Sara Davidson Speaks Out

By Kelly Mahan Jaramillo, Nov. 21, 2007

I subscribe to writer Sara Davidson’s blog, and we have had a couple of really nice exchanges – She responds personally and promptly, no form letters. We have had a few chuckles over past posts concerning her wild meetings about her new book LEAP!

Check her out, she is right on the blogroll.

I read her new post today, concerning the Writers Strike, and asked for permission to re-post it here. She got back to me in a few hours, amazing for a woman juggling as many balls as she is. She gave me permission, I want to thank her, and encourage everybody to go to her blog and read her latest post – it has photos which I am too tired to wrestle with getting up here.

HOWEVER, the video below shows a way you can help with this – buy a box of pencils for a dollar. I am broke, and I can spend a dollar and eight cents on a box of pencils in support.

If you stand behind the Writers, even if you are not near a studio where you can walk the line for a day, you can buy a box of pencils.

The video link is located at the bottom of the article, under HOW YOU CAN HELP.

Thank you everyone, everywhere, for your solidarity. Enough crapping on writers, already, dontcha think?

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Article below re-printed by permission of the author.

In New York last week, I joined the striking film and TV writers on the picket line in front of the Disney store on Fifth Avenue. Before the morning was out, I’d gotten involved in a tussle that could only happen when writers strike.

I picked up a sign that said, “Fair Share for Writers!” and joined the line of hundreds in an enclosed space on the sidewalk. Our numbers kept growing until we couldn’t move at all, just shuffle in place. There were star writers like David Chase, who created “The Sopranos,” and Tony Kushner, who wrote “Angels in America,” along with writers who barely earn a living. (The average member of the Writers Guild earns $60,000 a year) I caught up with a friend who writes big horror movies, but who’s one of the calmest, dearest, sane people I know. He asked that I change his name, so let’s call him Jerry. We hadn’t seen each other in years and were catching up, when we spotted a trim man in a beautifully tailored navy suit and tie outside the barrier. “Go home!” the man yelled, “Go back to work!” People started asking, “Who is that guy?” and we heard, “He’s from management. He looks like a suit, doesn’t he?”

He was, in fact, the only man in sight wearing a suit. Writers live in jeans or sweats and sneakers.

We kept shuffling and talking, handing out fliers to passers by, blowing whistles and beating drums. The Suit kept trying to incite people, and had a cameraman with him. “Don’t you want to work?” he shouted. “When was your last pay check? If you ever hope to see another one, get your ass back to work!”

Jerry and I decided he was an agent provocateur from some sleazy TV program, trying to get the writers angry so they’d behave badly. Then they’d get it on film, air it and embarrass the lot of us. Jerry started telling people, “Don’t react, don’t take the bait. Just ignore him.”

And so we did. But an hour later, the Suit, who had dark curly hair and narrow slit glasses, appeared with a box of donuts. Right in front of Jerry and me, the Suit threw a donut in a striker’s face. Then he looked at me and asked, “Want a donut?” I shouted something incoherent, bracing for a donut to hit my face. Jerry yelled at him, “Get out of the line. You don’t belong here!” The Suit, impudent, stood his ground and asked Jerry, “Want a donut?”

Jerry—the calm, sane guy—took his picket sign and whacked the donut box— whack, whack, whack!—until the Suit dropped it and the donuts spilled all over the ground. The Suit looked into the camera and smirked. Jerry said, “I’m gonna call the cops,” and barreled toward the side of the enclosure. I started after him. Jerry was clearly reacting as the Suit had wanted him to and I hoped to diffuse things, but another guy stopped Jerry and said: “The Suit’s a writer for Saturday Night Live. This is a skit, that’s all.”

Oy. We’d been gotten.

Jerry returned to the line abashed. “They shouldn’t let me out of my apartment,” he said. “I wanted to punch that sucker out.” Ten minutes later, the Suit had changed to a Writers Guild shirt and cap and was picketing with the rest of us.

We all had a good laugh, which was sorely needed, as the situation for writers looks grim. People ask me, “Is your TV show affected by the strike?” Like, totally! We turned in a draft of the pilot for “Leap!,” the drama series, just before the strike began, but we can’t do revisions or prepare to shoot until the strike ends. And that may not happen till next summer, or later. We’re asking for two per cent of what the networks and studios make on sales of our work over the Internet and new technologies. They’re standing firm at zero. Nada. No matter how rich they get on our work, they give us nothing. Jerry says three of the heavies in management—Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., Sumner Redstone of Viacom and Jeffrey Immelt of GE—are know for their hostility to unions. They want to cripple ours, just as other unions in the country have been weakened. These conglomerates can afford to lose billions if that will undermine the pesky writers’ union.

