The coming three days will bring plenty more of what we've seen already--the complicated parsing (including some guesswork) of just what kind of a deal the writers guild membership will be assessing in Saturday meetings on each coast. The corollary topic is how that deal compares to the deal struck by the Directors Guild, and to the more optimal agreement the WGA struck with Worldwide Pants and others (here on the WGA site under "The DGA Makes A Deal"), which they hold up as their exemplar. If there's assent for the terms, leadership can call an end to the strike even as the more elaborate process of formal ratification grinds along.

More important than the details, therefore, is just what the mood of the writers is at this stage. There are two tiers of writers--with due respect to the guild's fierce show of public solidarity--to consider. There's the rank and file, estimated to average $62,000 a year in income and used to feast and famine--and jealous of every penny that can be stacked into their residuals deal. Then there are the elite, A-list screenwriters and show runners and other hyphenates, who have publicly held ranks but are viewed as a (less and less) quiet threat to the union's solid front. If they start to break ranks, "go Fi-Core" (i.e., make their own individual deals by renouncing the guild's efforts), they could, in language heard this week, "blow up" the union's unanimity.

Such a threat, plus simple fatigue, helped bring the writers' representatives to an ad hoc set of talks that included the AMPTP's negotiating reps (even guild bugaboo Nick Counter), but importantly, included heavyweight bosses in the person of News Corp's Peter Chernin and Disney's Robert Iger. Perhaps equally important was the presence of attorney Alan Wertheimer, a partner in the leading entertainment law firm Jackoway Tyerman, Wertheimer, Austen, Mandelbaum, Morris & Klein, who was brought in by the guild to handle the thorny issue of the "distributor's gross"--a fundamental on which any agreement would rest.

Wertheimer is respected by the chiefs. Not long ago he cut the Writers Co-Op deal with Warner Bros., giving a cadre of elite writers an unprecedented taste of feature film gross points should they achieve a certain level of success in marketplace. Writers like Tom Schulman and Nick Kazan were given the chance to take less money up front in order to bet on themselves and their work--an equation the studio respected. Given that common ground, Wertheimer was able to talk turkey with the studio chiefs on the writers' crucial issues of New Media residuals.

The practical pressure is shared by both sides. Television producers know the window to set to work on a salvageable TV season (and pilot season for the coming months) is mid-February, while early next month is the practical deadline to have a real shot at a full 2009 feature film slate. And finally, the slow fuses leading to various top stars' pay-or-play deals will ignite costly payouts whether or not the strike halts production of the pictures they're signed to.

Another indefinable factor is the jeopardized Oscars. with stars like George Clooney pointing out at the Oscar candidate's luncheon that he's a member of six unions and "Nobody is going to cross a picket line" (even as he warned the WGA, "There's a lot of strike fatigue..."), the awards as a gala public ceremony are already severely challenged. A number of associated events have begun to be canceled, and none more tellingly than the announcement today that the annual Vanity Fair bash would not be held.

With all this as context, early Tuesday evening came the word from the guild
presidents Patric Verrone and Michael Winship:

As Negotiating Committee Chair John Bowman wrote you last night, we are continuing to negotiate the terms of a tentative agreement with the AMPTP. We anticipate that we will be able to present the terms of that agreement to you in the next few days. In order to have a full discussion with you of the terms and how they were reached, and in order to get your input before making recommendations or decisions, we have scheduled membership meetings for current-active members only for this Saturday, February 9, in New York and Los Angeles.

The New York meeting will take place at 2 pm ET in the Broadway Ballroom of the Crowne Plaza Hotel...the Los Angeles meeting will take place at 7 pm PT in the Shrine Auditorium.

We urge you to attend. We have gotten to this point in our negotiation as the direct result of the power of this strike, which each of you has generated. Neither the Negotiating Committee, nor the East Council or the West Board, will take action on any contract until after the membership meetings are held and your voices have been heard. We are all in this together.

The reaction of the guild membership should supply a quick indication of whether the strike is to be settled soon. Meanwhile, the pressure tactics will remain-next Thursday, all the west coast WGA pickets except those at NBC Burbank have been called to converge outside Disney Studios for a major show of solidarity.