The Salamander

In the first two parts of this long tirade against the folly of writing for a living, I have shown you why you, my dear aspiring writer, should think twice about turning your hobby into a job. Maybe I’m just nasty that way and relish the act of dashing people’s hopes and dreams into the hard, barren bedrock of my bitterness and disillusion about my own career as a wordslinger. Or maybe I’m trying to increase my odds at making it in this business by killing the competition through propaganda. Whatever my motive, you will agree that the logic behind my argument is entirely sound. In a country as poor as ours, your fiction and poetry won’t sell jack shit. Selling out by writing for magazines and by churning out horrible romance novellas won’t earn you enough to feed your nicotine addiction, which you’ll inevitably develop because cigarettes deaden the pang of hunger. TV, on the other hand, may be your ticket. Not to fame and fortune through your art as you once dreamt it would be, but to a decent living as a writer at least. The only problem is that shows last only for a couple of months on the average and that period of time in between shows will murder you.

By this time, other people would have taken it into their pointy little heads and would have gone on to do something else. Like find a real job. You, on the other hand, are still here reading this. Because you’re a fucking artist, by Jove. To my ‘never’ you’ll say ‘nevertheless’ and to my logic you’ll rage, haggle, beg, and parlay for an alternative. You ask: what about movies? Surely, film scripts are worth much more than TV scripts. Film is a chance to be recognized and to get rich, motherfucker. Oh yeah, sixteen-year-old groupies, here I come.

I say yes. And no.

When discussing your potential career as a screenwriter, we must look at the sad state of the Philippine movie industry. It is a beast once mighty but now felled by piracy. Yes, you had a hand in it. You may rationalize that art is for everybody and piracy just evens out the opportunity for all to see movies; that now even the poorest of the poor has the means to watch Great Films. No, man, the poor don’t watch Great Films. They watch Pinoy mainstream flicks, which have been formulated for them, and which employs workers no better than wage-earners. When we think about movies, we all have the highly-paid stars and directors and producers in mind. A few thousand pesos in loss won’t hurt these people, right? What about the lightmen, then? What about the script supervisors and the gaffers and the grips and the utility guys? And yes, what about the scriptwriters? These are the people most hurt by piracy, not the big-earners. Stars and producers and big-shot directors have TV jobs that you can’t hurt. Not unless you’re a psychic with the uncanny ability to burn on VCDs TV episodes that have not been taped yet.

Wait, you say. I don’t buy pirated Pinoy movies. I buy pirated Great Films! Yeah, well, your demand for pirated foreign movies also serve the impetus for developing piracy technology. The bottomline, dear aspiring writer, is that you’re screwing yourself.

I will not deny it, though. There is big money in screenplays if you can get into that racket. Chances are you won’t. But let’s say you’re lucky enough. Your first shot would probably be in indie movies. Indie, you groan, there’s no money in indie! I say yes, there is.

When I say indie, I don’t mean those awful movies by college students. That is the real indie movement in this country, by the way, but there’s no future in that. Any dumb fuck with a Sony Digital Handycam can make a ninety-minute feature on suckage. The indie I’m talking about are movies produced by companies other than Star Cinema, GMA Films, Regal, Viva, and their ilk. The money comes from the pockets of TV stars who want to go into directing (and some of them are pretty good), politicians trying to be visible for the coming election (thus, from our own pockets as well, har-dee-har to you, motherfucker), etc.  They pay relatively well. These producers expect to profit from their endeavors so the product has that mainstream flavor mixed in with the artsy-fartsy. It’s a great way to make movies, I must add. This is the real Pinoy movie industry now, and I’m hopeful that this will improve the quality of our movies and TV shows. New blood, new styles, new ways of making commercial movies. And, as I said earlier, there’s money in it for the screenwriter if he can get into that racket. But that’s the hard part.

Let me explain:

Indie movies are made by groups. They’re more like Satanic covens, usually helmed by their Head Priest, the director. With the director there’s the writer, the technical producer, the production designer, etc. Most times the indie group is just a handful of people, maybe even two: the director and the writer. Always, there’s the director and the writer. The writer’s the guy who writes the proposals for potential producers, concepts, storylines, letters, and such. Writers are indispensable this way. That seems to make your chance of getting a writing gig even higher, right? No. Because like directors, there’s only one writer per coven. Being a ronin writer is like being a vocalist without a band. And a writer who does have a group is very protective of his position. I, for one, would murder you the moment I suspect you’re trying to usurp me in my group.

Let us suppose you do find a group and get a gig. The newbie screenwriter gets fifty to eighty thousand pesos. Not exactly chump change, no, but no one makes his bread by movies alone. You don’t get a movie gig every month, my friend. If you’re really lucky you’ll make three a year. People are very rarely that lucky. You should look at screenwriting like you look at virgins: it’s great when it appears on your lap but don’t hold your breath waiting for one. If you want to be a screenwriter, you must supplement the dearth of movie gigs with a TV show, which, we have seen in the previous article, isn’t very profitable in the long run.

And there’s also the issue of respect, which makes this series a four-parter instead of the three-parter I had planned.

PREVIOUSLY
Writing for a Living Sucks Part I: Print
Writing for a Living Sucks Part II: Television

NEXT
Writing for a Living Sucks Part IV: Respect