The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (40 page)

BOOK: The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild
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Blogs offered a less structured and more public approach to disseminating strike information and opening lines of communication between writers and the larger community. A variety of websites became popular, two in particular being
United Hollywood
, created by the WGA, and
Deadline Hollywood Daily
, run by a sympathetic media reporter. These sites provided a centralized space for immediate access to information about the strike and about negotiations that was unavailable through traditional print and broadcast media. Blog visitors could access, update, or comment on content instantly, day or night.

To develop
United Hollywood
, a group of WGA strike captains worked with what the site itself describes as “advocates for working people in the entertainment industry facing the digital revolution.”
86
Dante Atkins, an Internet outreach adviser for progressive causes and Democratic candidates, helped design the site. Its name, he admits, “may have seemed like an odd choice for a website devoted to protecting the interests of the WGA, but in truth, the name fit right in with one of the principal messages the WGA captains were trying to communicate: that the fate of the WGA in these negotiations over Internet royalties would set the bar for negotiations with other Hollywood unions like the DGA and IATSE.”
87
With frequent updates, rapid responses to negative statements by the AMPTP, extensive video links, and blog entries by writers of popular films and television series,
United
Hollywood
quickly gained a large audience of followers and on-site commentators, and it provided an important voice to counter the AMPTP’s public relations machine.

Deadline Hollywood Daily
was born out of entertainment reporter Nikki Finke’s weekly column “Deadline Hollywood” in the free alternative paper
LA Weekly
. A year before the strike, Finke created an online version of her column in which she editorialized on the politics and culture of Hollywood business practices. Finke’s access to insiders, her frequent news scoops, and her relentlessly pro-labor attitude toward industry business made her site popular for information and debate among WGA members and supporters in the months before and during the strike. Courtney Lilly remembers walking the picket line during the first week of the strike and checking Finke’s blog every twenty minutes on his iPhone to see whether the strike would end.
88
Los Angeles Times
television reporter Scott Collins derided the unprofessionalism and sensationalism of Finke’s blog but admitted that it was a key weapon in the WGA’s artillery against the conglomerates. “Blogs are, in fact, the chief difference between [the strikes of] ’88 and ’08. Blogs replicate, amplify and sometimes distort stories in ways that simply weren’t possible 20 years ago. And no blogger left a bigger footprint on strike coverage than Finke.”
89
Deadline Hollywood Daily
reported the latest news from the negotiation tables, picket lines, and backroom meetings and provided a space for labor to discuss and debate the news—even the facts.

The diversity of articulate, witty, and heated discourses within the blogosphere was precisely what made the strike discussion compelling. The WGA offered writers suggested talking points when speaking to the media but never restricted its members from expressing individual opinions. Filmmaker Jennie Chamberlain and scholar Daniel Chamberlain note the multiplicity of voices that emerged: “Unlike the AMPTP, which made its decisions behind closed doors and then paraded its sound bites through the very mainstream media it owned, the WGA membership clamored with a cacophony of voices across a variety of Internet sources. One-way communication was broken—no longer controlled by the media or the Guild, but taken on by the membership.”
90

While the wordy and often boisterous blogs offered useful details for insiders, the WGA realized that part of this message war was about winning the support of the general public. And, not unsurprisingly, entertainment writers knew just how to tell their own story. The crucial lesson they had
learned from the failed
America’s Next Top Model
walkout was the power of streaming media to speak to the masses. One
New York Times
writer called the WGA’s short videos aimed at strike watchers and supporters “creative venting,” but these image campaigns were targeted and purposeful.
91
In “Sorry, Internet,” writers Frank Lesser and Rob Dubbin of
The Colbert Report
present the cute furry animals that dominate so many online videos, but in this one the pet stars refuse to perform their adorable antics out of solidarity for the striking WGA members.
92
Work is still work, even if that work is just being cute. The reach of these videos was substantial: “
The Office
Is Closed,” a streaming video produced by
The Office
, received over 280,000 views in its first week on YouTube.
93
With veteran writers creating content for the Internet, the possibilities of the medium for entertainment—and for political action—became clearer. Strike captain Peter Rader, writer of
Waterworld
, said, “The strike is about the Internet, so we’re using the Internet to fight back. . . . We are going to get America to recognize one way or another that the Internet is a democratic space and there need to be unions to protect those who provide its content.”
94

A month into the strike,
United Hollywood
released a series of higher quality videos entitled “Speechless.” Produced by Screen Actors Guild members working in solidarity with the WGA, the series celebrated the collaborative nature of media work. Without writers, the videos demonstrated, actors would have no lines. One particular video featured actors Amy Ryan and Patricia Clarkson deep in an emotionally gripping conversation with dialogue provided by the plumbing ads in the Yellow Pages.
95

Although the battle against the conglomerates—each with its own enormous advertising budget and media connections (most of them owned television stations and newspapers)—was decidedly uphill, the weight of public opinion slanted toward the writers. A Nielsen survey released after the strike reported that 100 percent of 800 respondents were aware of the strike, with 77 percent supporting the writers either strongly (55 percent) or somewhat (22 percent).
96
Michael Winship said of American viewers, “They got it. They understood what the issues were. The public was incredibly supportive.”
97
Paradoxically, the AMPTP’s singular voice, a result of decades of mergers and acquisitions, was less adept, less nimble, and ill suited for this battle.

