nisidhe
Hank Scorpio
O Superman....O judge....O Mom and Dad....
Posts: 5,723
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Post by nisidhe on Apr 13, 2022 7:16:30 GMT -5
Let's consider the position - you're not credited for your work, you're not making boatloads of money doing it, and every week you're both stifled from giving your best work (despite your prior successful career as a TV writer) by the higher-ups _and_ what work you do runs a 95% of being either ripped up entirely or morphed into a monstrosity all on the whims of your single-person audience. Meanwhile, the bookers elsewhere are managing to get better angles and stories on their weekly TV shows and get praised for it regularly.
You're a tree being cut down every week and nobody acknowledges hearing it. The only sound you make comes from your boss's bragging to network executives about his Emmy-awarding winning creative team even though all those accolates came from outside your work with WWE.
What would happen if Vince had to pay his writers as much as he has to pay the on-screen talents for their work? Would he be more inclined to listen to them then?
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Post by Feyrhausen on Apr 13, 2022 7:23:50 GMT -5
Do they have successful careers as TV writers? Most of the ones I remember hearing about were not particularly successful.
You have the odd name like Prinze Jr. or Patrice O Neal who do it for the love of the business but they do not last.
I would imagine that they do it for the same reasons anyone takes a job. They get paid, they get benefits. And the ones that dont have to ride with Vince on the jet most likely get to have private lives and time off. Not sure how it compares to Hollywood writing careers but again if they were not successful there then its an alternative to waiting tables.
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Push R Truth
Patti Mayonnaise
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Posts: 39,292
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Post by Push R Truth on Apr 13, 2022 7:29:35 GMT -5
For similar reasons that anybody does any job. The pay/experience/lifestyle is worth the effort/pain.
I think the same thing every time I walk into a Walmart and I see a minimum wager getting yelled at by somebody in stained sweatpants over the price of a 30 pack of Busch Light.
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Dan Royal
AC Slater
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Posts: 212
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Post by Dan Royal on Apr 13, 2022 7:43:15 GMT -5
I don't know, I mean if the writers are making around 100K a year. You're basically being paid to travel the country/world, come up with a few ideas a week and hang out with a crazy old dude. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2022 8:14:27 GMT -5
Why bother because it is the easiest job in the world once you understand who you are writing for and all you have to do is write one thing and then just copy and paste it week after week.
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Post by This Player Hating Mothman on Apr 13, 2022 8:14:46 GMT -5
From the outside, yes, WWE looks like a raw deal. But it's worth considering the industry perspective. Steady writing work can be hell to come by. You take a chance on a TV show and you might end up canceled before the season is out and then you're looking for work again. WWE pays money and is a real show, and it is an institution as far as being consistently present online, which means it's a secure gig. Yes you'll suffer burnout and frustration and you'll probably leave feeling like crap because most writers seem to, but at that point you leave with a tenure working on a major, international TV show on your resume. Yes the show's writing is crap, but that's still experience on something big and most importantly, it's steady work. For a professional writer, that's the ideal.
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Post by The Dark Order Inferno on Apr 13, 2022 13:15:35 GMT -5
It is not an easy job and the people doing it are subjected to stresses that they wouldn't get in any other writing gig. They aren't sat on Vince's private jet, sipping martinis, they're working all flight, trying to write what Vince wants, knowing that he'll reject and demand it rewritten at the last minute. You're expected to write fir talent but forbidden from getting to know them and Vince is there all the while, stirring the pot for his own amusement, setting writer against writer because he can. It's soulcrushing, to the point where writers like Alex Greenfield quit while on his honeymoon because ten days without wrestling the whims of a nightmare boss reminded him of what a normal life could be like.
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Post by oxbaker on Apr 13, 2022 13:26:20 GMT -5
They call it work because they pay you for it.
If it was called fun, everybody would do it for free.
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Dub H
Crow T. Robot
Captain Pixel: the Game Master
I ❤ Aniki
Posts: 47,852
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Post by Dub H on Apr 13, 2022 13:37:11 GMT -5
They call it work because they pay you for it. If it was called fun, everybody would do it for free. Except if you are good at something ,you don't do it for free.
