Strike Days: The Posturing Phase

With negotiations still on hold on Day Nine of the writers' strike yesterday, the opposing sides stayed pretty well true to form. The writers took advantage of strong support from actors to stage one of their sympathy-pulling media events, and the AMPTP, in the stern uncle mode, addressed the WGA's internal politics by issuing the following release:

November 13, 2007

Statement from AMPTP President Nick Counter:

The WGA is using fear and intimidation to control its membership. Asking members to inform on each other and creating a blacklist of those who question the tactics of the WGA leadership is as unacceptable today as it was when the WGA opposed these tactics in the 1950s.

The release first went out as simply a statement, but was soon amended to include an attachment with a Variety article on soap opera writers doing script work covertly and otherwise. That story that went on to detail what the AMPTP sees as intrusive rules enforced by the guild's Strike Rules Compliance Committee. (It's probably impossible to craft a name that doesn't ring at least a little of Mao's Cultural Revolution). Said the piece:

Strike-breaking is a serious issue for the WGA, and its strike rules require members to report any activity in that realm. Discipline for violations can include expulsion, suspension, fines and censure; nonmembers who perform banned work during a strike will be barred from joining the WGA.

When the strike rules were issued a month ago, the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers responded with information on its Web site showing how to go fi-core [essentially, dropping elements of one's guild membership-- but retaining other key ones--while returning to work] and pointing out that WGA members who take that step can't be disciplined for working during a strike.

But, given the high stakes of the conflict, it's probable the WGA would move to publicly embarrass members who take such a step. WGA West members received an email over the weekend from [the SRCC's] Dan Wilcox [saying]:

...The SRCC will primarily concentrate its efforts on unearthing and discouraging scab writing. There is no more fundamental working rule than the prohibition against a WGA member performing struck work...you must inform the Guild of the name of any writer you have reason to believe is engaged in strike-breaking activity or other scab writing...our purpose is not to punish people; it is to head off scab work before it can undermine the strike."

The result was a counter-statement from the WGA:

Mr. Counter's charge is as offensive as it is untrue. To accuse the Writers Guild of America of blacklisting, when it was we who suffered the most from it in the past, is simply Mr. Counter's desperate attempt to divert attention from the fact that it was he who walked out of the negotiations, and it is he who refuses every day to return to the table. The WGA has an offer on the table and is ready and willing to meet with the AMPTP any day, anywhere."

The guild also, under its "script validation" process, had asked writers to turn in working versions of their current scripts by last Friday, and received some 1600. The studios' rebuttal to that demand, calling it a potential breach of contract, may have combined with writers' natural inclination not to be snooped on to make that total a far from complete accounting of such scripts.

The nation's mood about the conflict was made clear by a report late in the day that the public, as polled by Pepperdine University's school of business management, was 63 percent pro-writers (studios got just 4 percent, with the remaining 33 percent unsure.) Other poll questions results held possibly threatening news for both sides, as the public showed a willingness, in the face of re-runs, to turn to reading (42 percent) and the Internet (35 percent).

Another relevant story yesterday (as pickets occupied Battery Park, as close as authorities would let them get to Wall Street), was Rupert Murdoch's notice to shareholders that that the Wall Street Journal would be available for free on its website when he's fully its owner, a definite boost for the ad-based revenue model that the AMPTP has characterized as too bewildering to sort out. (Murdoch predicted the move would increase the Journal's readers tenfold up to 10 million, with resultant ad revenue more than canceling out the $50 million in lost subs.

Yet another arrow in the side of the AMPTP (the producers' guild has asked the media to quite using the term"producers" as a synonym for that alliance) was Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein's informal survey of studio heads ) who need to portray their studios in rosy hues for his annual "report card" column ranking them.

In fact, Hollywood, once a boom or bust business, has never been as stable or consistently profitable as it is today, thanks to better management of risk, a flood of outside investment, global growth and a vertical integration that finds most studios in the hands of far larger corporate behemoths. When NBC has a cold, GE doesn't even sneeze...there's a certain disingenuousness at work here. Every year I write a column grading the movie studios on their box-office performance. And every year, studio chiefs assure me that they're rolling in dough.

If the studios really believe they can't share a sliver of profits with the people who create what they sell, they'll be the losers. If you don't believe in the future, you shouldn't be in show business.

In the earliest days of the strike, the writers commenting on blogs moaned often that not only the trades, but the Los Angeles Times were uniformly biased against them; after declarations like Goldstein's, and Monday's lionizing story about WGA negotiator David Young, that thesis seems quaint.

Meanwhile, the demonstration by 2,500 strike supporters along Lankershim Boulevard outside Universal Studios drew substantial star wattage, from Ben Stiller, and Jack Black to already established pro-guild stalwarts like Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Ray Romano. (Today's scheduled highlight was a live performance by Scottish singer K.T.Tunstall on a picket line at NBC Burbank near the Tonight Show sign--and this time she won't have to be backstage with Ann Coulter as she was when visiting Jay Leno last year.)

Sarah Silverman's sign riffed on her self-absorbed comic persona with "AMPTP: I REALLY HATE YOU RIGHT NOW" and her comments to the press were excerpted later on the WGA Site: "It's so crazy ridiculous. All the writers want is a small percentage of the money the producers are making on things they're writing. The producers will still be incredibly rich, even if they give the writers what they deserve."

Seeming to back her up was a clever short-form video, supplied in a link at writer-director Craig Mazin's The Artful Writer site, showing industry chieftains like Murdoch, Redstone and Moonves kvelling in interview video about the huge money to be made from digital.

AMPTP spokesperson Barbara Brogliatti dismissed the writer's side of the PR battle as "sound bites". But in a nation that makes its news meal out of sound bites, the writers would appear to have a strong upper hand in terms of public support.

(Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin outside Universal, November 13; photo by Robyn Back/AFP/Getty Images)