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[0:01] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome back to Season 6 of the Dramatists Guild Presents TALKBACK, sponsored by the Dramatists Guild Foundation. This season's theme has been reinvention, which has included reinventing our relationship with financial literacy as writers. We've had so many conversations this season about how writers get paid, or not. So, in this bonus episode, I'm talking to the Guild's Executive Director of Business Affairs, Ralph Sevush, to clarify some questions that have come up and to hear him give his expert perspective. Ralph has been at the Guild for 28 years and has been so instrumental in initiating and carrying through so much of the vital work the Guild has been doing. Here we go. Thank you so much for joining us for Episode 7, the wrap-up where we're going to ask you all the questions that came up in Episodes 1 through 6. This is Ralph Sevush, Executive Director of Business Affairs for 28 years. Thank you for your service.

[1:02] Ralph Sevush: Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to answer some questions, if we can help writers know more and empower them to know more. That's what we're doing.

[1:25] Christine Toy Johnson: So, this season has been all about reinvention in various forms. It's an intentionally broad topic. And part of that reinvention is reinventing our relationship as writers and as business leaders. Part of that reinvention is reinventing our relationship as writers with financial literacy. So many questions have come up from so many different people about how people get paid, how people don't get paid. And I wanted to start with asking you for some context about the Guild and where we started, where we're going, where we've been, whatever you would like to start with.

[2:05] Ralph Sevush: Sure. The story starts about 110 years ago. It was the Progressive Era. Unions were forming. Equity had just formed. Writers in the theater generally had to do something else, like writer-actor or writer-producer-actor, director, in order to get paid because there was no copyright in performance. That started right at the turn of the century, where a performance, you needed to license the rights to it. Before that, the copyright only attached to the book, the publication.

[2:45] Christine Toy Johnson: Oh.

[2:46] Ralph Sevush: So, once there was a right to license performances, then there could be a royalty stream, and people could create works that would generate revenue.

[2:57] Christine Toy Johnson: So wait, let me just make sure I'm understanding that. So if you have written a play and it exists on paper, you could copyright that.

[3:07] Ralph Sevush: Yes.

[3:08] Christine Toy Johnson: But there wasn't, for example, when it was being performed, the copyright just disappeared?

[3:11] Ralph Sevush: No.

[3:13] Christine Toy Johnson: It just didn't exist?

[3:15] Ralph Sevush: It didn't exist. You know, copyright is not one thing. It's a bundle of different rights, and that right wasn't in the bundle at that time.

[3:23] Christine Toy Johnson: Interesting. I never knew that.

[3:25] Ralph Sevush: So when that got to be part of the bundle, then it became something a writer could license and get royalties for. So the professional playwright really comes about at the turn of the last century when royalties could be had for more than the book, the publication itself. So then you get to a place where the producers of the time, the Schuberts and others, simply bought the play, and the author received nothing more than the purchase. Or if they paid a royalty, the authors had no ownership or control. It wasn't a good situation for playwrights at that time.

[4:04] Christine Toy Johnson: Even with the royalty stream, the producing community was not that interested in allowing writers to make a living from the work.

[4:12] Ralph Sevush: So was it more similar to the way film and television writers work for hire in those days?

[4:20] Ralph Sevush: Not work for hire exactly, but it might as well have been. Starting in 1912 or so, an organization called the Authors League was born, and that was comprised of different kinds of writers. Writers of novels, writers of the burgeoning new industry of film, writers of plays, and they had common interests. They didn't want to be unrepresented in this world where now people were being represented. And it took them about 14 years to get to the place where they had a contract that they could put in front of producers and say, this is the way we're going to do business from now on.

[5:04] Ralph Sevush: So from the Authors League came the Authors Guild, which represented the novelists, and the Dramatists Guild, which represented the playwrights. So you get people like Eugene O'Neill and others at the early 20s negotiating, trying to get to a place where there's a contract that's enforceable. Initially, the producers said, we're not interested in your contract. And the authors said, well, we're not licensing you our plays. And producers went across the pond to try and get British writers to get their plays. And so they went to people like Noel Coward and George Bernard Shaw, and Shaw famously said, I'd love to license you my play. Dear boy. But it has to be on a Dramatists Guild contract. So our British cousins stood fast, and the producers eventually agreed.