But the writers are united, determined to go the distance.

HOW YOU CAN HELP:
If you live in L.A. or N.Y., join us in a picket line. Check the WGA West or WGA East websites for strike times and locations. We need you!

Wherever you live, you can write to the heads of companies and urge them to negotiate and give writers a fair share. The companies consider one letter to represent the views of 100 people, so your voice will matter.

Watch a video of the titans predicting how much money they’ll make over the Internet.

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If you have ideas or comments, simply reply to this email. For information about Leap! go to www.saradavidson.com

Sara Davidson, a journalist, novelist and screenwriter, began chronicling the boomer generation in the Sixties with her phenomenal best seller, Loose Change. The author of five other best-selling books, she’s written for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Harper’s, O, the Oprah Magazine, the L.A. Times and Rolling Stone, and for 25 years she’s written dramas for television.

The Old-Fashioned Day

By Kelly Mahan Jaramillo, Nov. 18, 2007

After being quiet on Veteran’s Day, I had the week of dealing with bank mistakes, credit card issues, and the Motion Picture Pension Plan. Hiss, Boo, as my father used to say.
I am vested in the Union, which sounds great on paper, when in reality, it means that I have $21,035.72 that I cannot touch until I am 65.

I want it now. I NEED it NOW. I have, call me crazy, a desire to handle my own money, as I have been doing quite well as a ‘Johnny-Come-Lately” to the idea of saving money. Turns out I am pretty good at it, and I thank the Pension for investing my earnings well for the last two years, but my gut feels nervous that my next statement is going to show a loss, and I want to get MY money out.

I realized last night it was already Friday, and all I had done was post ‘The Golden Triangle” on “Partners on a Dime”, and wander around other peoples blogs, enjoying them and commenting on a few.

It feels like writing, it looks like writing, and it IS writing, but….there was something missing.

I went into a short story I had started at the beginning of the year, and had thrown what I had written out to the FGNC (Few Good Nags Club – brainchild of Tara Zucker – and it seemed to be received favorably, with some very helpful critique and insights that I had not written intentionally. Tres Cool.

I thought I would revisit it. I did, and it took on a life of it’s own, before I knew it I had written six more pages, and I have no idea how it reads. I am a bit afraid to go look at it – this is not something I am going to post, I am going to send it off, hard copy, with a stamp and a SASE, and frankly, I have not done this type of activity in years. I might as well have been banging away on an old Royal Typewriter.

I kind of liked the feeling, but am afraid I may have been spending a little too much time struggling with the nuts and bolts of the web page and the blogs, zipping around my pages and pages of people I find interesting, of commenting here and there, and generally enjoying myself.
Writing for hardcopy, which is all I used to do, is a whole different mindset, and when I wrapped it up last night, I felt drugged. There were no new posts, there was nothing that immediately showed that I had been working hard for hours, and I was wiped out on writing the first draft of a short story. Which, by the way, is my weakest area.
I have to admit, I love the instant gratification of blogging, as I am, to put it kindly, a tad impatient. (Guys, stop laughing).

For me, blogging is a great place to temper the impatience, as I see whatever I write immediately, and can go back and edit, fix whatever I want to, without papers scattered everywhere and my red pen constantly hiding.

Last night felt so strange, that I must go back to the short story today to see if all of this instant gratification has hindered or helped the “forever learning” writing process.

I would love feedback from other writers, tell me about your experience blending these two mediums.

I have to say, for as peculiar as I felt, the underlying satisfaction was feeling old-fashioned. Mentally, I was in a rocking chair with a shawl around my shoulders, and I liked it very much.

And now I am going to go do some cleaning, so as to avoid reading what I wrote. But I am going to get to it tonight, just out of sheer curiosity.

Thanks for visiting! Love some feedback – everyone’s opinion and experience is priceless and valid, and I would be immensely please to hear from you.

De-Motivated

By Kelly Mahan Jaramillo, Nov 13th 2007

In the usual manner of needing to have an answer, I am trying to figure out why I have absolutely no desire to write, talk, eat, smoke, sit down, stand up, stay awake, go to sleep.

I am, as our friend Pete calls it, “De-motivated”.

