Writer’s Strike Is Over

“On the way to yesterday's (WGA East in New York) meeting, the writers passed Broadway theaters whose marquees still prominently display the names of playwrights. The notable exceptions are the theaters showing "The Lion King" and "The Little Mermaid," where in the ultimate expression of the Hollywood ethic only the Disney name is displayed.

At the cinemas, the most prominent names were of course those of the actors, followed by the director and the producer. You often need to squint to find the writer on a movie poster. As a reporter once noted, the rewards of being a screenwriter are money and oblivion.” Via Michael Daley.

After 3 months, the WGA Writer's Strike is finally over, but as the above excerpt indicates, the studio-writer paradigm remains unchanged. Writers now get a slightly bigger piece of the crumbs that fall from the pie. (The settlement just applies to screenwriters, however. The studios are still happily fucking over authors.)

We walked the picket line a couple of times. We’re not Guild members (yet) but we’re in LA, and it was the right thing to do. After all, we’re from Boston, a strong Union town where cops pull in $100K per year and firefighters are literally falling over themselves to cash out.

Each time we picketed our place of choice was Gate 2 at Warner Bros. Located just outside the WB Studio, this location offers wide sidewalks and a wide street that took a long time to traverse. It was an ideal place for a group of writers and SAG actors to walk back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, soliciting honks from passing cars (and the occasional enraged “FUCK YOU” from men in imported luxury cars.)

Keep it Moving
Why so much walking? In LA, only the homeless are allowed to live on the sidewalk. Everyone else, including picketers, must be in constant motion. Stand still, you're eligible to be cited for loitering. Sometimes, the writer in charge of pressing the Walk button forgot to do his job, and we’d stand there helplessly at the walk light, hoping a cop doesn't come by.

That’s it. We’d like to say it was more exciting, but not really.
Among the highlights:

• Is that Ken Ober walking with us? It Is!

• We met Quinn K. Redeker, one of the credited writers of Deer Hunter. He stopped by and walked with us for over an hour.

• There was also a newspaper vendor selling the Revolution newspaper. Of course, she was surrounded by film and TV writers, so the talk came around to what kind of movies she liked. Her pick: “Did you ever see Casualties of War? What a great movie.” To which we replied "Casualties of War? Why the Hell would she like…." Wait for it, wait for it…. She went on to say: “There's this scene in that movie where the American soldiers are raping a Vietnamese villager.” Sigh.
  

To pass the time, one of the other writing students we were stopping labor with introduced us to a game he likes to play. “What's the one movie that, when you hear someone likes it, makes you hate that person immediately?”

Some responses: Vanilla Sky and Magnolia. When it came to be our turn, we declined to answer on the grounds that the writer of that movie could be standing right next to us. So we moved on to other games.
There’s Got to Be a Morning After
So the Strike's over. What does it mean for you people? Means your shows should be coming back on, starting in about 4 weeks or so.

Well, almost all your shows. There's a rumor that 24 won't be coming back. “Not true” said one writer we walked with who worked at Fox. He told us 24 will be coming back, but in a shortened season. With only 6 hours to fill, they’ll be tackling smaller problems. This season, Jack Bauer investigates an unattended suitcase found at the airport.

In the end, the Strike wasn’t a total wash. It gave us :

• Conan O’Brien singing Sabotage. As Edith Bunker.

• Sarah Silverman telling Jimmy Kimmell that she's fucking Matt Damon

• Mike Huckabee crossing every picket line he could find

* (by the way, our answers: Babel , Bowling for Columbine, and Juno. )