Opinion: Strike report: Day <strike>7</strike>68
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
If you’re delivering stuff to a studio, schedule it for Friday
To end up my week of strike reports, I wanted to hit a different picket line this morning, and so went even further out of my way than usual, to the Fox lot on Pico and Motor...only to look like a cartoon jackass when I discovered that I’d been looking at a Monday-through-Thursday picket schedule from the WGA. There was nobody assailing the house Babes built, which was probably just as well since the surrounding streets house my least favorite form of life: busybody residents who finagle no-parking-any-time rules out of the city. (One of these days, zoning partypoops, the Cavanaugh reign of terror’s gonna start!) In fact there seems to be very little picketing activity anywhere on Fridays. I put in calls to a few studios to see if they’ve begun to arrange their pickup and delivery schedules around picket lulls. Will follow up if I get an answer.
Mixing it up on the picket line, at last!
And here’s what I missed at the Fox lot. A little old-school fisticuffs on the line! Nikki Finke blames the ‘Fox white collar worker’ for the altercation, but is big enough to allow that she disapproves of aggressive tactics by the picketers too — although her example of the latter doesn’t strike me as all that objectionable.
Please don’t throw me in that briar patch, Brer Bear!
I have yet to hear anybody make a non-ludicrous case that waivers, exceptions and other side deals during a strike are anything other than straight-up good news for management and bad news for labor — though stay tuned to Blowback next week, when a guild member will give it another try. But here’s an intriguing unsourced item from Nikki’s catalogue of producer misbehavior:
Harvey Weinstein received a number of phone calls from the moguls warning him ‘You shouldn’t do it,’ and ‘We can get this done with the DGA,’ when word leaked out that he was making a side deal with the WGA to be able to hire striking writers.
Presuming that there’s any truth to this report, I’d expect Weinstein’s logical response to be, ‘Think about it, dummy. Management doesn’t need solidarity; labor does. My cutting a side deal is either a wash for you if you’re a competitor or a benefit for you if you’re a partner.’
But it’s a crazy world out there. If producers believe (and I mean actually believe, not just claim to believe for public consumption) they stand to lose through waivers and side deals, and writers believe they stand to benefit, I have no choice but to think there’s something to this premise even though I see no logical basis for it. Am I missing something?
No Negative Globes, but a funny response
I was hoping at least New Yorkers, who are said to be a hardboiled bunch, might go in for a little gallows celebration of the ongoing awards-show apocalypse, so I asked the writer Rob Kutner where the Big Apple’s best Negative Golden Globes party would be. His reply:
I would say Times Square, because nothing looks better on a massive Jumbotron than a star-unstudded press conference!
And now a word from the free market
One of my weird byways in the always tangled paths of libertarianism was to dissent from what I considered a too-forceful opposition to unions. Not that I support organized labor or condone its outsized political clout. But I’ve always been just a little too ready to view unions as private entities that are entitled to their own freedoms of association and action, and to resist efforts, like Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Proposition 75 a few years ago, to rein them in. (You can read through my Prince Hamlet routine on that issue here.) But I do enjoy getting a bracing dose of individualist grit amid all the collective passion. Here’s one I just received from the documentarian Dan Gifford:
My take on the Writer’s Guild strike is that it is, at its heart, driven by class warfare and capital naivete about the fact that those who put up the money and take considerable financial risk to fund films want changes because they are not making a profit. A recent Global Media Intelligence/Merrill Lynch report made that fact crystal clear as well as the reason: ‘Most of the income - past and future - that studios and writers have been fighting about has already gone to the biggest stars, directors and producers in the form of ballooning participation deals’ as one story summarized the study’s findings. But that does not matter to most WGA members I talk to and overhear while attending many film screenings at the WGA. What is being said comports completely with Lawrence O’Donnell’s characterization of the WGA several years ago on CNN’s Reliable Sources: ‘The Writers Guild of America, my union, is at a minimum, 99 percent leftist liberal and, like me, socialist.’ And the sentiment I hear O’Donnell’s socialists consistently express is that ‘the rich’ are just greedy pricks who don’t want to share their wealth. Dan