Leno, WGA Sparring Over His Monologue

With the breathlessness that seems to arise around symbolic conflicts on slow (strike) news days, the nation's media has focused, along with a lot of air time devoted to something that seemed to be going on in Iowa last night, on whether Jay Leno's Thursday night show would violate WGA strike rules.
Leno indeed performed a scripted monologue Thursday, though without any reference to the dispute.

Leno contended via NBC spokespeople that in a clandestine meeting with WGA head Patric Verrone and othr guild officials, he was given permission to craft is own opening spiel. This he did, for ten fairly successful minutes. What may occasion some bitterness on the guild's part is that he handily beat Letterman in the Wednesday night ratings, though the latter was buttressed with grade-A, WGA-approved writing staff. (Tonight's news-making bit, in which Mayor Michael Bloomberg stopped by to present a key to the city with the words "This is for your beard," was not immediately credited to anyone.)

A WGA spokesman, despite NBC's insistence that the verbal waiver took place before a number of witnesses, insisted, "Patrick never gave Jay that approval." He said, "There must have been some kind of misunderstanding if Jay is saying that."

Leno's people stated they were miffed at the terseness of the guild's Thursday evening release stating, "A discussion took place today between Jay Leno and the Writers Guild to clarify to him that writing for the 'Tonight' show constitutes a violation of the guilds' strike rules."

"The WGA agreement permits Jay Leno to write his own monologue for `The Tonight Show,'" NBC said in a statement. "The WGA is not permitted to implement rules that conflict with the terms of the collective bargaining agreement between the studios and the WGA."

A full-on, obviously scripted monologue, such as the one Leno bragged on creating with his wife's advice and consent for Wednesday, would theoretically put the host in jeopardy of a fine or losing his WGA membership--despite reports that the guild had little stomach for a public contretemps. No doubt Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose typically script-heavy shows return Monday night, are watching this potential donnybrook with great interest in where the truthiness lies.

The issue of whether such late night shows should even have returned this soon was one of a range of questions posed in Variety's subscriber poll of yesterday. The poll highlighted the growing fissures between the WGA and its fellow guilds in showing:

... a deep divide on the question of whether latenight shows should have waited longer before resuming production, with 47% of all respondents saying the shows should have waited longer and 45% disagreeing. WGA members (67%) were most likely to oppose their return, while among the unions, IATSE respondents (58%) were the most supportive of the decision to return. SAG and DGA members were split on the question, with 51% of SAG members and 49% of DGA-ers saying they should've waited.

And, in a week where the strike is causing palpably more dissension and unrest within the WGA membership, the poll--albeit in the suit-friendly environment that is Variety--revealed scant optimism:

There's a growing sense of gloom about what the strike will eventually yield for the scribe tribe. Only 9% of the total think the strike will be resolved in the writers' favor, while 57% say it will be resolved in the companies' favor -- compared with 20% who believed it would end in the writers' favor in the November survey. Even among writers, the pessimism appears to be growing, with only 10% of WGA respondents believing that it will end in the writers' favor compared with 22% in November.