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Writers wanted their fair share of compensation and went on strike to attain such a negotiated settlement. After 22 weeks of holding out, crippling financial pressure allowed corporations to break the union, as it were. A situation that was merely an aggravation to corporations whose bottom lines were suffering a bit was a struggle to put food on the table for the writers striking for more money. They had no choice but to settle for less than they had aspired to garner. Their plight was aggravated by the fact that soon afterward, market conditions lowered the MSRP of videotapes down to the $19.99 range. When the average sell-through point hit its final resting point of $9.99-$14.99 for titles, writers were hurt that much more by their settlement.

They had agreed to take 0.3% of the gross on the first million in revenue followed by a 20% increase to 0.36% for all earnings above a million. For those of you who aren't good at math, 0.36% of a million is $3,600. A movie that made $10 million on home video, a relatively successful performance, earned the writer exactly $36,000. Working folks wouldn't turn their nose up at that (unless they were playing Deal Or No Deal), but let's be honest here. It is not the promised land one would expect when they set off to write the greatest screenplay since Citizen Kane. And the odds of a movie doing that sort of business on home video were dramatically reduced once that MSRP on videotapes fell 70-80% from the $50 average when the agreement was made to $9.99-$14.99 afterward. At this point in the marketplace, a title had to sell at a factor of five more often to garner the same accrued income for a writer. Ergo, when the writers union was broken, hundreds of millions of dollars in future compensation was lost in the process.

Given the way the 1988 writer's strike played out, it is understandable that writers would be reticent to put themselves in a similar position in the future. This is particularly the case when we consider that membership in the guild has increased by 33% over the past 20 years as the increase in cable channels has created an expansion in creative programming. Approximately 12,000 members are impacted by the current strike as opposed to roughly 9,000 two decades ago. Most of them are not in the league wherein Hollywood Reporter and Variety report their every new deal, either. The average income of a Hollywood writer is considered to be $60,000, and that number is skewed quite a bit by the high-end earners, the ones who get seven figures for their hotly contested works. A lot of people are putting their very livelihood at risk by striking.

What makes them do so? The marketplace wherein movies are distributed has experienced a fundamental shift since 1988. DVDs are now disposable purchases that require no more money than a person can find between their couch cushions. Even HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the new, ultra-expensive formats generally sell in the range of $25-$35 when not on sale, an amount representing 50-70% of the average cost for a VHS tape when the last agreement was reached. But neither of these is the particularly troublesome issue for writers. That boogeyman is the Internet.

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