WGA Strike: A frightening reality from a view of a 3rd World Country Creative

There’s this thing hanging over my head for almost a quarter of my life now. I’m currently 26 years old and a bit of a “late bloomer,” starting off a bit late into what I loosely called “creative media.”

Now generally, in the Philippines at least, when you are a kid telling your parents that “Mom, Dad, I want to be a painter / musician / writer / photographer” you’ll know what will be the answer. If some of you don’t have a clue, here are some of the responses of parents.

“That’s great honey, maybe if you graduated as an Engineer you can do that on your spare time.”

“Oh really?...are you sure?”

“That is also my dream son, but do you think we can afford all of this if I went on with it?”

“Wait until you entered the real world, get back to me if you still wanna do it”

…some of you guys, artist, probably will smile in agreement to these response while looking back at those times when you are so eager to tell your folks that someday, your doodles on your 2nd Grade notebooks will earn you money, a career, and ultimately respect just like all of those people are getting in their other line of work. But sadly the most common response you’ll probably get will be THERE’S NO MONEY IN IT.

WGA Strike (That’s Writer’s Guild of America) stuck a cord on me. Being in a 3rd world country, I’m frightened by the reality that most American writers are closer to be in extinction in the whole industry’s future. Now, it’s too long for me to explain here what exactly WGA is fighting for but in a nutshell; Major studios aren’t so keen to include their writers a fair share of the profit by incorporating new technologies that’ll effectively wipe out all residual benefits that the writer’s rightfully has.

So, what does an aspiring Filipino creative has to do with all of this? I can feel it everyday. For the most part, being called an artist is a “luxury” that means upfront, you can strut along the crowd with a tag hanging on your neck that says “I’m an artist,” yes you can get into parties speaking in art-jargon to people who are not too artistically inclined with them mystified and attracted to the air of your intelligence, but after the party is over, you get home frantically biting your nails thinking if one day your career
will be over.

That’s the thing that scares me. If you made art as a career, you basically are hanging by a thread. You are constantly forced to do an unfair compromise and let some of your most genius of ideas on the backburner so that you can still work on a studio to pay bills. Now, I’m not a militant person, always thinking that “It’s their entire fault.” But it seems to me that there’s always a cautionary tale when you tell people that you decided to make a career out of being an artist. Imagine a young person telling their parents that they want to be a Doctor, or an Engineer, their response is so much different.

It’s gut-wrenching imagining the futility of our situation. What WGA is doing right now is a reflection of why creative people are pushed aside even though we thought that, in American Entertainment Industry, all of these creative people are getting their fair due on what it seems a behemoth, Billion Dollar business. If this is happening in America right now, what can be said about the artist in such small industry like ours?

On some occasions while I’m brooding. I sometimes jest that none of this will be obvious to me if I don’t know how to draw. Even after the Da Vinci’s , the Michaelangelo’s, Geroge Lucas’ and even Steve Job’s contribution to our recorded history, we artist are still considered worthless and expendable.