Are Hollywood's Writers Ready To Strike?

To "blow up" used to mean to explode into obliteration, like a bunker in a news video. Then rap music took over the term to mean, inflating out of all proportion by selling millions of albums (and usually deflating, changing the metaphor's basis from dynamite to hot air).

Perhaps we can borrow the old meaning back to assess what went on last Friday in talks between the Writers Guild negotiators and the producers (AMPTP); if the talks didn't blow up, as in explode, they certainly started ticking dangerously. And no one seems to want to stand too close.

The stakes went up a week ago with an e-mail co-signed by WGA West head Patric Verrone and his east coast counterpart Michael Winship, asking for members to vote to authorize a strike (the writers' ballots are due October 18) because "it is apparent the companies do not yet feel the pressure to conduct serious negotiations."

Still, even then the smart money was that the WGA would bluster for a bit and then as the October 31 deadline for their deal came, extend that deal and lateral the talks to the directors' and actors' guilds. Then came this past Friday's apparently very unfriendly negotiating session.

Soon after, the AMPTP's president Nick Counter, issued a statement:

We have had six across the table sessions and have been met with only silence and stonewalling from the WGA leadership. We have attempted to engage on major issues, but no dialogue has been forthcoming from the WGA leadership. This is the most frustrating and futile attempt at bargaining that anyone on the AMPTP negotiating team has encountered in Guild negotiation history.

The WGA leadership apparently has no intention to bargain in good faith. The WGA leadership is hidebound to strike. We are farther apart today than when we started and the only outcome we see is a disaster engineered by the present leadership of the WGA.

Today's session was cut short when WGA's negotiators (after less than an hour) opted to go home at 11:30 a.m. after our negotiators tried to get them to discuss the WGA's proposals. The WGA leadership stated that they would not be available again until Tuesday, leaving us with only three weeks to deal with these incredibly complex issues.

The return PR salvo came from the WGA, who said in a release:

While the WGA remains determined to make a fair deal, at this stage of the negotiations the AMPTP is still stuck on its rollback proposals including profit-based residuals. Our members will not stand for that. The entertainment industry is successful and growing like never before. Writers, whose creativity is at the heart of that success and growth, are committed to sharing in it. Next Tuesday, we will return to the table and once again present our serious and fair proposals."

Accompanying the fervor of the WGA's stance is the recently re-elected Verrone's call for a strike authorization vote, abbreviated SAV in various online discussions. And nowhere was the discussion more robust than on the site The Artful Writer, run by screenwriter Craig Mazin. What's interesting about Mazin's views is that he's not only feasibly an A-list writer, with a row of Scary Movie credits behind him and the similar spoof Superhero in production, but part of a group callled The Writing Partners who struck an innovative deal with Fox to get greater back-end rewards in exchange for less up front. What's more, his key colleague in blogging isTed Elliott, also a pretty fair boardroom lawyer and the guy who with Terry Rossio has written all the Pirates of the Caribbean iterations.

They're anything but the middle class that Verrone quite logically finds most threatened by anything that undercuts screen and television writers' earning ability.

Such successes are a goodly part of the guild's financial backbone--like any member, they give the WGA 1.5 cents out of every dollar they make. That said, Mazin's interestingly well-reasoned tub-thumping for a strike authorization is viewed askance by some who point to the size of his personal war chest. And Elliott set off an at times arcane, at times bitter debate by postulating on the site that a yes vote to strike would mean--by the guild's constitutional rules--immediately cutting off talks. (A strict interpretation of that would be hard to enforce.)

Today Mazin, busy in production of Superhero, ceded the running of his blog to fellow writer (for The Dennis Miller Show), Jacob Sager Weinstein. But he'll likely step in for the occasional post, and given the energy of the threads he's started--some running close to a couple hundred entries in quick succession-- he's done much to set the tone for the coming debate (and SAV).

One quite resolute member of the negotiating commitee is writer/director Terry George:

[The companies] say they want to go back to a profit base distribution thing. I still get statements on Hotel Rwanda which basically says we are $20 million dollars in the red [the picture grossed $23 million at the box office and about double that on DVD] and with In The Name of the Father [$25 million], we are $16 million dollars in the red. Hollywood bookkeeping is beyond mafia bookkeeping. So the notion that writers and actors work until [companies] declare a profit is ridiculous. It's a smoke screen to get away from what this all about, which is that the whole industry is moving over to the Internet and the new media. All we are saying is to give us a little piece of that and we would be very happy with it.

Writer/director John August (The Nines) held an optimistic view he related, on his blog, to the ethos of his midwestern childhood: "I don't think Mom and Dad are going to get divorced. They just have stuff to work out, and it's going to get loud for a while."

Mazin ran down the relevant numbers: "...Guild members earned 905.8 million dollars in 2006...the amount of working writers in the WGAw hasn't really changed (even if the ones working have). Year after year, with minor fluctuations, about 4,400 WGAw members actually get hired to write. The total amount of "current active" members in the union? 8,084, which is down from 9,216 in 2000."

Mazin charges that the companies have shown so little regard for the writers' key issue that they seem willfully obtuse:

Residuals aren't some rootless payment we argued for because it sounded sexy. Residuals are our financial substitute for royalties. We agree to work for hire, they agree to pay us residuals as if our authorship were meaningful (which it is).

Eliminating residuals is simply not an option. It's a poison pill.

That's probably why they shouldn't have announced it the way they did. In my opinion, it made them look a little bit desperate. An insinuation might have been more chilling. A news conference?

Not their best move to date.

Many issues trail out of what happens three weeks from now. Some of the more fervid posts projected that the television industry itself (whose writers would be the hardest hit) could suffer irreversible damage. There's no question that the below the line workers and film crews are dreading the prospect. As Richard Verrier said in the Los Angeles Times: "A strike could cause upheaval in the entertainment industry that drives much of Los Angeles' economy. Writers last struck in 1988 for 22 weeks and cost the industry an estimated $500 million."

The WGA will be holding informational meetings for its members in various venues on the 9th, 11th and 16th, no doubt generating further finger pointing, and blog debates. Meanwhile, perhaps no one crystallized the doomsday mentality more bluntly that an someone dubbed SML did in a post on Mazin's site last Thursday: "Think about it this way, a strike is a disease and it attacks and kills the weak (young, sick, and old). Only the strong will survive and prosper from the weak's sacrifice."