Directors End Brief Strike in L.A., N.Y.

Directors Guild of America negotiators settled their contract dispute with movie and TV producers early this morning after the guild launched a strike that lasted three hours in New York and only minutes in Los Angeles.

The 8,500-member guild also reached agreement with NBC but continues to negotiate on new contracts with CBS and ABC. None of the networks were struck this morning.

The tentative settlement averts a strike/lockout that threatened to virtually shut down the American entertainment industry.

At an early morning press conference, officials for both the directors and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), a bargaining group for more than 200 companies, both appeared pleased with the proposed three-year contract. “It’s a win-win agreement,” alliance President J. Nicholas Counter III said.

The contract, which must be approved by guild members--directors and their assistants--would keep most residual payments intact despite earlier demands by producers that residuals be virtually eliminated as a cost-saving step. Residuals are payments made to directors and others when movies and TV shows are rerun or sold on cassettes.

The settlement came at 6:05 a.m. PDT after an all-night bargaining session that climaxed at 5 a.m. when producers withdrew a demand for rollbacks of residual payments for movies shown on pay-per-view television.

“They broke the logjam,” guild President Gilbert Cates said of the producer’s move on pay-per-view.

The proposed contract gives directors an immediate 5% increase in basic pay, with another 5% increase in 18 months.

In one important change, the agreement would allow employers to reduce some residuals paid on hourlong TV programs sold into syndication. But it would also give directors higher residuals than at present on the most successful syndicated shows.

Cates and Counter told reporters that the directors’ 1986 residual payments, which totaled about $50 million, would actually have been higher under the new contract.

The higher payments would have resulted, they said, because the new payment structure for hourlong TV shows such as “Miami Vice” and “Scarecrow & Mrs. King” would have made it easier for producers to get those shows into the syndication market, thereby increasing the total residual pool.

The guild’s old contract expired June 30, but directors and their assistants had continued to work until they launched a brief selective strike--the first in the DGA’s 51-year history--against Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros. here and in New York this morning at 6 a.m.

Guild members briefly picketed the Burbank Studios, where Columbia and Warner are based, before receiving word of the last-minute settlement. The major studios and networks had threatened to lock out all guild members if the selective strike was launched.