? I wouldn’t. And here’s my great hope for the Pats: At the end of the regular season, when they set their playoff roster, they cut the punter. That’s right. Go into the playoffs without one on the team. Pick up an extra fullback, maybe. Maybe just leave the slot open. Whatever. It would be the perfect punctuation point to end this statement season and would cement Belichek, officially, as the most hated coach in the history of the game.

Also, it would be kind of awesome.

Finally, on the way to work this morning, Redskins talk radio was buzzing about the team’s second straight division loss, which dropped them to the .500 mark and might have put them out of the playoffs. The overall impression from hosts and listeners was . . .

*What a great game!

*The Skins are better than we thought, even!

* Except for those three long TD passes, they totally shut down Dallas’s offense, which is amazing! (This is nearly an exact quote from one of the analysts.)

The general mood was giddy excitement, with most of the people I heard predicting that the Skins would use this as a springboard to run the table the rest of the way.

I’m from Philadelphia, so I obviously don’t understand what “normal” is, but this strikes me as at least as psychotic as booing your team during the first quarter of the first game of the season.

This is a strange story. Who knew they needed writers to make Justice League?

A WGA reader just pointed me to this site dedicated to imploring both the writers and the studios to just “get back in that room” because of all the collateral damage the strike is causing to non-striking employees.

On the one hand, the site’s anonymous author has a point. Negotiation is good, bargaining is good, there certainly seems to be a small window over the next couple days for a compromise before the logic of the conflict points toward a long, dug-in standoff.

Also, the author is certainly correct that lots of working folks are going to get squished by this strike and that’s both unfortunate and unfair.

The only problem with the “pox on both their houses” approach–although maybe this is better described as “can’t we all just get along”–is that it imputes a certain moral equivalence between the two sides that doesn’t really seem to exist. In some cases, the studios have been playing games to get out of paying writers what they’re owed (with streaming broadcasts labeled “promotions”). In others, they’re trying to roll-back the residuals writers get on the next generation of delivery vehicles (by giving writers less on downloads than they get from DVDs). There’s no economic justification for this–it’s simply an assertion of the power of oligopoly. Imploring “both sides” to get back to the table is a little like asking “both sides” of a mugging to stop fighting. That’s an incredibly bad analogy, but you get what I’m driving at.

There is one way, however, in which both sides are responsible–in the game theory sense of the word–for the strike. The WGA is right, but in a strategically weak. The studios are wrong, but in a strategically strong position. The dynamics of this sort of encounter alway, always beg for confrontation. Both parties have incentive to confront and disincentive to compromise.

“Hulk BANG Portman & Johansson!!”

Phil Sheridan notes, with all appropriate irony, that the Eagles’ next two opponents have a combined record of 9-9.

In case you’re interested in following the WGA strike, Variety has a blog set up specifically for it: Scribe Vibe. It’s pretty good inside baseball.