Opinion: Strike report: Day 93? (RCC Ash Wednesday)
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Winding up for the winddown
Yesterday at 8:30 a.m., I canvassed the four picketers then on line outside CBS on Beverly. Do they think the Writers Guild is close to a deal? Resonses:
1 qualified yea 1 wait and see 1 I dunno 1 I’m not on the negotiating committee
Same question same place same time same number of writers, this morning:
2 hope we’re close 1 I’m on the staff so I don’t want to be quoted in any way 1 Yes!
What did writers do online?
What will I miss most about the strike? I’ll miss being able to nurse that mad hope that the big, steaming pile of creativity allegedly centered in Los Angeles might start to ooze into these here interwebs — that the experience of total fiscal drought might drive the writers to hustle and do it themselves, proving that they could master this whole online thingee without suckling from the massive studio apparatus.
Preliminarily, I’m saying the strike appears to be winding down with no important developments on the web. Speechless? Zero out of five stars. Why we fight? The entertainment equivalent of that nice boy who liked you way back when. Strike TV? As noted here previously, this effort to raise money and make work for jobless writers spent time in development hell and doesn’t seem to have generated actual content (though the Strike TV myspace page did lead me to this, and who wouldn’t like a less-challenging version of The Spot?). I’m waiting to hear back from a Strike TV spokeswoman about whether that group, or any other striking writers, did anything worth checking out online; I’ll update if or when evidence comes in.
I also canvassed the editorial board for interesting filmmaking writers did online during the strike, with ‘interesting’ defined as ‘anything more than one micron above the ‘Speechless’ series in terms of quality and compellingness.’ That search returned this and this, neither of which peel my banana — your mileage may vary. Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskowitz’ experiment in beautiful-people Dada Quarterlife came right out of fantastically-successful-and-connected-award-winner left field to land a spot in NBC’s February lineup. But I was kind of thinking of people at a lower level of attainment than master of the message Zwick, the show was shooting or shot before the strike even began and in any event I fully concur with Aaron Barnhart’s ruling that it’s ‘a show that old people might make about young people.’
If you have other examples of good independent webshows made during the strike, send them my way.
Update: Strike TV press liaison Julie Rayhanabad (who’s OK in my book because her one IMDB credit is for a Garret Morris movie) gets back with the following:
Strike TV: Hollywood Unplugged is ongoing. There are a number of productions currently working towards completing material for the online channel - a few are still in preproduction, while others are in active production. We haven’t released anything yet. We will be doing an announcement closer to the release date, with information about the slates that are being released and the talent behind them. The beauty of the Strike TV: Hollywood Unplugged fundraiser is that its about writers doing what they do best, creating, while being proactive during the strike and gaining more experience in creating for the Internet. It’s not really about competing with the networks or the studios, because it’s not about those parts of the industry. It’s about Hollywood being unplugged and seeing what writers can accomplish and what they can experiment with - it’s coming straight from the creative people behind film and television production. Further, it helps raise money for the Writer’s Guild Foundation’s Industry Support Fund, raising money for non-WGA members that have been seriously affected by the strike... There have been a number of online pieces created by members that have been in support of the strike - including Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy), members of the writing staff from The Colbert Report and the Jon Stewart Show, members of the Samantha Who writing staff - just off the top of my head. There’s also the ‘Speechless’ pieces and the ‘Voices4Action’ pieces that are available. Those are all strike-related. Non-strike related, recently, a few series have been purchased that were originally webseries and are now going to be aired on network television. The SCIFI Channel bought a web-series called Sanctuary that they’re now planning on making into a series for the network. Also, I’m sure you already have the information about Quarterlife, which was recently purchased for air on NBC (actually airing this february).