Strike Days: Voices From The Line

On this Monday where the talks between writers and the companies are resuming under a news blackout, and there's an item floated that the strike-ending terms may already be cut--er, unless they're not--(have we covered all the possibilities there?), comments made by three successful writers to me some days ago keep coming to the fore. Amidst all the heat and antipathy, these comments from picketers keep resonating as being near the middle ground of the writers' mood--restless, a bit daunted at the financial consequences, conciliatory at the very edges, but resolute enough to keep them picketing even today as the talks resume.

I spoke first with Larry Levin, a wry, mellow bespectacled fellow who was watching a prospective television start-up--these things don't grow on trees--face an uncertain future: "I had a pilot ready--Fox TV had hired a casting director, and a director, and we had a potential start date in December. Now we're not doing anything and people are asking, `Are you going to be writing anything during the strike?

The answer's no."

Levin, who's worked on a variety of TV shows and the two Dr. Doolittle films, has made a good living over the years, but notes that residuals "gave me a bit of a cushion to try different things." Most notably, a Seinfeld I wrote with Larry David in 1990 is the gift that keeps on giving. It was called The Boyfriend (guest starring Keith Hernandez]; residuals are an important part of many writers' lives. What [the companies] are talking about now is gutting them completely."

Levin continues:

This is the seminal moment--we did not choose to be at this moment. Twenty years ago was when the video rollback came, and 20 years before that the beginning of residuals itself--so now we're standing on the shoulder of others, and we're really doing this for the next generation.

In a Hollywood writer's life, Levin added,

You have this arc and then it's sort of this long fade down--and that's [the importance] of many of these residual and pension and health benefits that didn't exist until those writers in the `30's and `40's went on strike and organized--I think the guild has done a brilliant job of organizing the union and focusing on what the core issues are.

Their outreach the last two years has been so focused--they did meetings at writers' homes, 20 or 30 at a time, and it all paid off. [Negotiator] David Young comes from sort of a garment worker, textile background--a serious guy. At the end of the day they're gonna settle on something-- so I think they need to do that soon before the vitriol going on now gets even uglier and more entrenched.

Carol Flint is a veteran television writer (she graduated from researcher to writer on China Beach and has worked on L.A. Law, West Wing, and E.R., among others). She had been working on a pilot for Showtime when the wok stoppage hit and agrees,

This is one of those historic moments where you say, `Wait a minute--the studios and networks can't get away with acting like, `What is this newfangled Internet thing? We haven't figured it out.' Yet when you go on [the company sites], you see plenty of ads. I think people in Peoria get it you don't need a crystal ball to see that anymore.

The funny thing is the studios and networks love to make these movies about the little person who stands up, it's a theme that's done a lot--but at the moment, the corporations aren't really staying behind that.

In some ways I'm very surprised; if you asked me [before the strike], I would have said, `These are smart people on all side, and somebody's gonna show some leadership and avert this--`cause it's not good for any of us.

Joining them on the Sony picket line--and quietly, very much a leader down to his repeated, determined stabs at the buttons that trigger the red lights whenever he crossed the roadway--was writer -director Paul Haggis (Crash and In the Valley of Elah.)

His easy grin flickers for a moment at the scale of what's interrupted when he notes he was writing the 22nd James Bond film when the strike hit:

"I didn't get to finish the polish on that; I had notes that I couldn't do so I don't know that they're gonna do with that...I really loved working with those folks on Casino Royale, and I loved it in this one. But you stand by your guild."

Haggis--speaking before a more conciliatory tone emerged from the AMPTP side-- defined the issues that created such a usable degree of wrath on the part of the writers:

I think it's largely because we're dealing with the extreme corporate greed in the most obvious sense. When somebody says to you, we need a hundred percent of everything, even if were going to sell it--that isn't quite fair.

We were talking to Jeopardy writers here; their Jeopardy DVD's sell for sixty dollars and they get four cents -and [the companies] were outraged that they might have to give them eight cent s out of sixty dollars. It's really cynical on [the companies'] parts--they're doing it to union bust. They did it to us in `88 when we went out for six months and then lost, and they figure they can do it again.

Today, at an undisclosed location, the guild and company reps are trying to get past the scenario these picketers describe, and find some sort of peace with, if not great honor, enough profit to keep the companies happy and enough concessions to mollify the anger the writers have built up over the years. It won't be easy.

(Carol Flint and Larry Levin on the picket line at the Sony Madison gate)