Strike Days: Talks Scheduled--But Hold the Irrational Exuberance

Close observers of the writers' strike, with its recriminatory and despairing overtones, might be excused for not turning cartwheels over the mutual announcement that the WGA and the AMPTP are planning to go back into negotiations on Monday. It's a step, but only that. It would seem that neither the writers nor the companies have suffered enough in these early stages to overcome the doggedness of their divergent agendas.

If one common estimate of seven or eight more months may be a somewhat inflated product of the current ill will, certainly there's not much hope of huge progress in the post-Thanksgiving session--though we're now seing the first of the companies' "force majeure" notifications, as they seize the occasion to shed talent (and paychecks) from their rosters as they've been expected to do.

Once the bottom lines get that useful haircut, the companies will have what some cynics say they wanted from the strike.

Another positive indication is in the terseness of the press release SAG and the AMPTP settled on sending out. It seems that after all the bluster and chest beating, the leadership of each group has realized they might do better hashing things out in private for a bit:

Leaders from the AMPTP and the WGA have mutually agreed to resume formal negotiations on November 26. No other details or press statements will be issued.

Of course, the day following this announcement saw side-by-side op-ed pieces on the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times in which WGA negotiator David Young and AMPTP boss Nick Counter squared off.

Young's central thesis was this:

But for decades, writers have been left behind. Every new technology or genre was presented as some unfathomable obstacle, requiring a cheap deal from writers. That's what happened with home video and basic cable. It's what happened with reality TV. Now Big Media wants it to happen again with the Internet. It is time to deal with these issues.

He went on to quote CBS's Les Moonves ("All these [online] site are ad-supported. We get paid for them") and Disney's Bob Iger (speaking last March about the Disney.com site): "We're streaming, at least in the four weeks that it's been up, about 100 million videos a week."

Such statements tap into one great source of the writers' anger, the "Do they think we can't read?" yawp. It's been oft-repeated that the company bosses must tell Wall Street that they're a thriving part of their conglomerates, but in so doing they tend to kibosh the idea that any enhancements for writers may bleed their paltry profits try.

Meanwhile Counter (interestingly, signing his essay with the folksy Nick rather than the formal tag of J. Nicholas Counter III) railed once more against "the theatrics and carefully designed photo opportunities of the last two weeks" as perpetrated by the writers. He went on to note that "the guild is demanding an unjustifiable increase in the residual rate that writers receive for downloads."

The typical consumer, of course isn't too worried about the writers proposing they get a raise that would bring their share of each web dollar up to something short of a dime--ordinary folk just can't say where that hurts them.

Counter, who himself has become the symbol of the writers' alienation and the subject of urgings in from both blogs and in Letters To the Editor sections that he be removed from the process, added "it is the producers who shoulder all the risk in a business in which most motion pictures lose money, and the vast majority of television shows never get past the pilot episode. Regardless of whether the show or a movie is a hit or a flop, the writer is paid."

Again, the working public, call them callous, just can't work up too much boo-hooing over Hollywood producers--hard as it may be to live in the back of a Range Rover. And iIt only takes one writer to foist a carefully designed photo op on the public, as when screenwriter (Larry Flynt) Larry Karaszewski had a news article saying "Viacom Profits up 80 Percent" silk-screened onto his shirt, which somehow conjures up a mental picture of a goatishly grinning Sumner Redstone. Nor was it all that helpful for Rupert Murdoch to announce this week his gifts of $100 million in stock shares to each of his six children.

When the AMPTP cites a statistic claiming that the 4,000-plus working writers in the guild average $200,000 a year, it draws quick rebuttals from people like writer/director Doug McGrath (Emma). McGrath replied on the Newsweek web site that that: "at any given point in a year, a little more than half of all film and TV writers are unemployed... The thing that gets you through these fallow periods is the residual."

McGrath went on to say, "The support within the union for protecting our residuals is very deep. The marches and rallies in L.A. have closed the streets, bringing out thousands of writers."

This sentiment was echoed by Carlton Cuse, one of the show runners on ABC's Lost (to which, as a self-described moderate, he's still lending non-writing producing services) and a member of the guild's negotiating committee. He spoke to the Los Angeles Times as he walked the picket line outside Disney.

"The studios," Cuse said, in what might fairly be taken as a summary of the writers' mood, "have underestimated the resolve of the guild."

A substantial WGA march down Hollywood Boulevard is planned for Tuesday.