[6:02] Ralph Sevush: So 1926 is the birth of the first Guild contract, where next year is the 100th anniversary of that. From that point forward, every five years or so, the Guild and the Broadway League, the Shuberts, would sit down and revise the contract, tweak it based on new circumstances, new developments. That was up until the 1940s, mid-40s, at which time they sued us. Instead of negotiating with us, they thought it might be better to just sue us, claiming that we were in violation of antitrust laws. We were not a labor union, we were acting as a labor union, but because we weren't, we were in violation of antitrust laws. We were owners of property who were fixing prices, essentially. That lawsuit, Ring v. Spino, dragged on for like a decade.

And the ending was ambiguous. The producer, who was actually the plaintiff, got like a dollar. Just symbolic. There was no final determination whether or not it was an antitrust violation. But it did put into doubt our ability to act collectively. That started sort of creating the shadow over playwrights, where collective bargaining made us vulnerable to antitrust suits, not just from other producers, but from the government. So we had to take a more circumspect approach to the contracts that we were promulgating.

[7:32] Ralph Sevush: Even after that, though, the producers continued to sit down and renegotiate every five years up through until the 70s. New York in the 1970s, I don't know if you were here during that time, it was not good. It was a harsh economic environment for theater and for everybody. A lot of theaters were empty. So producers, you know, when the money gets tight, everybody gets angry and looking to point fingers. And so, you know, they once again tried to sue us. That lawsuit ended up in the mid-'80s in a settlement. And that settlement is the Broadway contract we now have. It's called the Approved Production Contract, the APC. And as I said, that was a contract that was a settlement of a lawsuit. The Guild, the League of Broadway Theaters, has refused to renegotiate it since then.

[8:31] Christine Toy Johnson: Since the 80s, yeah.

[8:32] Ralph Sevush: Since the mid-'80s. What's happened as a result is, you know, the industry grows and changes whether or not they keep up with the contract. So the League has imposed on all of its members, all of its producing members, the obligation to essentially renegotiate the contract from scratch on every show that comes to Broadway.

[8:56] Christine Toy Johnson: So it's on an individual basis.

[8:58] Ralph Sevush: Yeah. And those contracts come to us. We review them to see if the modifications they made to the contract are fair and equitable and consistent with the terms of the original agreement. And if there were special circumstances to allow changes, then we considered those. But there was a certification process and still is. And if we don't certify it, the contract terminates. Now, the writer is free to keep the contract in effect, but then they have to leave the Guild. So the obligation is on our members, not on the producers. So that's why we have much less exposure to antitrust claims because it's an individual choice. Nobody has to be a member of the Guild to be produced on Broadway.

[9:42] Christine Toy Johnson: Right.

[9:43] Ralph Sevush: But if you want to be a member of the Guild, under our bylaws, you need to use our contract. Under that contract, the basic elements of an author's compensation and their rights hasn't really changed all that much. The author retains ownership of their writing. Nobody can change it without their approval. They have approval over the casting and designers and director, and they retain certain production rights, film rights, foreign licensing, stock and amateur, publishing. There's a bunch of rights the author retains. After they've licensed the production rights to that producer, when that producer's done with it, those rights, too, revert back to the author. And so now the deal that was made in the 26th contract and is still made is the producer needs something to raise money with.

They used to have a copyright. They don't have a copyright anymore. What they have is potential profits from the production as well as an ongoing participation in the author's future revenues. These are called subsidiary rights revenues. They are revenues that are generated by the author's use of his play afterwards, what comes after. It's not an unlimited amount, and it's not forever, and it's not from everything. So it's pretty important to keep an eye on that.

[11:11] Ralph Sevush: And those are typically negotiated on an individual basis, too.

[11:16] Christine Toy Johnson: There's not a standardized...

