True to the quietly conspiratorial fashion in which moguls in Hollywood have always done business, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers largely kept their mouths shut during the three months of the writers strike. Sure, they issued some hectoring press releases, implicitly accusing WGA West President Patric Verrone of rabble-rousing and key negotiators David Young and John Bowman of running their own war on the backs of the poor working stiffs in their membership and the wider industry. (The WGA rank and file, 13, 500 strong, still need to complete the formality of ratification of their settlement.)

But you heard almost nothing, at least in attributable quotes, from the group of moguls who signed the AMPTP's final announcement declaring they were pleased to have a settlement. This public restraint clearly a strategy to empower their own negotiators--notably Nick Counter, who for his trouble got to become a whipping boy for the angry writers--and also a good way to keep their own heads from getting shot off in the media and on the writer-friendly web sites.

Typical enough was today's AMPTP release, congratulating the directors for ratifying their timely settlement, settling, not so subtly dissing the WGA for taking as long as they did to do likewise, and sending a shot across the bow of the Screen Actors Guild (who has its own internal class warfare to resolve) in anticipation of negotiating with them:

February 20, 2008

AMPTP STATEMENT ON DGA RATIFICATION

The members of the Directors Guild of America have ratified the sensible labor agreement we concluded. Our negotiations with DGA proved beyond any doubt that when both parties are prepared to bargain seriously, groundbreaking new media labor pacts can be reached without resorting to harmful and unnecessary strikes.

That question of just how necessary the writers strike was seems likely to reverberate across future years. Those who insist a walk out was needed tend for obvious reasons to be the more politics-minded (and for film and TV writers, since the formation of the guild out of leftist intellectuals in the late 30's, those politics are almost unfailingly liberal). On the other side are the "middle class writers" who took a financial thumping, and, their odd bedfellows, the hair-on-fire strikers who thought the settlement came too soon and too easily. (WGA board member Phil Alden Robinson represented the reasoned but defiant edge of that for the mainstream while veteran television and screen writer (The Oscar) Harlan Ellison, whose rant was posted on the calmly inclusive United Hollywood site, took the anarcho-conservative stance (caps his):

THEY BEAT US LIKE A YELLOW DOG. IT IS A SHIT DEAL. We finally got a timorous generation that has never had to strike, to get their asses out there, and we had to put up with the usual cowardly spineless babbling horse's asses who kept mumbling "lessgo bac'ta work" over and over, as if it would make them one iota a better writer. But after months on the line, and them finally bouncing that pus-sucking dipthong Nick Counter, we rushed headlong into a shabby, scabrous, underfed shovelfulla shit clutched to the affections of toss-in-the-towel summer soldiers trembling before the Awe of the Alliance.

And I am ashamed of this Guild...we wasted our efforts and lost out on technology that we had to strike for THIS time. 17 days of streaming tv!!!????? Geezus, you bleating wimps, why not just turn over your old granny for gang-rape?

You deserve all the opprobrium you get. While this nutty festschrift of demented pleasure at being allowed to go back to work in the rice paddy is filling your cowardly hearts with joy and relief that the grips and the staff at the Ivy and street sweepers won't be saying nasty shit behind your back, remember this:

You are their bitches. They outslugged you, outthought you, outmaneuvered you; and in the end you ripped off your pants, painted yer asses blue, and said yes sir, may I have another.

Please excuse my temerity. I'm just a sad old man who has fallen among Quislings, Turncoats, Hacks and Cowards.

I must go now to whoops. My gorge has become buoyant.

Respectfully, Yr. Pal, Harlan Ellison

A more middle-of-road approach was voiced on the same site by
Howard Michael Gould (Mr. 3000) In a post (ON UNITY, DEMONOLOGY, AND THE LEGEND OF THE DIRTY THIRTY) containing a short history of the pro-settlement (and therefore at some level anti- the leadership) group The Dirty Thirty, he made the following points:

In retrospect it's clear that, unless we were willing to settle for a mere extension of the last contract, accepting the DVD rate on electronic sell-through and leaving all other new media issues tabled for another three years, the AMPTP was never going to negotiate seriously with us before they made a deal with the directors.

That put the DGA in a tough position. They could take the kind of basic no-frills extension we were offered... or, they could do the harder thing, negotiate more aggressively than they've traditionally done, and try to land a deal good enough to provide an acceptable template for our own. ...the DGA stepped up to the moment, used the power of our strike as leverage, bargained hard, and landed a better deal than we expected....this year, we didn't get the DGA deal. This year, the DGA got our deal.

Gould discusses WGA strongman John Wells, a show runner of considerable clout and repute whose "widely read internet piece in praise of the deal became one of the lightning rods for the polarization [of the membership]":

.

..We on the inside didn't love everything in the deal as much as Wells seemed to, but in truth we were satisfied with the great bulk of it...in a sort of parallel, those same things can and should be said about Board member Phil Alden Robinson, who, with the clock on salvaging the TV season ticking down, wrote a tough, militant piece for United Hollywood, scaring the bejeezus out of writers desperately hoping that a settlement was close at hand. ..I think that when more is known, both of these men will be widely appreciated for their contributions to this negotiation, and for their courage and willingness to brave personal vilification in the interest of bringing writers the best deal possible. Both of these men deserve to be regarded as heroes of the Guild.

Gould cites the further polarizing effects of the Dirty Thirty, ad the "rampant rumor that ", even before the DGA announced its deal, thirty A-list feature writers and show runners had threatened to leave the Guild unless we accepted ...there were far, far more than thirty. If we're counting writers who, after the DGA deal was announced, were angry at the thought that we might still blow up the TV season and wait for SAG to join up with us, then I heard personally from over one hundred. ...mostly writers at points in their careers where they were making (and sacrificing) a lot of money, but usually without the long histories of high earnings which gave them the wherewithal to withstand a lengthy strike...
It's a painful irony that, even as we struck for middle class writers of the future, it was the middle class writers of the present who got clobbered hardest on their behalf." (An interesting discussion in a comment on the site ponts out that the Actors' Fund is eager to help writers harmed financially by the strike--and that George Clooney, a voice for settling, made a $25,00 contribution to that fund.)

Gould describes a meeting for which he and fellow negotiating committee member Robert King:

...went to the home of a writer to talk with about three dozen members whom I'd heard were deeply unhappy with the strike and the leadership.... a bunch of those writers had been force majeured out of their deals that very afternoon. And listening to the way we had all been talking to the membership, it was not unreasonable for them to fear the possibility that what was, at that point, a ten-week strike could turn into eight months, at which time SAG would join us and the real strike would begin. These writers were hurting already, and they were afraid, and they were angry

It wasn't the easiest afternoon for Robert and me. But in the end, it was successful. They now had a way of communicating with the Guild, and they didn't take their grievances public.

Personally, I think the reason that was true this year, unlike 1985 or 1988, is that the cause was so just, so clearly important, that the few in the most extreme opposition to leadership realized that they weren't going to find much traction among even relatively conservative members, who might under other circumstances speak out against a strike.

In the end, the writers seemed to have taken a lesson from the moguls--they kept their differences of opinion inside their organization, and by presenting a united front, accomplished a deal whose merits and necessity may be debated, but which has left their with a sense of--and proof of--their ability to hang together int he future. With a number of provisions due to be re-negotiated three years from now, that could come in handy.