With the WGA having finalized its tentative agreement with the AMPTP, over 10,000 writers on both coasts will review the details and vote to ratify or reject them in meetings today in Los Angeles and New York.
Weirdly, the New York writers are meeting less than an hour from now — 2 pm Eastern at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Times Square (B’way and 49th) — but the Los Angeles writers won’t convene at the Shrine Auditorium until 7 pm this evening or 10 pm Eastern, a full eight-hour workday after the NYC gathering.
The WGA West board of directors and the WGA East Council “will meet Sunday to formally endorse the contract. Writers could be back at work as early Monday, depending on whether the WGA√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s ruling bodies decide whether to end the three-month strike at those Sunday meetings,” the Variety story (filed this morning at 3:38 am) reads.
So the Oscars are definitely on, people are going to have to come up with new parties to replace the ones that were cancelled (like the Vanity Fair soiree), Nikki Finke‘s Deadline Hollywood Daily is about to go back to being just another Hollywood website, and all-over “normalcy” (a term coined either during the Warren G. Harding or Calvin Coolidge administrations) is about to kick back in.
“The WGA West board of directors and the WGA East Council will meet Sunday to formally endorse the contract. And writers could be back at work as early Monday, depending on whether the WGA√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s ruling bodies decide whether to end the three-month strike at those Sunday meetings.
Leaders of the WGA made the announcement of the finalized deal early Saturday after spending much of Friday meeting with lawyers over the contract language. WGA West president Patric Verrone and WGA East prexy Michael Winship sent a message to members that stressed the gains made in the new-media sector.
“It is an agreement that protects a future in which the internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery,” they said. “It creates formulas for revenue-based residuals in new media, provides access to deals and financial data to help us evaluate and enforce those formulas, and establishes the principle that, ‘When they get paid, we get paid.’ ”