[11:18] Ralph Sevush: Yeah, on the Broadway contract, there is a standardized. There are like four options that the producers can choose from. And so they pick one. So in that regard, it's standardized. If you're talking about off-Broadway or in regional nonprofits, it's the Wild West. There is still a range of common requests from the producers, even in that area. It's not fixed by any particular contract that we have. We've been talking about how the APC really is sort of the flagship contract in that it's the one contract that we do administer and how those standards trickle down, really, to other contracts. You've said a lot, and I just want to ask a follow-up question that I think comes from all of this information about why people, and people ask this of us all the time, why we're not a union.

And, of course, the word guild can be misleading because there's the Writers Guild and there's the Screen Actors Guild, and so other guilds are unions. But I wonder if you can speak more about that. And I know it has to do with collective bargaining and antitrust laws and all of that, but you probably can say it much better than I can.

[12:46] Ralph Sevush: Well, it goes back to that first lawsuit. Up until that time, we were acting as if we were a union. We didn't know we weren't. One of the things that that case said was writers are not employees. They are not labor. They are owners of property who are licensing their property, like a landlord or like any other business, and they're all in competition with each other, so they can't get together and fix prices or the terms for licensing. So why that has hit us as dramatists, but directors and choreographers and designers are all represented by labor unions. And they also own their copyright to certain things. I know we talked about set designs and costume designs, right?

[13:36] Christine Toy Johnson: Right.

[13:37] Ralph Sevush: To the extent that designs are copyrightable, their contract with the producers allows them to retain the copyright. Similarly with the union for the directors and choreographers, choreography in the Copyright Act is specifically defined as copyrightable. Direction is not. So the choreographer, again, retains their ownership. How come they can do that and we can't?

[14:01] Ralph Sevush: Bad case law. Bad case law. There was a case later in the 70s, I think. I think it was USA. It was a scenic design.

[14:10] Ralph Sevush: It actually referenced the directors. Unlike writers, directors can be seen as employees for the purpose of labor law. So, there was this notion that writers go off to their garret, and they create this work, and they hand it down from on high, and then it is performed by a bunch of people over there, say every word that was written, and they send checks. That was the court's understanding of how dramatists work. It wasn't true then. It is so much less true now. But we've been living under the shadow of that case, and the ambiguity that that case created about who we are and what we can be. So, if we start acting collectively, collective bargaining or setting prices, we run the risk of another lawsuit, whereas those other skills have been allowed to unionize.

[15:09] Ralph Sevush: Yeah, it's also confusing because there are minimums for every...

[15:17] Ralph Sevush: Body of...

[15:18] Ralph Sevush: Yeah, and we do have minimums in the APC, but they're also... Brandon was talking about how there is a reduced minimum, which is actually not even a thing.

[15:31] Ralph Sevush: Well, it's oxymoronic. It's very moronic, but it's also oxymoronic. Now, when producers ask you to waive your minimums, it undermines the very notion of what's a minimum. If you can waive it, it's not a minimum.

[15:47] Christine Toy Johnson: That is very confusing. Wow. We could probably do a whole season on all of that.

[15:53] Ralph Sevush: So, the contract provides for compensation to the author that includes money up front. Not as much money up front as a screenwriter would get. Screenwriters get a fee, and it's a significant fee because they know they're not going to get anything more because Hollywood has defined net profits out of existence. They don't get what we call something on the back end.

[16:19] Ralph Sevush: Right. They're supposed to get something on the back end, but it's not real. Where in the theater, very rarely is a show actually profitable, but when it is, they pay royalties on it.

[16:30] Ralph Sevush: So, writers get paid when a show runs. They get a little bit of money up front as an option. The producer gets an exclusive right to try and produce the material for a period of time. It could be a year. It could be two years. It could be three years. It could be periods that are extended for additional payments. More time for more money.

[16:54] Ralph Sevush: Then, if the show does raise the money to get produced and it goes into rehearsals, then an additional pile of money gets paid, which is called the advance. The option is an advance, too. The advance is an advance. What are the advances against? They're advances against the royalties they'll pay you later. So, the producer's going to get all that money back out of your royalties. So, they're not paying you really anything until the show ... They're taking the risk that the show may not run, so you'll at least have something to show for your years and years of work.

