Craig Mazin, aka The Artful Writer, is getting pummeled on his on blog by Patrick Meighan, a Family Guy writer who thinks Mazin should walk off the set of the film he's directing. Writer-directors have two union contracts to honor, writer-producers only one.

Family Guy, incidently, is one of the few animated series with a WGA contract. Micah Wright's post on Writer Action explains in great detail what happened when Nichelodeon writers tried to go union:

I came to this guild having had a "successful" career writing Animation for $1400/week for five years. During that time, I wrote on several of Nickelodeon's highest-rated shows. My writing partner wrote and directed 1/4 of the episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants and I was responsible for 1/5 of the episodes of The Angry Beavers. The current value that those shows have generated for Viacom? $12 Billion dollars. My writing partner topped out at $2100/week. In the year 2001, tired of not receiving residuals for my endlessly- repeating work (even though the actors and composers for my episodes do), I joined with 28 other writers and we signed our WGA cards.

So, Nickelodeon quickly filed suit against our petition for an election, and set about trying to ferret out who the "ringleaders" were. In the meantime, they canceled the show that I had created 4 episodes into an order of 26. Then they fired the 3 writers who'd been working on my show. Then they fired 20 more of my fellow writers and shut down three more shows, kicking almost their entire primetime lineup for 2002 to the curb, and laying off 250 artists.

Then, once the WGA's petition for election was tied up in court over our illegal firings, Nickelodeon called in the IATSE Local 839 "Cartoonists Guild" — a racket union which exists only the screw the WGA and its own members — and they signed a deal which forever locks the WGA out of Nickelodeon, even though we were there first. Neato!
Then Nickelodeon's brass decided--out of thin fucking air-- that myself and two other writers had been "the ringleaders" of this organizing effort, so they called around to Warner Bros. Animation, the Cartoon Network, Disney Animation, and Fox Kids, effectively blacklisting the three of us out of animation permanently.

And why did Nickelodeon do this? Why were they so eager to decimate their own 2002 schedule, fire 24 writers, break multiple federal labor laws, sign a union deal, and to even bring back the fucking blacklist? They did all of that to prevent us from getting the same whopping $5 residual that the actors & composers of our shows get.

For five lousy fucking bucks, they destroyed three people's careers and put 250 artists out of work and fucked up their own channel for a year.

Ahh, but my episodes run about 400 times a year worldwide, though, so obviously Sumner Redstone (Salary in 2001: $65 million dollars) and Tom Freston (2001 salary: $55 million) were right to do what they did... myself and those other 23 writers might have broken the bank, what with each of us going to cost them another TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS each! OH NO! That... that's... FORTY EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS!A YEAR!

So don't come crying to those of us who have EXPERIENCED what the AMPTP plans for all of the rest of you, that people who are deciding to stand up to bully-boy tactics like that are the crazy bunch of "horads" lustily marching "through" the streets searching for blood. The AMPTP are the barbarians sacking Rome in this scenario.

The AMPTP and their glittering-eyed weasel lawyers are a bunch of lying, blacklisting, law-breaking scumbags, and the fact that they haven't budged off of ANY of their proposals in the last three months proves that what they have in store for EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU is exactly what they did to us at Nickelodeon, and what they can do any day of the week in daytime animation. Or reality.

Strike or no strike. That's their plan: to winnow down your membership, to snip away at your MBA, to chew away at your health & pension plans until there's just nothing left of the WGA. Why? Because they've had a good strong drink of how much money they make off of animation when they don't have to cut the creators in for any of the cash, and now they want to extend that free ride to all of live action as well. THAT is why they have pushed for this strike at every step, with their insulting press releases, with their refusals to negotiate, etc.--because they're HOPING we go on strike, and that enough cowards and Quislings come crawling out of the woodwork after six weeks that they can force us to accept the same deal that Reality TV show writers have.

If you doubt me, go read their contract proposals again... there's not ONE of them which isn't an insult and a deal-breaking non-starter.
So can we PLEASE stop hearing about how it's the current WGA management which is the fucking problem here? Because, frankly, that canard is getting a little stale.

Or perhaps you prefer presidents like the President of the Guild back in 2001 who just threw up her hands when we were fired and blacklisted out of our careers and said, and I quote, "oh well, it was a good try"?

• "KING CORN is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In the film, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how we farm."
  
  EVERYTHING on your plate is corn.
  
  
  
  
• "THE REAL DIRT ON FARMER JOHN is directed by Taggart Siegel, who made the film in a most unusual way – shooting farmer John Peterson over 25-years of their evolving friendship, and using multiple media, from Super8 home movies to modern video -- allowing him to capture his alternately humorous, heartbreaking and spirited life with raw drama and intimacy. Along the way, Siegel charts Farmer John’s astonishing journey from farm boy to counter-culture rebel to the son who almost lost the family farm to a beacon of today’s booming organic farming movement. The result is a tale that ebbs and flows with the fortunes of the soil and revealingly mirrors the changing American times."
  
  
  
  Attention, xtingu: Bee suits.
  
  
• Leo is a happy little pig on a happy, sunny farm with a red barn and lots of room. until Moopheus offers him the red pill, at which point Leo wakes up and sees what kind of industrial-scale, massively polluting, factory conditions he's been living under the illusion that is...
  -THE MEATRIX!
  -THE MEATRIX 2: REVOLTING. Moopheus, Chickitty, and Leo go inside the dairy industry.
  -THE MEATRIX 2½: Inside the processing facility
  
  
• Okay, that was the cartoon. Here's the real thing. Slaughterhouse: The Task of Blood. A British documentary about the men who work in a small, family-owned abattoir in Oldham. From herds of cute sheep, mooing cattle, and oinking pigs, to bloody corpse hanging from a chain being disassembled with knives, chainsaws, and hydraulic pincers, to meat, ready for packaging and purchase by you at your local butcher shop. This is where is comes from, this is who does it.
  
  
  
  SLAUGHTERHOUSE: THE TASK OF BLOOD 1 OF 4
  Uploaded by Top-Notch112
  
  
  [New Link]
  
  Very interesting to view the kosher and halal slaughtermen in comparison to their secular counterparts. And personally, if you eat meat regularly I think you have a borderline moral responsibility to take an hour and watch all four parts. Because a country that wants meat but doesn't want to know where it comes from ends up with THE MEATRIX.
  
  Because eating meat and not looking where it comes from squarely in the eye sweats hypocrisy.
  
  And because if abattoirs had glass walls, more people would be vegetarians*

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  * Altough if KING CORN is right, most of that meat is corn-fed anyway. But that doesn't count. Watch the slaughtermen do their job, or go buy yourself some fucking soyrizo.