HE’s director-writer friendo believes that the WGA negotiators are “an ineffective wild bunch — great with threats, terrible with realistic negotiations.”
The three principal hardheads, he asserts, are Patric Verrone (whom he calls “the Iago figure”), David Goodman and “the melodramatic and very bellicose” Chris Keyser.
David Young stepping aside from negotiating last February meant that “the WGA had a different playbook in mind, a more militant and rigid one.”
“WGA leadership wanted a strike the last time their contract us up, but due to COVID couldn’t ask for a walkout,” he says. They’re now asking, he contends, “for unrealistic mandates for a business model that will be marginalized in the future, such as dictating a minimum number of writers hired for staffing. That’s akin to making a one-man show on Broadway illegal, forcing upon the production a supporting cast.
“Whatever deal the WGA winds up getting could have been achieved without a strike,” he states, adding that “the main leverage right now remains the actor walkout.”
“The strike fund is just whispers on the picket lines as many people haven’t qualified for aid, expressing anger at not getting help.
“David Young suddenly having a medical issue last February after leading every negotiation successfully for years…well, that says something as he was a blue-collar outsider with a tougher style than the mild-mannered scribes used in the past. He was a teamster type, a street fighter.
“Verrone led the strike the last time [2007], planning for it long before it was called. One opinion is that he was a little animation guy who wanted to have his roar heard by the studios that ignored him in the past.”