In December, the Directors Guild of America went into closed-door sessions with the AMPTP. A group of about forty writer-directors (who
campaigned under the name WD-40) published a statement asking the DGA to forgo negotiations until the writers had a contract. Instead, the AMPTP essentially held out to bargain with the less demanding DGA, hoping that the WGA would eventually settle for the same contract.
98
The directors, as they had done in previous strikes in the 1980s, undercut the power of the WGA by continuing negotiations with the AMPTP. Once a deal was settled with the DGA in January for less compensation for digital residuals than the WGA had asked for, the AMPTP began cutting costs by ending expensive, often unproductive long-term development contracts with certain writers. The WGA negotiators, who had already dropped their demands for jurisdiction over animation and reality series, entered into two intensive weeks of bargaining with the media moguls, led by News Corporation’s Peter Chernin and Disney CEO Robert Iger.
99
NBC’s Jeff Zucker compared the strike to the wildfires that ravaged California in the fall of 2007: “Change isn’t easy, and sometimes it requires a catalyst. . . . A strike has devastating consequences for thousands of people who are directly or indirectly dependent on this industry to feed their families. . . . Fires fertilize the soil with new ash and clear the ground, often setting the stage for robust growth.”
100
Many writers were tired of the strike and eager to return to work. Some showrunners who had proved a powerful force at the beginning of the strike were considering returning to work as producers. The strong ties among writers that the Guild had worked so hard to foster during the strike were starting to unravel.

Tensions were also building among the various unions. One writer mentioned to a sympathetic friend in the DGA a conversation he had had with a DGA member who objected to directors allying with the writers. The writer’s DGA friend said, “I heard something that I didn’t think I’d ever hear. . . . It was the disdain of the house slave for the yard slave.”
101
This inflammatory conversation highlights a problem the Guild had faced time and again, both internally and externally, with other unions: rather than all workers focusing on bettering their lot, they wasted time quarreling among themselves. The Directors Guild had always acted as an ally of the studios rather than of its sister unions, and this strike was no exception. Arguably, the DGA landed a better deal from the companies than it would have achieved had the writers not been on strike. The executives’ fear that the directors might join ranks with the writers gave the DGA a small amount of unearned negotiating power.

Despite cracks in its united front, the WGA membership officially held strong until a deal was reached with the AMPTP on February 12, 2008. Many writers were devastated by the end of the strike and felt it ultimately demoralized the community and split the stalwart Guild faithful from the workaday members. Others believed that the Guild had grown stronger. To some, however, that unity mattered little. Craig Mazin’s view represented a faction of writers who felt that the Guild had been too focused on organizing and forgot that, first and foremost, writers want to write. “When they say that it brought writers together and gave them a sense of unity, all I can say is that they value that so much more than they ought to. The union’s purpose ultimately is to protect my financial interests, protect my creative rights, and to protect my health and my retirement. I don’t need a sense of unity with the people with whom I compete for jobs.”
102
On the other hand, Mark Gunn praised the writers’ leaders for understanding both the demands and the limits of their membership: “David Young and Patric Verrone had a very good sense of where the membership was in terms of their patience for a deal—and they went up right to the edge of that, but they didn’t go past that edge.”
103
In the end, as Ross McCall said, “We didn’t get a foot in the door so much as we got a toe.”
104
Others might argue for a toenail: writers acquired compensation for streaming media and electronic sell-through, but no minimum was set.

During the strike, the Guild leadership had attempted to present a unified front, but it also allowed for a multiplicity of voices. Del Reisman, WGA president from 1991 to 1993, was awestruck by the relative cohesion within the union he once led. As a child, he had roamed the Universal Studios back lot in the 1930s; then he wrote for live television in the 1950s, made telefilms in the 1960s, and saw his work transferred to DVD in the 1990s. The night the negotiating committee presented its final agreement with the AMPTP to the membership, Reisman was there. “I got there early and went down to the first row and turned around and . . . I recognized about ten or twelve people. And I had once been president and extremely active in the Guild. But there was a generational change. . . . Unity, unity, unity. Never experienced it before, never observed it before. . . . It was the complete openness of that meeting. The directness of it. The ability of the negotiating committee to say, ‘We tried hard on this and we couldn’t get it’ without any attempt to cover it over.”
105

Something had changed for the Guild. Out of a fractured group came decisive action at the start of the strike. Even though the divisiveness had not disappeared, there was a movement toward unification between East and West, between film writers and television writers, and between new writers and veterans.

Post-Strike Assessments

That’s what I mean about using the Internet as asymmetric warfare. . . . That’s part of the reason Andy Stern [former president of Service Employees International Union] said, “It was the first strike of the 21st century.” . . . It wasn’t about steel workers or car workers. It was about intellectual property.

—Michael Winship, interview, 9 April 2012

The WGA, DGA, AFTRA, and SAG all signed contracts in 2008 allowing for compensation for digital exhibition. Although the direction of future digital media production is impossible to foresee, as Mark Deuze points out, it will involve a “delicate and contested balance between the creative autonomy of culture creators and the scientific management of commercial enterprises.”
106
In a multinational conglomerated media landscape eager to downsize, it is easy to see why labor has had such a difficult time getting its voice heard. Finding parity between creative labor and the bottom line within the rapidly evolving, virtually unchartered territory of the digital sphere is a nearly insurmountable challenge. And although the studios had argued during the strike that their streaming of series was solely for promotional purposes, their actions immediately after the strike demonstrated something different.

A month after the strike ended, major conglomerates began announcing their streaming partnerships. Hulu, a joint venture of NBC Universal and Fox Entertainment Group, debuted, and the popularity and accessibility of streaming television and features expanded greatly. One year after the site launched, Hulu’s audience reached 40.1 million unique users who viewed 380 million streaming videos in the month of March 2009 alone.
107
Still, individual practitioners’ economic woes were heightened by the larger economic crisis within the world markets that started in September 2008.

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