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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, March 21st, 2011 - 3 Comments »
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Support the Strike! Let Arianna Write Her Own Damn Content

All right, people. This is a call to action to support the writers who are striking against Arianna Huffington.

We need to unite against the business practices of Ms. “Let Them Eat Cake” Huffington and support the writer’s strike by boycotting all AOL/HuffPo content until and unless they negotiate a fair and equitable contract for the writers who have helped Ms. Huffington build her media empire. If you are not a striking writer, you can support them by NOT reading or linking to any AOL/HuffPo content for the duration of the strike.

If you are a writer who is still contributing to AOL/HuffPo — even if you are getting paid to do so — you are supporting Ms. Huffington. (Yes, my good friends who are Cinematical writers, I am looking at you, too. Sorry. And this includes editors writing for “free” instead of paying writers to write posts.)

As you may be aware, I’ve been writing a lot recently about the AOL/HuffPo merger, and about Arianna Huffington’s practice of building her media empire on the backs of legions of unpaid writers. This isn’t some state secret. The Queen Bee-yatch has been perfectly open about her contempt for the people who have been writing for her for free, helping her build HuffPo up into a site that she could talk AOL into paying $315 million for. Pretty smart, Arianna, I’ll give you that. Unethical, but smart.

Now the writers are striking back. Finally. Arianna thinks “no one will notice” if all her unpaid writers go on strike. It’s time to take Her Arrogance down a few notches, my friends.

By the bye, studio people: You are not helping, either. The writers who write about your movies need to pay the rent and keep food on their family tables just like you do. If you are paying AOL/HuffPo to run ads on sites that are using free content, you are contributing to the problem too. This means Moviefone, and Cinematical, because they are now a part of Arianna Huffington’s empire, like it or not — and whether those sites directly use free content or not.

***
Other folks on the strike:

Here’s the call to strike by the Newspapers Guild.

Bill Lasarow explains in a piece for the Guardian why Visual Art Source is encouraging their writers to strike and no longer give content to AOL/HuffPo.

Here’s an LA Times piece on the strike.

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3 Comments »

3 Responses to “Support the Strike! Let Arianna Write Her Own Damn Content”

  1. Jim says:
    March 21, 2011 at 5:21 pm

    It’s about time people recognized that writing is WORK. It’s a job. It’s supposed to pay the bills. I’m tired of people expecting free work from writers and other artists in exchange for “exposure.” No writer should ever work for “exposure.” It cheapens the entire industry.

    Here’s the thing about writing that nobody ever seems to understand: If you need your plumbing fixed, but you can’t afford to hire a plumber, you do it your damn self. If you have a leaky roof, but can’t afford a roofer…you do it your damn self. If you need something written, but can’t afford a writer, then you do it your damn self. Or go get stuffed.

    I have not visited Huffington Post since the strike, and I will not. One visitor in 26 million probably won’t make much of a difference, but I’m a stubborn bastard. (I still haven’t stepped foot in Safeway for the last 15 or so years–ever since they strangled a man to death for stealing a pack of cigarettes (which, incidentally, were never recovered so there was never any proof that the man stole them, just the word of a $6 an hour employee…and they never apologized.))

    Jim

  2. Robert Hamer says:
    March 22, 2011 at 10:06 am

    Refuse to support Arianna Huffington? Way ahead of you…

  3. Kim Voynar says:
    March 22, 2011 at 9:17 pm

    Robert, I rarely read HuffPo before. But now that Arianna is running content over at AOL, that changes the game completely. It’s no longer boycotting just HuffPo, it’s now including sites like Cinematical (those this pains me greatly), and Moviefone and TMZ (not so much) and every other site they own.

    And it’s a call to the other writers working for AOL who are, however inadvertently, supporting Arianna in her contempt for other people who are also writers. She’s shown, by her own actions and words, exactly what kind of person she is. She is now your leader and if you are taking a paycheck for working for her, you are contributing to the problem. Sorry, but you are.

    I know you need a paycheck. I know you have a family to support. I know you have a lot of reasons to value your job security over right vs wrong in this economy. But she will not hesitate to screw any of you over too, if the AOL higher ups decide that the job you do or you as a person are expendable.

    You are valued about as much as they can squeeze a few drops of sweat and blood out of you to benefit their multi-million dollar bonuses, and they underpay you while making you do more work to keep that job. And they will fuck you over in a heartbeat, kids, if they think it serves their interests. Believe it.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon