Strike Talks Hit A Black Friday

Upton Sinclair, despite having died in 1968, is having a pretty good month in Hollywood. It's been 80 years since he published Oil!, which gave rise to Paul Thomas Andersen's adaptation There Will Be Blood. The picture's doing exemplary platforming box office and starting to garner awards by the bucketload.

What might please him more, though, is the outburst of unionism that in some ways resembles the largely committed but peaceful insurrection he helped lead in Los Angeles during the 1923 waterfront strike at San Pedro.

As you might imagine, we're talking here about certain analogies to the present writers' strike--which, since talks broke down amidst a good deal of rancor this past Friday, appears poised to persist well into the new year.

The relevance to Sinclair --like at least a goodly percentage of the writers, a relatively privileged ideologue who decided early in life that the corporations were no friends of his, even if they were a paycheck--intersects with what's shaping up as a key tenet of the AMPTP rebuttal to the writers' charm offensive. The thesis is that the writers are being misled by individuals the alliance terms "organizers", clearly hinting that those people are what in Sinclair's time were called "parlor pinkos". To quote a recent AMPTP press release:

The WGA organizers are on an ideological mission far removed from the interests of their members.

Their Quixotic [sic] pursuit of radical demands led them to begin this strike, and now has caused this breakdown in negotiations.

The New York Times' Michael Cieply, in forecasting an "extended brawl", framed the mood of each side, in part relying on a months-earlier conversation with guild head Patric Verrone:

Mr. Verrone described the looming negotiations with employers as a confrontation much grander than a simple fight over pay formulas. This battle would be about respect.

Writers, he said, were looking to restore a sense of leverage and status that had been lost as ever-larger corporations took control of the entertainment business.

Part of the companies' beef is that Young came from hard-core labor work--textiles and more recently, construction--and thus the quote from an unnamed exec gave to Variety's Dave McNary for a piece entitled "WGA talks leave bitterness" that the key Directors Guild powers--exec director Jay Roth and negotiating committee chief Gil Cates--were seasoned industry operatives who knew a fuller context from being "part of this business":

That's a veiled reference to the fact that many AMPTP members believe the WGA is being controlled by non-Hollywood insiders who don't understand the way the business has traditionally been run. AMPTP insiders said they're convinced WGA West exec director David Young is trying to make the WGA battles a part of a larger, more global struggle against corporate "greed."

This is where the Anderson film---with its wonderfully intimate and personalized look at one man's obsession with the competition for riches in the form of oil--butts up against the present-day struggle (various writer-friendly web sites will continue to carry references to the union-busting Gordon Gekko's mantra in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, of "Greed is good".)

But Sinclair's 1923 adventure is an even better match than his earlier novel Oil! provides. As Anderson told the London Times' Chris Goodwin regarding the origin of the filmed story, the already left-leaning Sinclair (he had his famous The Jungle come out in 1906) was morally indignant at the irritated by what he found on arriving in the two-mile spot in the middle of the Long Beach map known as Signal Hill: "The book's genesis was that Sinclair's wife owned a plot of land in Signal Hill [just south of LA], where they found oil, and he got to witness this explosion, how the town fell apart."

Having promised his wife he would try to confine his cause-mongering to print, Sinclair insisted on jumping into the fray when he saw apparent violations of the dockworkers' civil liberties. As historian Martin Zanger details in a paper entitled "Politics of Confrontation: Upton Sinclair and the Launching of the ACLU in Southern California, "Sinclair found his moderate socialist faith in peaceful revolution dampened by anti-union and radical activity in the country as a whole and in southern California in particular."

The author sympathized with the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, from a distance, but it wasn't until a special "Wobbly squad" of harbor police began arresting members of the Marine Transport Workers en masse (Los Angeles police chief Louis Oaks won approval from the city council for a stockade to be hastily built in Griffith Park) that Sinclair, "convinced the police were acting as agents for the Merchants and Manufacturers' Association", got angry. In response to the arrests,, writes Zanger, Wobbly leaders held mass meetings to maintain worker enthusiasm". (Not unlike the WGA tactics of course. And an interesting sidelight is that far better than today's Internet rumor mill or the hundred blind quotes from execs that carry strike coverage these days, Sinclair saw the oligarchs conspiring close-up; he and his brother-in-law were in the office of M&M president Irving Hays Rice when they heard timber magnate Andrew B. Hammond, owner of a fleet of lumber ships immobilized at San Pedro, "who "bellowed irately or action, while Rice assured him appropriate steps were being taken."

After a combative meeting with the police, who vowed to arrest him, Sinclair staged his protest in the company of two wealthy clubwomen--one from the Crane plumbing fortune-- plus an English journalist, a Santa Barbara millionaire, and Sinclair's lawyer. (Thus their median income may have exceeded, in adjusted figures, the $250,000 per year the AMPTP avows, over WGA demurrals, that the average Hollywood writer is making.) They marched past crowds held back by barricade, crossed a police barrier and mounted the hill (since bulldozed down for a housing project) to stand isolated to speak. "There was no person except police officers within two city blocks of where we stood", recalled Sinclair.

