Thursday, October 18, 2018

Hiccup of History

A high profile writer (Terry Rossio of "Shrek", "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Lone Ranger" fame) points out a discrepancy that's been around sine the 1930s.

So strange that literally tho only words spoken in the new "Aladdin" trailer happens to be a rhyme that my writing partner and I wrote and Disney offers zero compensation to us (or to any screenwriters on any of these live-action remakes) not even a t-shirt or pass to the park.

As I used to tell angry writers: the reason they get shafted is because of a hiccup in history. Back when entertainment guilds and unions were being formed and scrambling for jurisdiction, animated cartoons were not something the Screen Writers Guild thought much about. The stories, after all, were worked by people that DREW PICTURES.

But things changed as things so often do. Story work for animated features and shorts devolved to the Screen Cartoonists Guild and then The Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists (now known as Tne Animation Guild), part of the IATSE, which represents below-the-line crafts in movies and television. And here we are.

Because of that hiccup, animation employees are shoe-horned in with grips, make-up artists and camera people (among others) and labeled "below-the-line" which is a lousy term to start with. Cartoonists have tried to get re-use residuals multiple times without result. Times being what they are, it might be a while before they achieve them.

2 comments:

  1. Back when the Screen Cartoonists Guild was first staking out its turf in the late 1930s, it was common for other unions to intervene at National Labor Relations Board hearings to claim jurisdiction over certain job categories. For instance the Cameramen and Lab Technicians did so at a hearing involving the Guild in 1939. There was nothing to stop the Writers Guild from also doing so at that time, an action, as you rightly point out, they were to later regret. (See my article, "In the Matter of Writers and Animation Story Persons," in the now out-of-print Storytelling in Animation anthology from the 2nd Annual Walter Lantz Animation Conference.) Also, the matter of residuals was first broached by the Screen Cartoonists Guild in 1944; it went nowhere, but was then successfully picked up by the Writers, Directors and Actors.

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  2. You're quite right, Harvey. The Screen Writers Guild chose what they wanted to organize, and Walt Disney Production, Leon Schlesinger, MGM (etc.) weren't it.

    The Animation Guild made an extensive residuals proposal to animation producers in 2000. We had the same result as the Screen Cartoonists Guild.

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