[17:33] Ralph Sevush: If you actually amortized out what a writer gets, let's use the APC. If you are one of the three writers on a musical, you wrote the book. Well, first of all, you took all the blame if the show fails.

[17:47] Christine Toy Johnson: Yes, I know that as a librettist, yes.

[17:49] Ralph Sevush: So, that's the first thing. And you don't have any music publishing rights, so you're pretty much screwed from the outset.

[17:58] Ralph Sevush: Let's look at the compensation to the librettist. You've got one-third of the option, which is $18,000, which is a number that was negotiated in 1985. Typically, we see more than that now, but I still see deals that have $18,000. So, the librettist gets $6,000, one-third of that, right? Then the show gets into production, and they capitalize, and they start rehearsals, so the authors will receive another $60,000. The librettist gets a third of that, $20,000. So now, by opening night, the librettist, who may have spent five years getting the show to this point without anybody paying them anything, has earned $26,000. If you amortize that over the years, they'd have done much better flipping burgers at McDonald's.

[18:52] Ralph Sevush: So, the author makes their money when the show runs. Used to be, you got a percentage of the box office receipts. It's very easy to figure out. You made $100,000 at the box office. Authors get 5% of it, $5,000. Now, they've created other sort of mechanisms to reduce the amount of money that not just the author gets, but everybody who gets royalties on a show, the director, the designers, sometimes actors, sometimes developmental theaters, underlying rights owners, and the producers themselves are in the royalty pool. So, they all get squished when the producer says they're going to pay not on gross box office receipts, but on weekly net operating profits. And then, whenever you go from the gross to the net, it's not good, because as James Goldman said, there is no net.

[20:03] Ralph Sevush: That's true in Hollywood, but in theater, there can still be a weekly profit. How much does a show cost to run? Let's say it costs a million. The show makes $1.5 million that week. That's $500,000 of profit. So, the royalty participants will get probably 35% to 40% of that, and the investors get the other 60% to 65% of that. Then, when the show recoups all of the expenses, the royalty holders get a little bit more, a little bump. If there were still weekly profits, it's theoretically possible for you to do better in a royalty pool. For example, if the author is getting 15% of the weekly net operating profits versus 5% on gross, if the show's really, really profitable, they could actually make more with the 15% than they would with the 5%.

So, there was a trade-off. There was an acceptance that, okay, producers, we'll allow you to protect yourself on the downside, because you're going to compensate us more on the upside. What did they do? They capped the amount you could make in the pool, so it's not much more than you can make on gross. So, now there's only downside.

[21:28] Ralph Sevush: So, that's the first thing they did after they moved from gross to net. The thing about being on net is the producer decides what the expenses are. You're now on their books. You're subject to their bookkeeping. Guess what? There are no generally accepted accounting principles that are applied to the theater industry. General management offices do whatever they want. They take whatever expenses they want. You know, there's something called the cash office charge. It's a weekly operating expense. What is it? It's a piece of money that comes in, goes to the producer to pay their overhead, their office expenses. If they have multiple shows, they're getting that for multiple, so they're, you know, getting triple their overhead, you know, if they have three shows running.

But nobody's paying your overhead. You know, they're a business. Their overhead should come from their profits. But no, cash office charge. Sometimes they'll take an executive producer fee. Why? Because they want to pay themselves a fee for doing the work that they're getting a royalty for and getting profits for. The way they justify that is the producers have given up a lot of their share of royalties to the investors just to raise the money. Money is getting more expensive. As theater becomes riskier, as money becomes scarcer, it becomes more expensive. And so the actual managing producers, the producers who are actually producing the show, not just investors, the lead producers, make very little because they've given up so much of it to their investors.

So in order to offset that, in addition to their cash office charge and in addition to their minimum weekly guarantee, they get an executive producer fee. Plus, as I said, they get a minimum weekly guarantee in the royalty pool from the net profits.

