Day: October 9, 2007

A WGA member had this to say this morning about the looming WGA strike situation: “This whole thing started with the producers sitting around…I’m sure this actually happened…none of them respecting the writers, thinking little of them and saying ‘we have to change this residual formula thing. We’re just handing them all this money, and they don’t deserve it.’ They know a strike could happen, obviously, but also that eventually people just get worn down, the rank-and-file start losing their incomes and need to get back to work.

“Those residual checks are so welcome…getting those checks in the mail is so great. And once you’ve had this residual system in place for years, you can’t take the lollipop away from the kid.

“It’ll be disastrous if the [writers] go out now. The producers won’t negotiate a serious deal with the writers until they talk to the directors and the actors. They certainly won’t give a deal to one union without getting an idea from the other two how they stand. The Writers Guild is the weakest union. They don’t have the power that the actors have, or the directors have. Strategically the writers should probably hitch their wagon to the directors.

“The joke of it all is that most of the WGA rank-and-file aren’t working. A relatively small percentage of the writers are employed on a regular basis. A lot of these guys kind of enjoy going out on the picket line and meeting people. Let’s get some coffee, I know this producer who might like your script, we should kick this around. It’s a social network thing.”

There are 39 paragraphs in Dave McNary and Josef Adalian‘s well-reported, well-composed Variety story that went up yesterday about the increasingly likelihood of a WGA strike happening on 11.1 (or perhaps in January) rather than next June, but you can boil it all down to four:

Graph #1: “Many believe a November walkout could be particularly crippling since it could affect both the current TV season and the next one. By Nov. 1, the nets will have enough episodes of current shows in the can to get them through mid-January. But the February sweeps would be decimated, and new shows would halt production well before they’d filled their initial 13 episode orders.”

Graph #2: “There are some observers, however, who think a January strike might make more strategic sense. The TV season would still be hurt, with original episodes of shows running out by late February. Pilot season would still be affected, since nets might be reluctant to lense $4 million pilot segs without scribes available to do rewrites — especially for comedies.”

Graph #3: “If scribes wait until January, they can also claim to have gone the extra mile on negotiations by working without a deal for two months. On the other hand, almost all nets have made early pilot commitments to at least two or three projects, some of which are expected to lense in December.”

Graph #4: “One industry insider believes writers will wait to see if any progress is being made before deciding to walk out. ‘If there’s absolutely no progress being made, they’ll go out,’ the insider said. ‘If there is some movement, they might give it a few more weeks.'”

Suspected militant WGA sentiment: “Make it hurt. Hit ’em hard. They talk tough, but deep down the suits are a bunch of candy-asses. As Terry Malloy said to Johnny Friendly, “Ya know, ya take them heaters away from ya and you’re nothin!’ They’re blustery and unreasonable and trying to break the union. And you can’t deal with unreasonable people.”