Little Miss Muffintop

Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica):

“At Battlestar, we had a very specific situation last year, dealing with webisodes, which opened my eyes to the problems. When we were approached to do Galactica webisodes, the studio’s position was they didn’t want to pay anyone to do it—they considered it promotional material. They weren’t going to pay any of the writers or the actors or the directors to do it, which we thought was crazy. We refused to do it, and eventually came to an accommodation where they said they would pay us, but then when we were almost done, they decided they weren’t going to credit anybody. They weren’t going to acknowledge anybody who wrote it. And then I refused to deliver the webisodes, and they came and took them anyway, which is their right since they own the show…but it really made me aware of these issues. I mean, my staff writer, who is the lowest man on the totem pole, they want him to do all this work for another media, not pay him for it, and then make money off of his work. Ultimately, that’s why we’re here, because that’s just wrong.”

If I could, I’d totally send him cookies in support cause, yeah, I don’t like pizza and I like to oppress others with my likes and dislikes.

Today’s moment of wtfery:

Former Disney chief Michael Eisner has called the current Writers Guild of America strike “stupid” and “misguided.” In an interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto at a media conference in New York on Wednesday, Eisner maintained that the writers, by demanding a residual plan for movies and TV shows downloaded from the Internet, are asking for a piece of “nonexistent” revenue. He predicted that revenue from digital media will remain “nonexistent for the next three years” and that the WGA was jumping the gun. “For a writer to give up today’s money for a nonexistent piece of the future — they should [strike] in three years, shouldn’t be doing it now — they are misguided.” Asked why, if the studios aren’t making money on digital distribution, they simply don’t give in to the writers’ demands since a bigger piece of nothing is still nothing, Eisner responded: “They don’t know what to give. … Digital will eventually be the dominant medium for distribution but not yet.” Eisner also suggested that the studios were partially to blame for the current situation since “they’ve been talking about how great [the Internet] business is, and now they have to open their books and explain that there’s no business.”