The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
It’s a fact that many, if not most of the members of the Philippine movie press, belong to the so-called self-employed lot in rigmarole.
By self-employment, it means that not a few of us depended our livelihood on a contractual if not a freelance basis. In the print media, a columnist or a feature story writer is paid per piece or per column inch. In the broadcast and/or online movie journalism, most likely, one is hired on a contractual basis although there are still types of them such as regular contracts, i.e., an annual or a six-month or any given job time frame reference. If one is a field reporter, a writer or producer of a segment in an entertainment show or a showbiz news component, most likely, there are contractual or regular or variations of employment. It really depends.
In the case of high profile or free TV on cam personalities like Lhar Santiago, Boy Abunda, Gretchen Fullido, MJ Marfori, Cristy Fermin, Iya Villania, Nelson Canlas, MJ Felipe, among others, they are either regular employees who enjoy labor or fringed benefits as SSS or Philhealth or monthly supply of rice etc. and contractual but they are relatively paid well.
I remember when the late Mario V. Dumaual and I started field reporting for “Star News” of ABS-CBN’s primetime news show “TV Patrol,” we were under regular contracts for less than ten years until I quit to organize a community theater group in my town Lopez in Quezon Province.
Meanwhile, when regular employee Angelique Lazo as entertainment news anchor left ABS-CBN for Radio Philippines Network (RPN) Channel 9 to join Ramon Tulfo, Rey Langit and the late Dong Puno in “Action 9,” where she dragged me to do another stint of showbiz reporting, Mario was promoted to regular employment.
Dumaual was earning four-figures as ABS-CBN Entertainment Bureau Chief apart from the perks and freebies accorded him.
When I went back to print media after hosting “Barangay Showbiz” at UNTV when Daniel Razon assigned me a daily show which lasted for a year, I was entertainment editor of a tabloid which paid me, at least, the regular income provided for in the minimum wage requirements which was pittance.
I was an editor, in that case. An editor, in multimedia, is mostly a regular employee.
How about the ordinary movie reporter who writes in tabloids or fanzines, the latter already endangered or does on-board in some nebulous radio stations?
They are either paid measly or not at all.
That is why many of us are found queuing up or waiting for the proverbial “magic envelope” or some tokens of appreciation, a euphemism for “cash” in exchange for a writeup in any persuasion.
Show business might impress the public as a lucrative income generating activity or glitz and glamour of the rich and famous but there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Robin Padilla, now senator, and practically all showbiz denizens, are familiar with this ugly reality–the movie press, in general, are hand-to-mouth in existence.
Some might throw in arguments that my preposition isn’t applicable or simply erroneous but what I’m saying is the legitimate earnings and not the privileges relative to patronage as sponsorships or “balato system” or “share one’s blessings” mantra, a cultural norm.
A veteran female movie news hen always finds herself in the halls of the Senate, not necessarily to cover events of actors-turned-politicians or to assist in the filing of a bill, but to wait for a manna from heaven from the public purse through some discretionary funds.
This semi-retired journalist was once a toast of the local tinsel town’s Fourth Estate in English but she altogether forgot to mind her own economic well-being as years went on.
How many of us are suckers for keeps if not freeloaders or would simply send indirect fillers or straightforwardly ask for a taxi fare from a movie star that eventually turns him or her off mindfully.
In the funeral wake of award-winning actress and well-meaning person Angie Ferro who died a pauper, actress Nadia Montenegro as emissary of Senator Robin handed in a donation if not a dole-out to the kins Angie left behind from the so-called Bad Boy of Philippine cinema who was once an acting student of the departed.
Nadia vaguely said that Robin would release something in October for the benefits of movie writers. “Basta (Just you wait),” she exclaimed.
Montenegro didn’t specify but if one surmises, it would be a support—financial or otherwise—although one wonders: Has Robin filed a bill to address the economic plight of the movie press, or a measure formulated within a general provision of an existing law?
Or is it a form of political patronage anew?
In view of all these, pay raise is one of the solutions or encouragement of a salary standardization act among showbiz writers from lawmakers like Padilla and other screen celeb pols like Bong Revilla, Lito Lapid, Grace Poe, Jinggoy Estrada, among others.
If movie scribes are paid well, cheap tactics are minimized.