ADVISORY: New Email Address

COMMENTS (8)

• As a long-time reader I sometimes wondered if you even liked the good stuff about Hollywood, Nikki; your often ascerbic take on the wheelings and dealings of mogul-dom and agent-icity drip ice and venom, and your name-calling and put-downs seemed rather harsh at times.

  I now know that that steely facade masks a true and deep love for this dysfunctional town and its wacky denizens, though you’d never in a million years admit it. And now I understand why: To cover the craven snakes that run this town you have to keep your professional poker face unrelentingly stoic.

  Sincere thanks for your excellent reportage and sincere attempts to help figure out this mess…

  Comment by JB — Thursday November 8, 2007 @ 11:09am PST  Reply to this post

• Let’s have Nikki mediate the strike!

  Comment by Dan Rhys — Thursday November 8, 2007 @ 11:36am PST  Reply to this post

• Great piece, Nikki. We need to be negotiating! Even if we were duped, as clearly we were, by the DVD issue on Sunday night, I think the Guild is as much to blame as the AMPTP for the talks breaking down – and I deeply regret that.

  Where was the federal mediator in all of this? Couldn’t he serve as some sort of witness to the Guild’s willingness (mistaken, under the circumstances) to take the DVD issue off the table in return for a supposed deal, or at least movement, on internet residuals?

  Why did our negotiators trust Nick Counter? You say that Peter Chernin was one of the “hawks” in the negotiations…could there possibly be present behind the scenes the hand of the great Rupert Murdoch, a man who lives for these kind of confrontations and (to his credit, in some senses) for introducing new technology, but at the expense of union-busting and hurting a great number of ordinary working families in the process.

  (I know, I know, that is not the public image of writers, but even those of us who live in nice, soon-to-be-not-so-expensive houses probably have most of our equity tied up in our homes, just like most people, and cannot readily lay our hands on these millions of dollars that are supposedly floating around.)

  Having lived through (and supported as a British Labour Party member) many devastating strikes in Britain during Margaret Thatcher’s Reign of Terror, one of the most memorable was the News Corporation/Times of London strike/lockout, designed from the start on the management’s side, in the form of one Rupert Murdoch (sound familiar?), to break the print union’s “stranglehold” on printing and move the newspaper and its downmarket sisters, The Sun and The News of the World, from historic Fleet Street to the aptly named “Fortress Wapping,” where new technology (sound familiar?) would permit printing on site.

  That strike degenerated into riot-like clashes between picketers and British police, at times in full riot gear, if my memory serves me, and on occasion on horseback – with results that sometimes turned dangerously violent on both sides.

  At the end of the day, Murdoch effectively won, and the printers’ – and for that matter the National Union of Journalists’ – influence within British newspapers was never the same again.

  Let us pray that the same thing doesn’t happen to the WGA – and that this entire process was not orchestrated from day one to do just that by the likes of Murdoch. And let’s get back to the negotiating table. Unlikely, I know, but perhaps both sides should reflect on the Words of the Buddha:

  “Victory brings hate, because the defeated man is unhappy.
  He who surrenders victory and defeat, this man finds joy”

  - Dhammapada, 201

  Comment by Alexander Stuart — Thursday November 8, 2007 @ 12:08pm PST  Reply to this post

• The major issue here is the internet. So why don’t we use it? The WGA website is not going to send a thrill through even the most dyed-in-the-wool Guild member, let alone a member of the public, and the best, most frank and enjoyable reporting I’ve seen so far is Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood blog, which is fun, informative, daring and brings the strike alive in a way that very little else does.

  Why don’t we put some of our Guild resources (while we still have them) into creating a unique website dedicated to a form of ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAMMING?

  We have writers who are also comics or comedic performers and who are also showrunners. There are, hopefully, actors and other creative personnel who would be willing to help out.

  I’m not suggesting that we try to create an alternative to network programming (although I wish we could), but why not at the very least take some of our best people OFF the picket lines and have them do what they do best: write and create hugely enjoyable entertainment?

  Create shows or “spots”, which should probably all be brief in nature, that communicate all the things we want to communicate, without making the information seem dull. Plus, create a website that people actually want to visit, because it’s fun and entertaining and better than the crap the networks are pumping out during the strike.

  I could see the SNL crew creating smart, funny, sharp sketches – or another rap video like Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg’s Lazy Sunday – about the strike, about the behind-the-scenes negotiations, such as they were – and about how this strike impacts ordinary people.

  The focus should not be too greatly on LA or New York, there’s a whole heartland to reach, and it would be fantastic to get ordinary Americans on our side, complaining to the TV networks and their advertisers about the strike and about the unfair treatment of the writers who create what they watch. (And this is a challenge, because I think it’s incredibly hard for most ordinary people to understand or identify, not to mention empathize, for a moment with what it is we do.)

  I could see Matt Groening creating a wonderful Simpsons-like spoof (don’t we have any animator friends out there who could quickly put something together for us, once we had written it?), with a Mr Burns-type definitely playing the role of Murdoch in this fiasco.

  Above all, whether we do it through our own website or not, we should GET SOME VIRAL VIDEOS OUT THERE that will play and play on YouTube and other sites, that the general public will actually want to watch and to watch again and to share with their friends – and generally use the new media rather better than we have as a Guild so far. The costs do not have to be high: we can pull favors, and everyone works for free.

  If Radiohead can release an album on download, without a record company, then surely we – the best and the brightest (I pray) of the nation’s TV and movie writers – should be able to create material that millions of people out there actually want to watch and download and share.

  Comment by Alexander Stuart — Thursday November 8, 2007 @ 12:10pm PST  Reply to this post

• Who needs the Governator when we’ve got the Finkenator! Thanks for gutsy reporting, Nikki.

  Comment by comedywriter — Thursday November 8, 2007 @ 12:21pm PST  Reply to this post

• “They breathe profits…they eat interest on money and if they dont get money, they die, they way you would die without air. Fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live, for every little beaten strike is proof that the step has been taken…”

  Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, poverty of meaness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

  Comment by Anonymous — Thursday November 8, 2007 @ 12:51pm PST  Reply to this post

• I’ll second that. Maybe you should mediate the talks – at least there might be talks, then!

  Comment by Alexander Stuart — Thursday November 8, 2007 @ 1:31pm PST  Reply to this post

• Alex, for what it’s worth, I’ve pointed out the posting of your excellent suggestion here to the UH crew. Maybe they’ll spread it around as well.

  It’s already happening, somewhat, but not to the level you suggest…

  Comment by Baylink — Thursday November 8, 2007 @ 3:05pm PST  Reply to this post