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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 3919720" data-attributes="member: 307">And on this, you are just flat wrong.It is not a concern for the writers. A writer is much like any other worker working for another. He puts in his input, but the entity producing the final overall product is the entity that has the responsibility to make the product profitable or not. Does GM ask the line workers at their factories to make sure their cars sell for a profit? No, they don't, and the line worker doesn't really care either. It is up to GM to make the cars turn a profit, and GM alone.They can, and do, make movies that cost far less than the "average" given. Hence, there is prima facie evidence that Hollywood producers could control costs if they truly wanted to. But they don't. Watching the production process of a Hollywood movie is often like watching a drunken sailor on payday. I don't have a lot of sympathy for hungover sailors with no money the next day.Cherry picking a single example doesn't make your case. The reality is that I ignored your anecdotal data because it is completely worthless.Now you are pretending I made an argument I didn't make. I said that if the studios wanted to, they could structure their costs to make a profit on just the theatrical release. No one said to compartmentalize the profits, because the profits don't really matter in this dispute. Only the revenues. You see, writers are a cost, not a partner in a profit sharing plan.You are wrong. The artist is a cost for you. And the cost is 4.5%. Not 50%. The artist doesn't care what your profit is, he cares what your revenue is. He wants a share of the total revenue, not your profit, because he has no control over how you control your other costs.This is very basic economics. Expected revenues grow - in this case, they grew because of the previously untapped market of DVD sales. Studios anticipate the increasde in revenues, and change their behaviour accordingly, greenlighting budgets based upon these expected increased revenues. Costs grow to meet the increased revenues, because studios decide that they can get away with paying the increased costs as a result. Costs generally increase to meet expected revenues, not the other way around. Studios could take a more conservative approach and not raise their costs as much, or to include the cost of writer residuals in those calculations. As of yet, they haven't.We have a hundred years of pre-DVD movie and television productions that somehow survived. Look at, for example, Hill Street Blues, now available on DVD. Is the revenue stream from that anything other than a huge windfall? Now, someone was able to make that show originally without anticipating the after market, and somehow make it profitable. Are you saying that modern production companies aren't as skilled at dealing with costs as they were circa the early 198os?That they understand enough to publicly state they anticipate billions in revenue from it. And tell that to their stockholders. And the loss (if there is a loss) is their own damn fault. I can't be any clearer on this. When your costs exceed the expected revenues from your product on a regular basis you are doing something wrong. When it is an industrywide phenomenon, your industry is behaving stupidly. Expecting the writers to pick of the slack for your stupid decisions is just idiotic.Your arguments still don't make sense because you have cause and effect backwards.</blockquote>

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