Lights, Camera, Action : Writers and Producers Return to Face a Monumental Task

Marcy Vosburgh and Sandy Sprung, writer-producers for the television series “Married . . . With Children,” came back to their offices at Columbia Pictures Television in Hollywood Monday with a microwave oven, a refrigerator and a freezer. They had long, long hours staring them in the face.

“We are not going anywhere,” Sprung said wryly, explaining that she and her partner had to churn out at least four or five scripts by early October to meet Fox Television’s schedule. “We said goodby to all our friends. ‘Nice knowing you.’ We barely may have time for sex.”

So it went Monday as Hollywood’s writers and producers--relieved but still showing the residual anxiety of months of inactivity--returned to work after settling a crippling 154-day strike by the Writers Guild of America against more than 200 movie and television producers.

It was a day for beginning the chaotic job of gearing up a truncated TV season that, even with the most frantic of efforts, will not start until October or November. But there were few complaints. In an industry where mood swings are a legendary commodity, gloom was on the run.

“The tips are higher and everyone’s super-duper happy,” said Caroline Etcheberria, hostess at Nate ‘n Al’s, a popular Beverly Hills restaurant.

‘It’s Mine’

“Writers are competitive again,” said screenwriter-director Jack Temchin. “I was already told, ‘Don’t write that story--it’s mine.’ Brotherhood is gone.”

Scripts, as though launched from a once-slumbering volcano, were everywhere.

At Barbara’s Place on Santa Monica Boulevard, a script-copying and typing service that had averaged six jobs a day during the strike, 29 jobs flooded in by midday Monday, a number of them from major studios.

At Art’s Deli in Studio City, a popular writer’s hangout where business sagged as the strike grew longer, owner Art Ginsburg had to order 30-dozen more bagels than usual Sunday.

“It’s like they were relieved and could spend money again,” he said.

At Columbia, 300 fans an hour called the switchboard to ask when their favorite shows will go back on the air.

The answer was: wait.

While members of the Writers Guild were able to return to their word processors immediately after voting Sunday to affirm a new contract, many of the 20,000 actors and production crew members, who would normally have reported back to work in June, face another month or more of unemployment.

“It will be six weeks to two months before everything is really at full bore,” said Ken Horton, a senior vice president at Lorimar Television.

That is because workers are hired in phases, with more coming aboard as a TV series gets closer to going before the cameras.

Half-hour comedies can whittle the process down to about four weeks, Horton said, because they can be written, shot and edited faster than one-hour film dramas. The dramas take at least six weeks to get going--longer if they are first-year series that are starting from scratch in assembling a staff.

The typical scenario, said Thomas E. Palmieri Jr., executive vice president at MTM Enterprises, which produces “Newhart,” is for writers, producers, associate producers and office staff to begin work first, as they did Monday. As soon as some stories are formulated, the company can sign on production managers to work up budgets and make arrangements for facilities and equipment and art directors to begin designing or locating the sets that will be used.

Roughly two weeks after that, set decorators, construction foremen, property masters and wardrobe supervisors are called to work to begin organizing their departments. The carpenters and painters who build sets are called soon thereafter. Depending on how long it takes them to finish, which can be several weeks, the chief electrician and his crew are then hired to begin lighting the sets, and assistant prop workers and costumers are brought in to assemble their wares.

Not for perhaps another week--until the week before photography is to begin--are the director, director of photography and editor brought in. The principal actors turn up a few days before shooting for wardrobe fittings. The bulk of the production crew--camera operators, sound technicians, grips--starts work the day that the cameras are ready to roll.

First Steps

At Paramount Studios, the writers for the popular NBC situation comedy “Family Ties” gathered around their brainstorming table and took the first steps in this elephantine process. They asked each other questions: Should they finally move 22-year-old Alex P. Keaton out of his family’s house? Should he get married? Visit Wall Street? Is it too late to liberalize his Reaganite politics just a tad?

The show’s producer-writer, Gary David Goldberg, and his four writers looked like they had made good use of the extra time off. Goldberg was tan. Writer Susan Borowitz left 10 pounds at the Paramount gym.

“I relaxed,” Borowitz said. “I refused to let myself get caught up in the panic. At one point, I even stopped reading the news about it. It had started to dominate my mind.”

At Lorimar Telepictures in Culver City, producer Tom Greene, who has produced such TV series as “Magnum, P.I.” and “Knight Rider,” woke up at 4:30 a.m. to begin calling people in New York and Chicago. When he got to his office, he found his secretary gone, his word-processor missing and 32 calls on his phone answering machine.

“I’m trying to get a temporary secretary--mine went to a 20-year reunion. She didn’t know the strike was going to end. And I don’t know where my computer is,” he said.

“This is really a mess. I’ve just been juggling phone calls and meetings all day,” said Greene, who currently is working on a movie pilot. “I need to get ahold of a makeup specialist. She’s terrific. And I need to get ahold of a wrestler who I think is going to Japan--I’ve got to stop him.

‘Top People’

“You need the top people right now, and everyone wants them. It was like a deli this morning. I had to leave word like a number in the deli for them to call me back,” he said.

Elsewhere on the Lorimar lot, Larry Kasha, one of the producers of “Knot’s Landing,” was trying to figure out how to use a new telephone system.

“I have my directions right on my desk,” he said. “I still have to set up the meetings. We start production on Sept. 12, so I have to get my tush in gear.”

Owners of restaurants near studios said business was not yet back to prestrike levels. Marvin J. Saul, president of Junior’s, a deli near 20th Century Fox Studios in West Los Angeles, said the reason was simple.

“There are not too many writers here today because they are all working their tails off. They have no time to sit in the restaurant and kibitz,” he said.

Many producers did not have to worry about starting from scratch because many writers began working on scripts during their own time as the strike wore on.

“Everybody expects a flood of material this week,” said Robert O. Kaplan, an independent producer.

Cheryl Rhoden, public relations director for the Writer’s Guild, said staff writers were prevented under strike rules from working on scripts during the strike, but writers working on speculation--without a prior agreement with a production company--were allowed to write.

Marginal Businesses

Two weeks ago, Catherine R. Stribling, branch manager for the Bank of Los Angeles in West Hollywood, predicted that dozens of marginal businesses that depend on entertainment industry customers would declare bankruptcy by the year’s end if the strike did not end soon.

Monday, Stribling said many restaurants will probably recover soon and predicted that small service companies, such as script-photocopying stores, will have a little more trouble.

The hardest hit, she said, will be “the writers themselves.”

“Many of them will not make it back to their former economic positions. They have used up their savings, borrowed money and charged up their credit cards, and they will never get back the nearly six months they have lost,” Stribling said.

For those who had no other income during the strike, it will be “a few years, literally,” before they have the same credit standing they once had, she said.

“And look what they were fighting for--residuals that they won’t get until sometime in the future. When I look at the economic hurt, I can’t see that anybody has won from this,” she said.

“No one can go five months without income,” said Jeri Taylor, a member of the Writer’s Guild and producer of “In the Heat of the Night” a new NBC series, as she sat in Dailies, a popular industry restaurant near MGM’s Filmland Corporate Center in Culver City.

“During the strike I spent a lot of days cleaning my closet, cleaning my desk, cleaning my drawers, cleaning my yard and then going back to the closet, which became cleaner and neater than I could possibly be comfortable with. For me to go back to a messy office is a great pleasure.”

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Nina J. Easton, Bob Baker, Victor Valle, Laurie Ochoa, Tammy Sims, Paul Vargas, Guy Aoki, Kristin Olson, Jill Stewart and Paul Rosenfield.