Lights, Camera, Action : Writers, Producers Now 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 on 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, won’t 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.

To some, even the five-month long walkout looked good in retrospect.

“I kind of enjoyed the strike,” said Terry Black, 33, of Costa Mesa. Black, who wrote the comedy-thriller “Dead Heat,” was spared much of the tedium of walking picket lines in Hollywood because the guild, in a bow to traffic congestion, only required its Orange County members to show up once or twice a month.

“Exciting was the wrong word for it. It was more of a party atmosphere,” Black said of his occasional picketing, which he confided was his first labor action. He said, however, that the strike had fallen short of cinematic visions of labor strife:

“I kept waiting for people to link arms and throw broken bottles, but it never happened,” Black said. “It’s not that I expected to see violence, but I would have hoped that people could at least have been rude on the picket lines. Instead they were waving to (management) people coming into the studios.”

‘It Was Pretty Dull’

Huntington Beach resident Steve Sharon, who wrote the Dirty Harry movie “The Dead Pool,” had less fun on the picket lines, but recalled one exciting event: “It was pretty dull walking back and forth, although there was a bomb threat one day when I was at Disney, so we got to stop picketing early,” said Sharon, 32.

Now that the strike is over, though, it was back to business for Sharon, and the other six or so active Orange County guild members. “I’m just waiting to get some meetings set up,” Sharon said.

Up in Hollywood, though, the action had already begun.

“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.

29 Jobs Flooded In

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 mid-day Monday, a number of them from major studios.

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

Workers Hired in Phases

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

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.

Ready to Roll

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.

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,” said Borowitz. “I refused to let myself get caught up in the panic. At one point I even stopped reading the news about it.”

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.

Juggling Phone Calls

“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 a hold of a makeup specialist. She’s terrific. And I need to get a hold of a wrestler who I think is going to Japan--I’ve got to stop him. 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.”

Owners of restaurants near studios said business was not yet back to pre-strike 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 on their own time as the strike wore on.

Some Writers Wrote

Cheryl Rhoden, public relations director for the Writers 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.

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.

Credit Damaged

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.”

“No one can go five months without income,” said Jeri Taylor, a member of the writers 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.”

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