[23:23] Ralph Sevush: Everybody in the pool gets a minimum weekly guarantee. So let's say the authors are getting $6,000 a week. Again, this is a number that's been used for like decades. That underpaid librettist is now getting $2,000 a week if the show is not a hit. If it is a hit, they'll get more than $2,000 a week if their share of weekly profits exceeds that amount, theoretically.

[23:59] Christine Toy Johnson: Yeah. So what have they done now? Amortization. Yes, that is a word that has come up several times. Our gold president, Amanda Green, and vice president Brandon Jacobs-Jacobs have asked me to ask you to describe in a way that we all can understand it better than we do. Thank you. Please and thank you.

[24:17] Ralph Sevush: It's hard to get your mind around because it's so inherently unjust. So it requires you to take a leap of logic to understand it. So they went to a royalty pool where 65% of the weekly profits were going to go straight to the investors to encourage investors to invest so that they were getting money back even if the show wasn't doing great. Whatever it was doing, they were getting two-thirds of it.

[25:01] Ralph Sevush: Not enough. Not enough. So they decided, let's say a show costs $20 million to produce, to get to that opening night, all the things it costs to get to opening night. Let's take a percentage of that. Let's take $200,000 of that and add it as a weekly expense. We're just going to take it off the top. And that $200,000 going back to the investors. Then you get to the royalty pool, 65% more goes to the investors. The authors are left with 35% of what's left after the $200,000 has come off the top. And very often that means minimums. You're working for minimums. Essentially, amortization turns everybody in the royalty pool into investors without a portfolio. They've been told they are going to invest the money that they would have gotten paid on that $200,000, but they're not going to get a return on their investment equivalent to being an investor. They're not going to get shares.

[25:54] Ralph Sevush: It doesn't make them an investor when in fact they really are. In fact, it's been done to them against their will. So in order to push back against that, we pushed back against the royalty pool by having higher minimums. From $3,000 it went to $6,000, and the advances got larger. But now with amortization, we've doubled the minimums to $12,000. And whatever money is given up because of the amortization is supposed to be paid back to the authors, not only out of the profits of the show, but out of that future subsidiary rights that the producer is supposed to get from the author on the basis that, why should I as an author be paying you your full share of sub rights if you haven't paid me my full share of royalties? When I get my royalties back, you'll get your sub rights.

[26:46] Ralph Sevush: And we've also asked for a premium. That is, you get back 110 percent of what you lost. So there's a little bit on top of it. But all of that is highly speculative because most shows don't recoup, at least not on Broadway. Over time they may. And so all of those givebacks can be illusory. You do get more up front. You get a double advance as well. So 120 instead of 60. So there's more up front. There's more every week. But it still doesn't come close to offsetting what you're giving up. What's 15 percent of 200,000? $30,000 a week is what the authors are giving up. That's 10,000 each every week to the producers so that they can get paid back first, even if there's a royalty pool where they're also going to get two thirds of the money.

It's crazy. We've really got to reconsider why we're accepting that as a mechanism that should be certified as equitable, because it's not. The worst part is, after, let's say everybody's working on minimums for two years, if the show isn't making a lot of profit every week, the producer will come to the royalty pool participants, like the authors and the director, and ask them to waive their minimums. Again, it's not a minimum if you can waive it.

[28:20] Ralph Sevush: We've always taken the position that it's not waived, it's deferred, and the author should get it back out of the subsidiary rights. Again, why should I pay you more money out of my pocket if you haven't paid me the full share of my royalties? But again, those are contingent, speculative. What's real is a show's been running on Broadway for two years, and you haven't been paid anything since you got your advance. Maybe you got the first six months of minimums, and then you've been in waivers ever since. Yeah, we've heard from writers who that's happened to, and it's really shocking to think that the person who was there when the page was blank is not. Yeah. What exactly would they be performing every night?