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Post by oxbaker on Apr 13, 2022 13:44:28 GMT -5
They call it work because they pay you for it. If it was called fun, everybody would do it for free. Except if you are good at something ,you don't do it for free. People do stuff they’re good at all the time for free: hunting, fishing, playing video games, baking … you name it.
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Dub H
Crow T. Robot
Captain Pixel: the Game Master
I ❤ Aniki
Posts: 47,852
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Post by Dub H on Apr 13, 2022 13:52:17 GMT -5
Except if you are good at something ,you don't do it for free. People do stuff they’re good at all the time for free: hunting, fishing, playing video games, baking … you name it. yeh,i`m showing how throwing generic vague statements dont make sense nor help a discussion . In the same logic,people have fun with thing they work at same time. WWE does seem like the bottom rung of writters job,unless you really need the money it sounds like hell
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Post by oxbaker on Apr 13, 2022 13:59:36 GMT -5
People do stuff they’re good at all the time for free: hunting, fishing, playing video games, baking … you name it. yeh,i`m showing how throwing generic vague statements dont make sense nor help a discussion . In the same logic,people have fun with thing they work at same time. WWE does seem like the bottom rung of writters job,unless you really need the money it sounds like hell I was making a point. The thread is basically ‘who the heck would want to work there, it doesn’t sound like fun.’ As I and other people have pointed out, it’s a job. They work for a paycheck. Probably very few people on this forum or elsewhere haven’t at some point in their lives taken work or gotten a job that wasn’t fun because they wanted to eat and be able to pay rent. It may be hell for some. For others, probably not. I don’t think people who have been writers there for an extended period and not left are doing shoot interviews about how fun their job is so you only get the other side. It’s not like in other TV/movie writing you turn something in and if the boss (head writer, producer, even the actors) don’t like it they just say ‘well you’re a writer and we value you, so even though this doesn’t really fit the direction of the show we’re going to do it anyway.’ Is it stressful? Probably so. Weekly television with multiple shows going year-round is of course going to be stressful.
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Chainsaw
T
A very BAD man.
It is what it is
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Post by Chainsaw on Apr 13, 2022 14:12:31 GMT -5
Pretty sure this is just a resume builder for most of the writers.
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Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
FANatic
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Apr 13, 2022 14:14:50 GMT -5
I will say it must be an absolute f***ing journey to keep writing scripts just to see them get torn up and rewritten AS THE SHOW IS HAPPENING
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Post by oxbaker on Apr 13, 2022 14:38:27 GMT -5
I will say it must be an absolute f***ing journey to keep writing scripts just to see them get torn up and rewritten AS THE SHOW IS HAPPENING Read about the creative process for SNL, which is once a week 90 minutes (probably about 45 minutes of material considering two musical guest spots and a monologue and commercials) three weekends a month (that may have changed but that’s what it used to be) — they would work all week on a skit and scrap it after rehearsal day of show and have to come up with something else. I’d imagine it’s not terribly different in other live scripted arenas like soap operas … and those are daily. Heck, even weekly 30-minute sitcoms — 22 episodes a year — go through mad rewrites on day-of-filming. Not to mention some of the most famous movies of all time they often don’t have pages/scenes until the night before as they constantly rewrite. Jaws and Apocalypse Now are two masterpieces that were basically written on the fly.
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Zone Was Wrong
Bill S. Preston, Esq.
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Post by Zone Was Wrong on Apr 13, 2022 14:51:55 GMT -5
I will say it must be an absolute f***ing journey to keep writing scripts just to see them get torn up and rewritten AS THE SHOW IS HAPPENING Read about the creative process for SNL, which is once a week 90 minutes (probably about 45 minutes of material considering two musical guest spots and a monologue and commercials) three weekends a month (that may have changed but that’s what it used to be) — they would work all week on a skit and scrap it after rehearsal day of show and have to come up with something else. I’d imagine it’s not terribly different in other live scripted arenas like soap operas … and those are daily. Heck, even weekly 30-minute sitcoms — 22 episodes a year — go through mad rewrites on day-of-filming. Not to mention some of the most famous movies of all time they often don’t have pages/scenes until the night before as they constantly rewrite. Jaws and Apocalypse Now are two masterpieces that were basically written on the fly. Those examples are massive exceptions to the rules. Even movies where you'd think are ab libbed a ton are usually scripted out meticulously. Most writing gigs go through rewrites but it's not usually the day of filming.
