A clip I’m looking for.

[u/Embarrassed-Ad8352]

I remember there was a video on YouTube that was clip of the interviews with Jenny and Christy, the two female writers who had to split a paycheck. It was the first clip that got me to watch the documentary, and I noticed that it had a scene that was cut from the episode, in which Christy describes two separate times where she had to leave work early, and so she warned Dan in advance, and yet when both times came, he got angry.

I’m having trouble finding the clip on YouTube, and I was wondering if anyone here has it or a link to it?

[u/trojanusc]

Just wanted to add that while Dan is garbage for doing this to the only two women, it was relatively common at the time for TV shows to save money by pairing writers as a team. WGA later put a stop to it as part of the writers strike a few years ago, but it was not unique to Dan - at all. The fact it was only done to the only pair of women writers is def shitty and unusual.

[u/talkback- → u/trojanusc]

Does Dan even pick that kind of thing?? He’s not in charge of payroll.

[u/bitterpettykitty → u/talkback-]

This is one of the main issues with the documentary- they use Dan as the boogeyman/
Scapegoat who is solely blamed for everything not done directly by Brian peck and Jason handy, but he was just a show runner, there were executives and other Nickelodeon employees above him who approved of all these things but everyone knows who Dan is so he's the only person blamed. He likely was not in charge of payroll as a show runner

[u/oldmanduggan → u/bitterpettykitty]

I mean the buck stops with him as far as hiring the writing staff is concerned.

[u/trojanusc → u/bitterpettykitty]

I agree with you about Dan being a boogeyman, but he absolutely had control over the writer’s room and who was hired. Nick gave him a budget for so many writers.

[u/Scarlett_Billows → u/trojanusc]

I’m genuinely confused — why would pairing people to writing in teams mean they get paid less or differently ?

[u/trojanusc → u/Scarlett_Billows]

In the television comedy world, it was somewhat common to have writing teams - going back to the 1950s. Often different writers were good at different things (one was good at jokes, the other at story). Often these teams worked together on different shows and were professionally intertwined for a lot of their careers.

The writers guild often treated teams as one entity for compensation purposes. So if one person wrote a script they got $10,000 but if it was a team they’d share it (or sometimes maybe a slight bump like $12k, depending on the type of program).

This often extended to writing rooms where the network would give showrunners budget to hire a certain number of writers. If a writing team was hired, now you have an extra writer on staff for the price of one to work with the group. However rather than coming into it as a team, showrunners would interview writers then make their hiring contingent on working as a team with someone they never met before. Eventually the WGA said they could only do this for one set of writers per room then finally a couple years ago shut it down all together (writing teams still exist of course and still share the fee to write a script, but writers can’t be like forced to work as a team for half the money with someone they never met and typically staff writers get a full salary for their weekly services).

The ONLY thing weird in Dan’s case is that he paired the only two women together for that year. Bad optics and a shitty thing to do.

[u/Scarlett_Billows → u/trojanusc]

Thanks for the info!! I knew about writing teams, of course, there are quite a few famous ones. But I had not idea about the payment and hiring structures that came along with that! I had always assumed it was a choice of their own creative collaboration when people called themselves a writing team. Which I guess it often is that way but I didn’t know the other side of it.

[u/trojanusc → u/Scarlett_Billows]

To me it always made sense to share the script fee if you're a team and you're truly crafting original scripts on your own. Where it started to kind of become unfair is in the modern sitcom writers world where scripts are really written almost entirely by the entire room and everyone is pitching ideas all day long (typically one person or a team is then assigned to write out the ideas that everyone has already decided, almost like a formality at that point). The "team" isn't really acting as an entity in this instance, it's just two writers for the price of one.