The Big Picture: It’s a writers’ strike, but actors play a big role
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The Big Picture / Patrick Goldstein
AT the start of the writers strike last November, everyone had a good laugh when Entertainment Weekly did a big cover story illustrated entirely with pictures, not of writers, but TV stars like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Marg Helgenberger and ‘Tonight Show’ host Jay Leno. (The magazine did run a photo of ’30 Rock’ creator Tina Fey, but she was identified as ‘showing her solidarity’ with the strikers, not as one of their own.)
As it turns out, the celeb-conscious magazine was simply ahead of the curve. The real story behind the demise of the Golden Globes earlier this week is that the writers strike has quietly metamorphosed into the story of how Hollywood is being shut down by two unions, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. This unprecedented guild alliance not only upended the Globes and promises to wreak havoc with the Oscars, but has Hollywood’s studio overlords re-evaluating their dismissals of the WGA as a bunch of radicals and crackpots too hapless to engineer a successful labor stoppage.