Yesterday we were bursting with creative juice, today I am foggy. This morning I had to drive to the Mid-Wilshire district to do an errand, and in Los Angeles, when one is stuck in the West Valley, going ‘over the hill’ down to Mid-Wilshire, which is just below Hollywood, it is a bit of a trek. With the traffic in Los Angeles hitting critical mass, that jaunt is now a raging, hurtling, snarled up, take-your-life-in-your-hands undertaking that can take hours.

Today it was not, and as I set out at 11:30 a.m., I was marveling at the breezy flow of the notoriously gridlocked 405 freeway, ditto for the 101. It was almost too nice, I felt like I was eight years old again, sitting in the backseat, never being stopped on the freeway, just zipping right along.

I do not think one should feel like an eight-year-old when they are forty-five and they are operating the vehicle. WAY too easy to daydream, and forget that it is Mid November 2007, and driving in Los Angeles is a vehicular was zone.

War. That is what smacked my face. It was Veteran’s Day, and the traffic was light. All sense of the day shaping up to be efficient and creative and good was gone in that moment. To think of the lost lives in the horrible, unnecessary war, the grieving families, to have this enormous sense of sadness and loss for people I never met and never will, stayed with me for the rest of the day.

All of the passions, all of the local and global events, all of my own personal creativity, personal angst – gone. Just left with a numbing sadness that we will call “De-Motivated”.

I think it is just fine to not be driving myself in any fashion, to not be thinking of myself at all, for once.

It is neither a day off or a day on, it is a day that does not belong to me – it belongs to those directly hurt by this administration’s ghastly choice to have young men and women die for their country, while the politicians rape and pillage both America and Iraq.

It is a day for the soldiers, a day for the innocent casualties, it is a day where I do not have a personal complaint or triumph about a goddamn thing.

There is no wishing it were different, there is no praying to be done, there is no one to pray to.

There is only silence today. Nothing I say can pierce what I do not know firsthand, and any tears shed are not for me.

The Writers Strike

By Kelly Mahan Jaramillo, Nov. 6th, 2007

First, let me say – I was going to continue the “Friendship” topic from the latest post of Partners on a Dime, but today is the first day of the Writers strike, and I would like to add my two cents along with everybody else.

If you are more interested in continuing the “Friendship” topic, hop over to Bobby D. the Crow, and we will carry on.

Back to the strike.

I am not a member of the WGA – I have a long-ago cartoon pilot script registered with them, but I am not a member, because, well, I have not attempted to wander down the path of scriptwriting, but I fully support the WGA. Just to be clear.

I have been a member of Local 700, for twenty years, back when it was Local 776, the Editors Guild. It used to be a fairly decent union, but they made some abysmal decisions in the past – decisions like not joining up with the Directors Guild when they had the chance, as editors and directors are joined at the hip in post-production, and later down the line decided to merge with the Sound Mixers Union – no, no, no, no.

It is too long to go into here, I am going to ask Marsha Sorce to weigh in and explain why it was such a bad decision, as I was on my way out of the business by then.

Local 700 also lost it’s heart and concern for it’s members when Field Rep Hank Schloss retired.

My Union’s latest and most heinous move is this e-mail sent to still working editors:

OPEN LETTER TO ALL IATSE MEMBERS AND LOCALS
ENGAGED IN MOTION PICTURE AND TELEVISION PRODUCTION.

FROM THOMAS C. SHORT, INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT

As you are aware, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is currently in negotiations for a successor contract to the current agreement that expires on October 31, 2007. While the IATSE remains hopeful that a new agreement can be reached between the WGA and the Employers, there is a potential for a work stoppage.

The IATSE has over 50,000 members in two countries engaged in motion picture and television production. Any work stoppage may have a profound and long-lasting impact on you and your families.

The IATSE contracts contain provisions that require us to continue to honor our contracts. These “no strike” provisions require the IATSE to notify our members of their obligation to honor these contracts and continue working. Any individual member who chooses to honor any picket line is subject to permanent replacement.

It is important for each IATSE member to be aware of their contractual obligation as well as the potential impact on them personally if they choose to not cross and are replaced. Contact your local union with any questions regarding this potential labor dispute.

323/876-4770 or 800/705-8700 – Los Angeles
212/302-0700 – New York
773/594-6598 – Chicago

To wrap it up, I am not a fan of my union anymore, have not worked a union job in over seven years, and am on “Honorary Withdrawal”.

However, I support Unions, and am always surprised when a friend of mine disagrees. But lively debate is always a good thing, so okay.

To sum it up, I am lifting part of an article by Brian K. Vaughn.

This strike, which will affect thousands of people, is due to the producers not wanting to give the writers FOUR MORE CENTS on the DVD issue.

