The Writers Guild of America, the union for writers in the entertainment industry, officially went on strike at midnight Sunday against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
The strike will hit viewers of both the small and big screen hard. Live late-night programs like “The Colbert Report” will run old episodes indefinitely and soap operas will be forced into repeats in about a month. Scripted shows will begin to run out at the end of this television season and feature film release will slow around early 2009.
Late Sunday, a resolution appeared possible after the WGA agreed to drop its demands for doubling their moneys, or residuals, received from DVDs. However, the two sides still could not reach an agreement in time.
Writers are on strike for increased residuals from both Internet sales and DVD sales of television shows and motion pictures. Union members currently only receive six to eight cents per DVD sale and no compensation from Internet business.
Entertainment writers in both New York City and Los Angeles were seen picketing outside of some of the film and television industry’s most notable landmarks early Monday morning including major movie studios such as 20th Century Fox, as well as many of the major television network offices such as CBS. Famous faces on the picket line included “30 Rock” actress and scribe Tina Fey, longtime “Saturday Night Live” head writer and actor Seth Myers, and J.J. Abrams, Carlton Cruse and Damon Lindelof of “Lost’s” creative team.
With such strength and spirit behind the strike, it will have a crippling effect both in quantity and quality.
The strike cuts off the industry’s main source for both television shows and films: stories, said Professor Emeritus Howard Suber, who teaches in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s Producers Program. “The common cliché is that “˜it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage,'” he said.
The main disagreement between the two seems not to be residuals from DVDs, but rather from the Internet.
“Everything is the Internet and the companies want there to be no sharing of the profits from the Internet,” said UCLA screenwriting professor and WGA lifetime member Richard Walter.
Many networks, like ABC, have made big efforts in the past few years to make most of their shows available online, whether it be through iTunes or through the networks’ own Web sites. And while episodes viewed on iTunes must be purchased upfront at $1.99 each, it is the free episodes with limited commercial breaks on the networks’ Web sites that have caused the biggest stir among union members.
“They run them for free so there is no revenue, but there is revenue because they are selling advertising. Even if it’s not very much, we should still get a percentage,” argued Walter.
WGA is currently demanding 2.5 percent of Internet revenue, but for guild members, any percentage of online viewings would be big step in the right direction.
“If they offered less than that, we could talk about the numbers, but they don’t want any numbers ““ they want zero. The Internet is the future and, in fact, the present.”
If the strike continues, the Internet may even become direct competition when scripted television shows and films return.
While the red-shirted picketers have only been away from their offices for a little over 24 hours, Hollywood is already feeling the strike’s sting. Reruns will run until further notice for live television late-night shows such as “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Late Night with David Letterman,” many of which employ large writing staffs for their important opening monologues, which tend to focus primarily on current events.
“The problem is that these people depend on being current, and running stuff that’s a year or two old, you have to cut out (the monologues),” said Suber. “You’re cutting off the creative juices.”
While it would seem in both parties’ interest to negotiate and get back to work, Walter said he feels the strike is far from over.
“It seemed pretty likely that it was going to happen. My guess is that it’s going to be three or four months.”
Walter however also expressed the open possibility of the strike looming much longer.
“The real agenda could be to break the guilds,” said Walter. “These companies … are owned by huge conglomerates, and studios just represent small parts of their business, so they are not going to be that eager to go back.”
For many inside the industry like Walter, the strike is reminiscent of the 1988 strike, which lasted five and a half months. The picketing was similarly over a burgeoning format, VHS.
Suber explained that when the WGA and the alliance came to an agreement then, the WGA thought their small paybacks from VHS would be temporary but studios grew accustomed to the system as home rentals and sales really started to make a splash.
“DVDs began to account for almost half the revenue of the films, and now the studios are used to that,” he said.
Suber is still optimistic about a resolution, even though he believes neither side will walk away completely satisfied.
“Hiring scabs … doesn’t work in Hollywood. If they need qualified writers, they are going to have meet them halfway,” he said, referring to studios hiring non-unionized workers.