Yeah. I know we could talk about this for a million years, but I also want to include some questions about non-Broadway contracts and writer situations. One of them that came up when I was talking to the great Gresham Cryer was this trend that has been happening with writers who are being approached by nonprofit theaters to bring money to their own production. We've heard about people being asked to raise $100,000 to pay for the sound equipment, to pay for the set, to pay for whatever. And the question came up, and I believe I know the answer, but I'd rather hear you explain it. The question came up, well, does that make you then some sort of producer or investor because you're being asked to raise several hundred thousand dollars or whatever it is or not?

[30:10] Ralph Sevush: Not. Yeah. When a nonprofit theater produces your play, there are no investors. Money given to them is given as a donation or purchases of tickets. So nobody's buying an interest in the play, in the production. It's sort of pay to play. You want to have your show here? Find me the money to produce it. They're abdicating their responsibility as producers to do what a producer does, which is raise the money to put the show on. Sometimes, and this happens more often now, you will have licensed your rights to a commercial producer. And the commercial producer used to go to Boston or Detroit out of town to work on the show before you expose it to New York critics and New York audiences. And so that out of town period is a period of development, but it was done on the producer's dime.

It's built into the production budget, the losses. You often have losses because it's an unknown show out of town. Maybe it's got mixed reviews in that place. So you can end up losing a few million dollars just in the pre-Broadway tryout. So what they've decided to do instead is they find a non-profit theater. The commercial producer will find a non-profit theater that's willing to produce the play if the producer invests in what's called enhancement money. That's money that's donated to the theater to enhance the production, to make it a production that they can then move to Broadway or to a commercial run. The idea being the theater has a built-in subscription audience, so there'll be people in the seats.

Out of town critics are less vicious. You can see the show on its feet in front of a live audience, not made up of friends and family. You can see which elements are transferable and which we'll have to redesign. There's a lot you can learn as a producer and as the writer from an out-of-town non-profit production. The problem is non-profits are now expecting that money. Instead of budgeting for the production, they're budgeting for the production plus enhancement money. Also, the producers, both the theater and the commercial producer, want a percentage of sub-rights just for the initial non-profit run. Now, the non-profit run could be like three weeks. It could be 21, 28 performances. It could be a $60 ticket.

It could be in a 120-seat theater. Sometimes you're just doing it for a flat fee. Major theaters will pay a flat fee for the subscription run of the production, six weeks, seven weeks, whatever it is, and then if they extend because it gets good reviews, it's selling well, then they'll start paying royalties on top of that. But mostly, it could be a flat fee. If it is a percentage of royalties, it's a pretty small percentage. It's not the kind of percentage you would get in a big commercial run, and yet you're still giving up a share of your future revenue. The idea of subsidiary rights with a non-profit theater is a particularly galling one. Now, we gave this up in the 60s, so I had nothing to do with it.

I want that to be clear. But non-profit theaters are tax-free organizations. They get donations. As a 501c3 non-profit organization, they can take donations and give the donors a tax write-off. They, as an entity, don't pay taxes on that revenue. We, as a society, are already underwriting this theater through our taxes that they're not paying. And why are they allowed to do this? Because they have a non-profit purpose, which is a charitable purpose, which is generally to advance the arts and to support the community, which includes the writers. So, when they turn around and then tax the writers, who they've been given a tax exemption to support, it really brings into question why they should be getting tax-deductible status.

The fact is, it's a relatively small amount to the theater. Usually, it's like 5% for five years. In New York, it may be 10% for 10 years. But whatever it is, I've sat with executive directors of non-profit theaters, and we showed them their own numbers and said, what's the percentage of your annual revenue comes from these sub-writes, comes from writers giving you sub-writes? A few percent. Basically, it's the money they use to pay for office supplies. It's paperclip money, as I call it. But what is it to the author? That same amount of money is rent money. It's grocery money. It's money that sustains a writer so they can keep writing. Does it make any sense at all that these theaters are reaching into writers' pockets to do what they're supposed to be doing anyway and have been given tax-exempt status to do? In my view, no. But that ship has apparently sailed. The Guild has, over the years, talked certain theaters into capping. Some of the theaters were taking 40%. Oh, dear.