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Post by oxbaker on Apr 13, 2022 15:13:44 GMT -5
Read about the creative process for SNL, which is once a week 90 minutes (probably about 45 minutes of material considering two musical guest spots and a monologue and commercials) three weekends a month (that may have changed but that’s what it used to be) — they would work all week on a skit and scrap it after rehearsal day of show and have to come up with something else. I’d imagine it’s not terribly different in other live scripted arenas like soap operas … and those are daily. Heck, even weekly 30-minute sitcoms — 22 episodes a year — go through mad rewrites on day-of-filming. Not to mention some of the most famous movies of all time they often don’t have pages/scenes until the night before as they constantly rewrite. Jaws and Apocalypse Now are two masterpieces that were basically written on the fly. Those examples are massive exceptions to the rules. Even movies where you'd think are ab libbed a ton are usually scripted out meticulously. Most writing gigs go through rewrites but it's not usually the day of filming. It does happen. And sometimes the results are marvelous, sometimes not. But SNL regularly rewrites scripts all the way up to air time and has for decades from accounts of people who have been inside the rooms, and they’re producing a minuscule amount of content compared to what WWE does on a weekly basis year-round. And I don’t think every single WWE show has every minute rewritten in the hours leading up to air time or during the show. You hear about it from time to time but it’s not like that’s the workflow every single week on every single segment of every single show. If I’m a writer, they’re paying me to write. And writing is the art of rewriting what you’ve already rewritten (quote from Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright who is considered one of the greatest writers in history.) Does that mean the environment is filled with pressure? Yes, it does. But, as noted, writers can also spend literally years developing a show and writing scripts for a first season and have the pilot not picked up, or canceled after a few weeks — something unlikely to happen in WWE. In general, all professional writing is a pressure job — newspaper and website writers and TV writers and movie writers and novelists all have deadlines to meet and all struggle with them at times. But let’s not make it out like this is the worst job in the world. Go work construction or roofing or a lot of other physical jobs and see if you wouldn’t trade.
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Post by Jacy Derangement Syndrome on Apr 13, 2022 15:23:00 GMT -5
That job would make me evil as hell. You wanna yell at me cause I wrote you too many words to say? Have more f***ing words. Have a helmet. Have glasses. Get out of my office.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Apr 13, 2022 15:23:38 GMT -5
It sounds like a dreadful job to be honest.
Look at the stuff that's been declined and then compare it to the shit we see every week that somehow gets approved... Like Priest and his purple light and most of the Alexa Bliss stuff for example.
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Post by This Player Hating Mothman on Apr 13, 2022 15:35:40 GMT -5
I think SNL is actually decently comparable to WWE's weekly output when you factor in how much downtime in a wrestling show doesn't need a script, versus an episode of SNL where outside of the musical guest everything is pure content.
As a professional writer though, I can say that working for WWE seems especially thankless and miserable. It's work. It's a gig. But it's very clear that the rewrite process in WWE leads to stuff being scrapped in a way that absolutely genericizes the whole thing. When I'm panic writing another draft to polish stuff up before a deadline, I feel fairly confident that what I'm writing is actually going to make it. I'm making revisions and following notes from an editor, sure, but I'm never afraid someone is going to rip up everything I did ten minutes before it's meant to go online. Maybe you aren't developing scripts for episodes that don't ever get produced, but instead you're dealing with stories that get the plug pulled on them at the last minute, or have Vince change his mind about a story and immediately render everything you just did pointless right before the point of no return. You can be the one taking point on a story line Mandy and Otis that's getting tons of positive reception and could do big things for them and watching as it all gets torn away in the months to come and none of it matters in the end.
So like, it's a job. But it's also a job that has a lot of unconventional elements to it and which I wouldn't say really follows 1:1 with a lot of the usual occupational expectations and structures. It's a place where professional pride and a care for the stuff you make seems like an absolute loser trap.
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