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Guest Column: Hollywood Is Failing Disabled Screenwriters With the “Consultant Trap”
The co-founders of Inevitable Foundation write that hiring writers as disability consultants means “rock-bottom pay” and no WGA credits, “widening a yawning representation gap.”
BY RICHIE SIEGEL, MARISA TORELLI-PEDEVSKA
NOVEMBER 10, 2021 12:15PM
Erica, a 32 year-old screenwriter, has worked on eight Hollywood films and TV shows over the past 10 years, providing notes, advice and ideas for each project. Her creative collaborators would tell you she is consistently fun to work with and is up to try anything.
But she’s earned a total of $7,500 for her decade of work ($750 a year, before taxes) and she doesn’t have a single screenwriting credit — a fact that leaves her ineligible for WGA membership or for any opportunity to participate in the guild’s benefits, including its health insurance plan.
Like too many other disabled screenwriters, Erica is stuck in the “consultant trap.”
“Erica” is not a real person, but rather a composite of the all-too-common experiences of over a dozen disabled film and television writers who spoke to us anonymously over the past six months.
In light of these conversations, it’s no wonder the Writers Guild of America lists disabled writers among its least-represented demographics: Only 0.7 percent of the guild identifies as disabled, compared to 20 percent of the American public — a 28x gap in representation.
By relying on one-off “disability consultants,” rather than hiring disabled writers as fully integrated members of their creative teams, Hollywood executives, showrunners and producers are only widening a yawning disability representation gap that sets this community back offscreen, onscreen and in the real world.