Screenwriters have “scoffed at a plan that would scrap the current residuals system — which makes additional payments for the reissues of movies and television shows on DVDs and elsewhere — and replace it with an approach that would pay a bonus only when a property becomes profitable. Producers, meanwhile, [have] brushed off the writers’ demand for expanded residuals.” — from Michael Ceiply‘s appraisal of the looming strike situation in today’s (9.1) N.Y. Times.

The bonus only-with-a-profit idea sounds fair to the unititiated. The bottom line on the writers’ side, as I understand the thinking, is that nobody trusts producers and studio execs’ definition of a film being in profit because of the decades of experience that led to that famous line in David Mamet‘s Speed-the-Plow: “There is no net.”