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John Rogers Profile picture
John Rogers
@jonrog1
TV, comics and film writer. LEVERAGE, JACKIE CHAN ADVENTURES, BLUE BEETLE, MARRY ME, among others. Free newsletter at https://t.co/oLwsGxytrH
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Aug 9, 2023 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
As we head out to picket for Day 100, there are a lot of positive messages of solidarity out there, true, but for my little corner I want to remind you of two sentences:

"Rejected our proposal. Refused to counter." There are a lot of punters out there proposing "their solve for the strike", and to a one they're like those tech bro buddies of Musk who lectured us on how Ukraine wasn't going to last a week.
Jul 23, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Last time I had a failure - which was collateral damage in an argument between the studio and the network - I had to personally fire 200 people, they all were off payroll by that afternoon, and I was also out of a job. The executives all continued to get paid. So fuck off. Actually, that’s not true. The failure after that one happened as collateral damage in one of the mergers, so it had nothing to do with the quality of the show. And I had to wait, forbidden to work, not earning a dime, as they shopped it for six months.
Jul 19, 2023 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
1) A moment at the Teamsters/UPS rally this morning clarified our current struggle with the studio CEO's (among other bosses). Teamsters got a lot of wins, but one of the main sticking points is the pay for the 65% of local UPS workers who are part-time ... 2) If you read the SAG-AFTRA demands, a truly STUNNING amount of their points involve protecting background actors, and trying to improve conditions for the 87% of their union who makes less than $26,000 a year.
May 7, 2023 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
1) Okay, we did "You have writers on set for dialogue" and now we're going to do "we have writers on set for TRAINING." 2) My Dad, on his first visit to a set, after an hour of watching, said "Oh, it's like a construction site, but once an hour good looking people wander through" and goddam I have never topped that.
May 7, 2023 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
1) There have been a couple threads today about the importance of having writers on set, and a lot of them have focused on last minute changes to to physical locations, story continuity, etc, but there are two other reasons I want to hit a) dialogue and b) training 2) It's not just "don't say X, we find out Y three episodes from now", props, etc, but dialogue is art coming out of unpredictable humans. I always say I choose both writing staffs and actors like a jazz combo -- you're here to play an instrument *I can't play*.
May 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1) Non-members ask how they can show solidarity with the Writers Strike. The most effective way is to donate to the Entertainment Community Fund. It's NOT for us, it's to support fellow Hollywood employees, crew who may suffer hardship due to the strike. secure2.convio.net/afa/site/Donat… 2) Choose "Film and Television" in the drop down menu. *This donation is tax deductible*. We writers have our Strike Fund, and the Good and Welfare fund. We're asking supporters to aid those we work with.
May 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It was a great night, stunning to see every labor union in Hollywood represented in the room, but if there's one message from the night, when Lindsay Dougherty of Teamsters Local 399 runs for Governor, people are gonna go to the barricades for her. Damn, what a speech. Joking aside, it was a memorable night, and the NegComm spoke eloquently about the open disdain with which our reasonable demands were treated. We don't want to be here, but here we are, just like the writers who came before us.
May 2, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
An under-rated part of our current media company dynamic, that's led to this strike, is how miserable the execs *within* these companies are. They hate this new system as much as we do. The plural of anecdote is not data, but the advantage of being in the business 25 years is that I have exec friends who have risen through the ranks. We have lunches. And I sit there and listen.
May 2, 2023 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
1) Something (very stupid) you’re going to see over the next weeks are people arguing that screenwriters are being unreasonable. “Times have changed”. No. Times WERE changed. By SOMEBODY. By PEOPLE, making CHOICES. 2) There’s an unfortunate tendency in modern American thought to write about economies, or markets, like they’re the weather. Like they’re natural phenomena, you know, “ market forces”, the invisible hand, etc, shit just happens, can’t be helped!
Apr 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
thread. Arguing that "it's authoritarianism unless it's from the Mussolini region of Italy, in which case it's fascism" ignores facts on the ground. A hundred years from now historians will be writing "Fascism in the mid 20th century looked like X, but then in the early 21st Century American fascism manifested in form Y" and everybody splitting hairs will be in the dustbin.