[35:54] Ralph Sevush: Oh, dear. As if they were commercial producers, without taking the risk of commercial producers, without having to raise the money of commercials. A commercial producer is raising money from scratch. Every production is its own company, and it's totally speculative. A non-profit theater has a subscriber base. They have government, corporate, and private sources of funding, in addition to the ticket sales. I'm not saying running a non-profit is an easy business. It's really not, and it's been made a lot harder by the current regime in power. But if they can't afford to do the thing that is their mission, financing it on the back of writers should not be the way they go about it.

[36:41] Christine Toy Johnson: Seems really not right. Yeah. So you have painted a very dire picture for us, but I do also know how passionate you are about advocating for writers, obviously, and as is the leadership of the Guild. And because we do need to wrap up soon, I do want to ask you, and I've been asking everyone this question at the end of our interview, what gives you hope? I'm going to amend that for you to say, what do you feel that the Guild can do to change this culture? It's obviously a very long journey here and beyond, but what do you feel like we can do in the near future to start changing this culture?

[37:29] Ralph Sevush: Well, first of all, in terms of hope, I always say, hope is not a strategy. It's nice to have. It sustains you, but it's not a way forward. You have to have a plan. So part of the plan requires writers to understand the power of no. The power of no is a very powerful thing, but only if you're willing to use it. So we spend most of our energy trying to empower and educate our members about what their rights are and what they should be asking for and what they should be saying no to. Too often, writers are so grateful that anybody's willing to read their play, much less produce it, that they will give away the baby with the bathwater or whatever that metaphor is to get the play done. And even when you've been asked to waive royalties, you could say no, the show could close, and then everybody gets put out of work.

You don't want to be the person who puts everybody out of work. But if you've been put out of work because the producer's not paying you, then what good is it to you? It's fine to be a nice person, but you are not their employers. You are not the person guaranteeing their employment. Everybody else on the show, everybody else on the show is represented by collective bargain contracts. The designers, the director, the choreographer, the people who dress the actors in the back, the actors, of course, and the front of house, box office people, the ushers, the people who mop up the stage, everybody is getting a paycheck and have always gotten the paycheck. And you've never gotten the paycheck. You've gotten a royalty check occasionally.

But if you're not even getting that, it's not your responsibility to fund the producer's production. And if it closes, it closes. But you know what? Sometimes when you say no, they just don't do it. They keep the show running because, as I said before, they're getting fees in other ways that are not from the royalty pool. So the producer can stay afloat, at least, while the show limps along. And maybe the show catches on, and maybe word of mouth builds, and maybe something happens that suddenly there's an audience interest in the show. And it's happened. It does happen. It's not impossible. So, you know, the notion of not saying no because you're afraid people won't like you, you have to be willing to say no. A contract that makes demands of you that would not only harm you, but everybody else who writes theater. If you're willing to lower the bar for everyone, that hurts you as well, because now the bar's been lowered for you, too.

[40:46] Ralph Sevush: Before the vacuum cleaners upstairs cut our interview short, I told me I was about to talk about ways the Guild can help change the culture of writers not getting paid. For example, encouraging writers to say no to unfair practices, continuing to find pathways for the Guild to collectively bargain, providing a space for writers to talk to each other about their financial concerns, and going public, talking to media and funders, making exploitation of writers an unpopular business practice rather than a default mechanism that producers may employ at their own discretion and without cost to themselves. So, the Guild's fight for writers' rights is ongoing and arduous. Nevertheless, we persist. And that's a wrap on season six.

[41:39] Christine Toy Johnson: This podcast is supported by the Dramatists Guild Foundation, a non-profit organization that fosters playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists at all stages of their careers. DGF supports these writers with financial grants, free space to create new works, and career resources and programs. If you are a dramatist seeking support or are a lover of theater who wants to support the future of storytelling, visit dgf.org or follow at dgfound to learn more. Talk Back is executive produced by me, Christine Toy Johnson, and recorded and edited by Bruce Johnson. Our music is by Andrea Daly. We're distributed by the Broadway Podcast Network. See you next season. As always, To Be Continued.