The troupe was arrested for "criminal syndicalism", driven through hayfields and orange groves to shake any efforts to find (and wring publicity) from their place and means of incarceration, and released after a night in jail. The entire episode helped give rise to the ACLU. (A small irony in terms of the present strike is that soon after, Sinclair refused to pay the Authors' League $37.50 in advance dues, calling it an old line craft union out of step with modernity.

Sinclair's idea of modernity was to coalesce his vision of a somewhat Socialistic American future with a strong guardianship of constitutional rights; he gradually became mainstream enough to run, with a good showing, for governor of the state. Verrone's devotion to the cause is put in shadow somewhat by the Young (subject of his own Wall Street Journal profile) speaking here. Passionate, charismatic in full cry, he clearly believes what he says. His best-known previous moment in the spotlight, was ten years ago in attempting to organize a coalition of garment workers called UNITE against Guess? Jeans, which company suffered real PR brickbats as Young browbeat them and their retail buyers like Bloomingdale's (despite the vigor of their spinner Michael Sitrick)--until the firm's four founding French brothers simply pulled the plug and decamped to Latin America, where, as Time reported, they could pay stitchers $20-40 per week. Young was quick to decry the globalization that moved thousands of jobs across the border, but the damage was done.

A crude equivalent fostered by the present strike would e the ramping-up of reality programming by the major networks, bringing the threat that one outcome of the strike may be a dumbing-down (yes--it can be done) of network television. Cieply's piece also suggested that the networks coudl emerge from the strike with a new plan for staggering their pilot season across several months, rather than the current scrum in fall and spring. This would ease the pressure to snatch up cast members from the small available pool of TV stars (including the usual array of sometime film stars) in the making, and help drive down production costs. Lurking beneath that urge is the AMPTP's coming confrontation with the Screen Actors Guild, whose contract expires June 30. Some theorize that the companies have already had a snootful of the increasingly militant (and WGA-friendly) actors and want to give them a scare by impoverishing the writers this winter.

Meanwhile, it already seems clear that the AMPTP's new propaganda doctors Fabiani and Lehane (covered in my earlier post) are targeting Young with paragraphs like this from their recent statement: "It is now absolutely clear that the WGA's organizers are determined to advance their own political ideologies and personal agendas at the expense of working writers and every other working person who depends on our industry for their livelihoods."

As the negotiations reached a breaking point early Friday evening, the events occurring in the no-longer secret venue, the Intercontinental Hotel in Century City, have been described variously by the competing factions as a casual farewell you might see in the golf clubhouse or...Very Bad Things.

Whatever happened, the proximate cause was a grouping of WGA proposals that the alliance seems quiet determined to entirely scotch. As Variety summarized:

Shortly after 6 p.m. Friday, AMPTP topper Nick Counter demanded of WGA's Young, in a hallway exchange, that the writers withdraw six proposals before talks could resume: the guild proposal for Internet compensation; jurisdiction over reality; jurisdiction over animation; the WGA's demand for part of the ad revenue from Internet streaming; removal of the ban on members honoring strikes by other labor unions; and the WGA's proposal to use third parties instead of the marketplace to determine the value of a transaction.

The Times concluded that the strike "now promises to drag on well into the new year," and elsewhere the guess as that talks won't even resume until sometime next month. The recently failed negotiations may never have been held without the influence of CAA agent Bryan Lourd, according to some reports, and for all his good will, he was somewhat in the position of a man who brings an oven mitt to a gunfight--to the middle of the gunfight/.

Lobbing insults from the sidelines on Friday night was Thomas C. Short, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, a group eager to continue holding sway over a segment of the reality and animation writers. Short likened the writers' guild leadership to "a huge clown car that's only missing the hats and horns."

Well, it must be admitted the writers have some funny gambits, including their parody of the AMPTP's soporific web site, which the parodists set up by simply adding `.com' rather than `. org' to the alliance's acronym. (The way the real site prudishly rebuked Verrone for skipping a portion of the negotiations to attend "a rock concert" -the Tenacious D performance and rally during which Verrone was a featured speaker-- was so Big Nurse-like as to be out of reach of parody.)

The coolest heads around may be with the DGA, next in line for negotitions. Century City lawyer Ken Ziffren, who with partner Skip Brittenham and a cadre of top deal making lawyers runs what's probably the most powerful law firm in the industry, has arbitrated such disputes in the past and may be added to the negotiating mix. Prior to the blowup of the talks, about 300 influential writer-directors -- among the 1,400 dual card-holding members - beseeched the DGA to delay starting talks with the AMPTP until the writers had their full shot.
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That day may have passed--Lourd reportedly told the writers they had reached their point of strongest leverage on the eve of the junked talks--and now the next part of the warring PR campaigns could be for the good will of the below-the-line workers, who rallied this past weekend for an end to the strike. It was that rally's organizer Chris Griffin whose words reverberated more loudly than anything from the two wrangling sides:

We are here today to remind the leadership of those locked in this struggle that real people, real men and women and their families, are being damaged.

(Thank you for striking; director Jason Reitman with WGA excutive director David Young last February; photo by Ryan Miller/Getty Images)