Mar 31, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
One of the challenges of the American system is that the Founding Fathers worked really hard to make sure we didn't have a king, but a healthy chunk of Americans REALLY WANT A KING. A Congressperson is just a person. A Supreme Court Justice is just a person. A President is just a person, and a former President is *really* just a person. Other democratic countries indict their President (or President equivalent) *all the time*.
Mar 29, 2023 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
This Dollar General thread reminds me of something I've been grappling with writing about in a longer format -- in an extremely religious country, or at least a country heavily influenced by its religious roots, the classical sin of greed just ... gets a pass. And before you answer "yes, well, that's capitalism" there's capitalism in other countries where this weird ... not just acceptance but emotional valorization of exploitation is not cultural currency.
Feb 21, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
1) Ages ago, back when the Silly puppy thing was happening in scifi (tl:dr white dudes angry that it was no longer the 50's) I wrote about the difference between escaping into* science fiction and escaping *through* science fiction. 2) People who escape *into* it want it to be safe from the outside world, it's an emotional refuge and should be unchanging. People who escaped *through* it, like I did, want it to be the passageway to NEW STUFF, be it images, cultures, ideas, etc.
Feb 17, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I'm amused, and I admit probably not well-educated enough in political history to understand, the strain of comments I'm getting that "it's hypocritical of rich people to criticize other rich people". So only poor people with no reach or influence can morally criticize the rich? That last thing we need is people with influence and power urging limits on influence and power. That's a neat trick. Follow that argument and see where it gets you. That's internalized ... something?
Feb 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It amusing on a post about how one of the problems in modern society is that there are a bunch of shitty little billionaire enablers running around making sure rich people’s feelings aren’t hurt, one of the minions decided to prove my point. Image Somebody’s very mad, BY PROXY, I made fun of, not even a single billionaire, but billionaires as a group, and that the post below (insanely, and why?) got 715,000 views, and decided *on their own* to fill out a form to bootlick! Snitch culture, it’s the vibe of the 2020’s!
Feb 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It's insane to have to say this, but apparently we do -- no billionaire needs defending, They're billionaires, *They will always be fine*. Particularly not billionaires who live in countries that allow them to sue casual online critics into silence. This is unhinged. Image I cannot imagine how fucked up your understanding of power has to be to wake up and say "That person, with all the lawyers, who lives in supernatural comfort and will never suffer any real consequence ever for what they say and do, I need to get their back."
Jan 13, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Oh. That's what a Toyota Prius without a catalytic converter sounds like. Cool cool cool. Well luckily my city spends over $11 billion on police every year, so calling in and reporting this should be easy!
Dec 29, 2022 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
This sort of bullshit is the end result of "do your own research." Learning how science works is *hard*. Scientists spend a lot of time *assuming they are fucking it up*, or at least guarding against that possibility. There's a whole field of philosophy dedicated to doubt. This is peripherally related to Elmo's tweet about "reasoned" debate of science. People think they're doing science or think they're reading science because it's science-y. One of the challenges is that science does not move at the speed of twitter, but disinformation does.
Dec 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
FWIW the game I WAS A TEENAGE @exocolonist by @FinjiCo caught me completely by surprise, and I'm fascinated by this storytelling structure. I did not anticipate being so invested in my life as a non-binary space teen trying to save my parents, exploring an alien world, working in the cafeteria and learning everybody's favorite birthday gift, but here we are.
Dec 20, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It's interesting to see the effect of techbro/corporate culture, where every worker is an anonymous cog to be disposed of when convenient, intersecting with Hollywood culture, where people would tell you they loved you while they stabbed you in the back, or quite often the front. I worked with absolute psycopaths as network and studio presidents, but they knew your name. It was show "business", not show "friends", but if it wasn't respect it was at least acknowledging you were a worthy foe.
Dec 17, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I think there’s an interesting knock-off effect to Elmo putting paid subscriptions in charge of “downvotes” in that the algorithm will become so useless, ONLY word of mouth will be effective. Which is in fact a better Twitter. As I’ve noted, < 10% of my Follows are verified, and that doesn’t seem uncommon for a certain type of user - the person who comes here to listen to interesting people or discover cool new ideas or facts or artists. But ALL of those things come from RT’s from mutuals for me.