Writers Guild Authorizes Movie and TV Strike

Writers Guild of America members voted overwhelmingly to reject a contract offer and authorize a strike against the film and television industry, guild officials said Wednesday.

However, a strike will not necessarily start immediately, said Mona Mangen, executive director of the guild’s East Coast office.

She said guild officials will meet briefly late this afternoon with representatives of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and CBS, NBC and ABC.

Management had offered a three-year contract that guild officials had urged the membership to reject.

“We want to see if they (management) want to go to the table again,” she said, addding that the guild will not wait long to call a strike if it decides one is necessary.

“We don’t know,” she said, when asked when a strike decision would be made. “We’ll strike when we feel it’s best for us.”

She spoke shortly after a two-hour closed-door meeting at the Warwick Hotel here, attended by an estimated 350 guild members voting on the alliance’s proposal and the guild’s strike authorization.

A similar vote was taken Tuesday in Los Angeles, but the results were withheld until after Wednesday’s meeting.

The combined vote was 2,317 to authorize a strike, with only 112 in opposition. The vote to reject the alliance contract offer was 2,335 with 76 voting to accept.

The guild declined to make available separate breakdowns for the East and West Coast vote totals, although a spokesman said 93% of those voting in the East supported authorizing a strike, with 95.6% of those in the West doing likewise.

No further negotiations had been planned. But today’s meeting was requested by alliance President J. Nicholas Counter III in a call made just hours before Wednesday’s vote, Mangen said.

Any walkout would not affect the approximately 600 guild members working in news operations at CBS and ABC. They agreed to new contracts last year after walkouts lasting six weeks. NBC news staffers are represented by a different union.

The guild says it has 3,100 members here and 6,500 in Los Angeles.

If there is a walkout, it would be the second in three years by the guild, which is one of the most militant unions in the entertainment industry.

The major points in dispute include payments for TV programs sold overseas; residual payments on syndicated reruns of one-hour episodes of TV series; so-called “overscale” payments for scripts, and “creative rights” giving writers more control over the results of their work.

In 1985, a majority of guild members voted to reject the alliance’s offer of that year. They approved a strike, and were promptly called out. The walkout lasted two weeks. A new contract offer later was made and approved.

The first effect of a guild walkout would be on daily TV shows--soap operas, game shows and such talk-comedy shows as NBC’s “Tonight” with Johnny Carson and “Late Night With David Letterman.”

A long strike also would affect theatrical film production and prime-time TV series. A three-month guild walkout in 1981 delayed the start of the new TV season that year by two months.

The guild’s old contract with the networks and the alliance’s 200 members--which include the major Hollywood studios--expired shortly after midnight Tuesday.

Contract talks broke off Tuesday afternoon, with no serious progress reported despite a marathon 21-hour bargaining session in Los Angeles that lasted until 7:15 a.m. Tuesday.

Counter said earlier Wednesday that an official of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service in Los Angeles had called him, seeking to help resolve the dispute, but “nothing has been set up.”

‘Provoke a Strike’

The guild, while expressing hope a strike can be avoided, said the last offer of the alliance “seems to be designed to provoke a strike.”

“We’re very disappointed,” Counter said Wednesday in giving his reaction to the guild’s call for its members to reject the contract offer and approve a strike. “We think we made a fair and reasonable offer.”

There was sharp disagreement on that from Los Angeles screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, who during the guild’s last strike was in a dissident guild group whose members called themselves The Union Blues.

Before the 1985 walkout, his group had urged ratification of the alliance’s contract offer, unsuccessfully arguing that it was as good a contract as could be negotiated at that time.

Chetwynd, in a phone interview from Los Angeles, said he doesn’t feel that way about the alliance’s current proposal: “It’s a bad offer.” He also said he had been among those who voted against it Tuesday night.

Before and during the 1985 strike, he said, there were rifts among guild members in Los Angeles. Not now, he said, adding: “I’ve never seen a more united guild.”