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Writers Wage Reality TV War
The Bachelor and its ilk are cads.
So goes a class-action lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles by 12 writers for reality TV shows such as The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and The Real Gilligan's Island.
The complaint charges that reality TV factories violated a host of California labor laws by overworking, underpaying and even underfeeding the workers who scripted their ostensibly unscripted fare by building storylines from hours and hours of raw footage.
All of the TV shows mentioned in the lawsuit, including the canceled Are You Hot?, The Will, The Starlet and the never-aired The Two Timer, are the brainchildren of producer Mike Fleiss. Fleiss' Next Entertainment was named as a defendant, along with three other production companies, and ABC, CBS, the WB and TBS.
The lawsuit was filed with the help and muscle of the Writers Guild of America, West. The guild is attempting to unionize the ranks of reality TV writers, few of whom, if any, are credited on their shows as writers, and are more typically identified as story editors, segment producers and the like. According to the WGA, about 1,000 such invisible scribes have requested membership.
"It's outrageous to me that people who do the exact kind of work I do don't get health insurance," screenwriter Daniel Petrie Jr., president of the WGA, West, said in a phone interview. "This is the kind of basic protection we're hoping to bring to these storytellers."
While declining direct comment on the lawsuit, ABC said it believed it was "in compliance with all applicable laws."
Begging to differ, the WGA released pay stubs and a deal memo used on shows such as The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. The writers' and union's gripes perhaps best can be summed up by the pay stub for the unidentified assistant story editor who received $800 for a week's work on the ABC show in December 2003. The union charges that the $800 was a flat rate, with no benefits, no matter how many hours the de facto writer worked, in this case 84. To meet overtime and double-time requirements, the union says, the writer's employers crunched the numbers and came up with an hourly rate--$7.41, or 66 cents greater than California's minimum wage--that would add up to the predetermined $800.
Of the $7.41 an hour wage, Anthony R. Segall, an attorney representing the writers in the class-action lawsuit, said Thursday, "You'd never be able to get anybody for that."
The WGA has been focused on securing an agreement with reality TV producers for the past year. Talk of a lawsuit began to heat up last month--as did counter charges that reality TV writers were unduly grousing.
"A lot of people in this country would love to have the work these people are doing," J. Nicholas Counter, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, told the New York Times.
The WGA wouldn't necessarily disagree--except over how the reality TV writers are being compensated for that work. "People do work long hours [in Hollywood]," Petrie said. "I've had calls on Christmas Day from a producer pausing halfway down the slopes to see how my second act's going...But I get health insurance."
The lawsuit specifically accuses the networks and production companies of failing to pay overtime and wages, failing to provide itemized wage statements, failing to keep proper pay records and denying writers meal periods. It seeks the allegedly unpaid wages and overtime, as well as unspecified damages.
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