Two Implications of Royalty Paucity

I want to return once again to those statistics I talked about here, specifically w/r/t royalties, largely because I think that what these numbers show is that our entire structure of paying and working with playwrights is based on a collective fantasy.  Let's look at those numbers again:

-- Roughly 3% of income is from royalties 
-- Avg. commission amount = $3-4K
-- Takes 6 months-2 years to write a play (if you took one year to write a play at $4K, you'd be making $333.33 a month off writing that play)

I see two implications here...

The first is that reforming the royalty system would be a very difficult uphill climb if only 3% of people's income is coming from royalties, and it might be a better idea to simply scrap the royalty system altogether and embrace something else.  Now obviously, I have no idea how a new system would work, but I could imagine some ways... What if we went to a weekly salary model? Not that actors get paid great, but what if had some system in place where on productions employing equity actors, playwrights got paid at least the Equity minimum per week?  Agents could negotiate higher weekly salaries for larger deal playwrights etc.  I have no idea if this is a good idea or not, but it certainly seems like a better one than the one we currently have.

The main problem I would foresee is this... how would smaller theaters play writers? And just because I'm dealing with Equity on Atheist right now... a special appearance contract (which allows theaters without season agreements with Equity to use union actors) pegs the salary at $200/wk + a $20 per diem.  I've worked at theaters producing on a Special Appearance contract before, and some of them can only afford to hire one Equity actor per show, because that one actor's salary at $2,720 is 10% of many budgets right there.   

So like I said, I'm not suggesting we replace royalties with an Equity-pegged weekly salary, but it is an example of a non-royalty payment scheme that could work. Maybe the Dramatist's Guild could come up with a few others.

The second implication goes back to copyright. Readers of this blog will know that I'm somewhat of a "copyleft" person. It's not that I don't believe in copyright, I just go back to its original purpose of encouraging creativity by allowing people to make money off of their inventions for a limited period of time.  I think our current system is waaay out of control in a way that (a) is unsustainable and (b) hurts creativity, particular when it comes to secondary use of texts.  I don't want to rehash the whole debate right now (search "intellectual property" and "copyright" in the search sidebar to your left and/or read this Jonathan Lethem essay for some idea of where I come down on these issues).

Anyway, when I bring the issue of copyright up, one counter -argument I frequently hear is that without copyright, writers are fucked (just to reiterate: I do not want to do away with copyright  and I clearly believe in compensating writers for their work).  But it turns out that playwrights at least don't earn much money based on the copyright they have of their material. Indeed, it would be more possible in this country to have a system where playwrights were entirely funded by grants, residencies, commissions etc. but all of their work was public domain and thus they earned no royalties than it would be to have a system where playwrights were able to live solely off their copyrighted work via royalties. I'm not saying I'd want either of those systems, but it's just worth mentioning that our current copyright system doesn't actually help playwrights other than the most successful all that much.

Comments

[99]

Right on. I've been thinking about this for a while now. This being the internet age and all, what purpose do the licensing organizations serve? Not that I don't like them or whatnot, but if I have a website, why can't I upload my script and have it available for download, even for a nominal fee? Why not cut out the middleman (or middleperson, as the case may be).

On the salary front, if we look at the issue with commissions, for the larger theatres (or even some of the smaller), rather than pegging it as part of the production budget, could we scrap commissions and instead give playwrights a weekly salary when they're writing the play? Would that make more sense? Maybe even provide a workspace for them, so they're more like a part of your staff? If commissions and royalties aren't providing actual living wages, junk 'em and try again.

[RLewis]

I'm not seeing where tying something to Equity has ever turned out to be a good idea, including Off and Off-Off.