Lately, I am have been mixing up the Bush Administration and their rampant greed with Hollywood producers, and their rampant greed.

I hope you read Mr. Vaughn’s whole article, and I hope that you support the writers. If you do not, I hope you will tell me why.

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Brian K Vaughan on the writer’s strike:
Brian K Vaughan, you may know him as the writer of Y The Last Man, Ex Machina, Runaways, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dr Strange, Ultimate X-Men, The Hood, and many other titles… And writer of the TV show Lost has a few words about the writer’s strike. Check it out, it’s pretty good, and very fair too.

***Why is the WGA striking?

Because writers believe we deserve a fair share of the revenue generated by the stuff we helped to create, crazy as that sounds.

There’s an excellent summary of what I consider to be our very reasonable demands at this blog, which has been a consistently dependable source of good information about the strike: http://www.unitedhollywood.com/

But basically, writers are looking to negotiate modest residuals and protections for use of our TV shows and movies on the internet, where most of us will likely be getting the majority of our entertainment from in the not-too-distant future.

We’re are also asking for a share of about 8 cents–that’s eight stinkin’ pennies–for every DVD of our work sold, as opposed to the criminally insane 4 cents we receive today.

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If folks think that pony-ing up four more cents for writers is going to put the producer on skid row, well…..I guess the producers might have to try writing for a living.

Please – everyone who writes a blog is writing – perhaps some of you would like to write for a livelihood someday. If so, it is vital that we support other writers. Writers are, for the most part, nice to each other. They form support groups, they critique fairly, if they have not become bitter and angry. What might make a writer bitter and angry? Being denied four extra pennies for their hard work.

Do you have a favorite television show that is not a reality show? You probably do. One of the major components in a good television show is the writing. Actors love good writing – it raises the bar for their work. It raises the bar for everyone to create something that can be called good, sometimes great.

Yes, the producers help, I am not going to say they are worthless, but they are not worth more than the writers, are they?

I could go on, but I will stop now.

If you waded through all of this, thank you – and again, all feedback is welcome, either pro or con.

The Day Of The Dead

By Kelly Mahan Jaramillo, Nov 2nd, 2007

As many people know, the day after Halloween is a Mexican celebration called “Day of the Dead.” Actually, it is a three day celebration, some say it starts on October 31, then November 1st is “All Saints Day”, and November 2nd is the official “Day of the Dead”. I am by no means an expert, but if you go to my web site Kelly Mahan Jaramillo I have put up a few links on the home page that are bursting with information.

Eileen Nelson, director of “American Dumpling”, the documentary Tomas is composing the music to, was very interested in this old Mexican tradition. Her producer, Darrell Hanzelik was also intrigued, and we wound up talking about it for quite some time today. Eileen is Jewish, and when I asked her if Jewish people had a ceremony or ritual of remembrance, she told me they lit a candle on the day the person died, every year. Some started it the night before. She and her mother Marie, who has a few scenes in “American Dumpling” (and she is a crack up, but not like you might think) had just done it for Eileen’s father, Sam Nelson, in October.

I am fascinated with all different cultures rituals, especially concerning the dead. Not from a morbid standpoint, but from comfort, and a celebration of their life, that they are not forgotten.

Eileen and Darrell, who is of Czechoslovak descent, and most likely Catholic, both decided they were going to learn more about “Day of the Dead”, and have a mixed Jewish and Catholic ceremony today and tomorrow.

Although I am Irish, we were not Catholic, nor Protestant. I do not even know if I was baptized! I have no one to ask, partly my choice, as the few living members of my family seem alien to me, and I am pretty sure they feel the same way. So, we do not stay in touch at all.
All I remember is my father, Bill, believing in “something” – not the good old wrathful judgmental God that so many in this country embrace. (Their choice, I have no problem with it, until the hate and intolerance reaches the breaking point.) However, he felt there was something bigger, and that is where I float around. I often refer to myself as a ‘lazy wiccan’.

Anyway, to wrap this up, the three of us, Eileen, Darrell, and I are having our own versions of remembering our loved ones, human and animal.

Eileen is remembering her father Sam, her cats Loretta, Liba, and Vaska, and Darrell’s deceased wife Jessy.

Darrell is remembering his cats Vaska and Liba, and his first wife Jessy.

I am remembering my second husband Abel Jaramillo, my father Bill, my cats Ratty and Monkey, and a long ago friend named Tracy Proctor.

It really did bring a sense of peace and closeness, and for the first time, no sadness, regret or guilt.

It was a very good day.