Deals offer hope, not much more

On Monday, the striking Writers Guild of America announced interim deals with Spyglass Entertainment and Media Rights Capital that allow its members to write on those companies’ projects. These agreements join previous one-off deals with Worldwide Pants Inc., the Weinstein Co. and United Artists in opening up a few avenues for striking writers to get back to work under new contract conditions that the guild has been seeking from their studio and network employers through the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

It’s a development that has many writers hopeful. “It just shows that we have a point that is being taken seriously in some quarters in Hollywood,” says Joel Cohen (“Toy Story”).

The immediate result was a predictable one. While writers with assignments at those companies simply went back to work, the rumor going around the agencies last week was that UA alone received 2,500 screenplay submissions in the first 48 hours after reopening for business. (While downplaying that number, a UA spokesman allows that “there have been lots and lots of scripts coming in,” while the Weinstein Co. says it has seen “a significant bump since Friday’s official announcement.”)

While surely gratifying to those studios, who have the added PR benefit of “helping the industry get back to work,” the influx will mostly be wasted. UA, for example, has only half a dozen projects in active development and is unlikely to suddenly greenlight a bunch of material. (Though one comedy writing team was invited to submit screenplays with the guidance that “Tom wants to smile.” Meaning, Cruise.)

As one skeptical agent points out, it’s not like UA doesn’t know which writers it wants to work. Actors, directors and producers with strike-stymied movies now theoretically have their choice of A-list rewriting talent. The question is whether these sought-after writers will publicly take a job while the rest of their WGA brethren weather the strike unemployed.

“Certain high-profile writers may wait to see who else jumps in the fray,” says William Morris agent Rob Carlson.

Even if more interim deals are signed, the amount of potential material would be relatively paltry compared to the huge open-assignment slates of the major studios. And if a hypothetical Directors Guild of America deal doesn’t end the strike (and I have my doubts that the WGA and Screen Actors Guild will support a DGA arrangement), all of these mini-studios and production companies will still have only a small window to get scripts in shape for a mid-March start date. Any production that started filming after that could get knee-capped by an actors strike at the end of June, when the SAG contract is up.

The recent flood of canceled overall TV deals at the major networks (Warner Bros. TV, Fox TV, CBS Paramount TV) could mean a boost in prominence for a company like MRC, which plans to move into television. But practically speaking, features, unlike TV, have years-long lead times. Which means that the strike would have to go on long enough for the major studios to burn through everything in their content bullpen before any independent company could truly claim an advantage with the script work provided by interim-deal writers.

For now, everyone is holding their breath while waiting to see if a DGA deal will push a resolution with the writers before the Feb. 24 Oscar telecast implodes. So thoughts of any potential long-term changes in the way the town does business are being disregarded. (For its part, the AMPTP writes off the interim deals as “meaningless” by suggesting that UA, et al. signed them only because of their short-term nature.)

“The interim deals are good, but everybody’s focused on how do we get the bigger issue resolved,” says Carlson. “Everything else is a bit of a Band-Aid.”

“I don’t think it’s permanent,” says one former agent, who notes that many of the smaller companies have strategic partnerships with the major studios that they wouldn’t want to jeopardize. “When it’s all said and done, it’s all going to revert back to the same hierarchy. Because really, at the end of the day, we all want to put our people where they’re going to get paid the most.

“Eventually everybody came home from Canada after the Vietnam War.”

Double feature at Sundance

The latest edition of the Sundance Film Festival opens Thursday with the rare distinction of including two films by a single screenwriter. Howard A. Rodman, a USC writing professor and WGA board member, wrote both “August,” an original screenplay directed by Austin Chick (“XX/XY”), and “Savage Grace,” a true crime adaptation directed by Tom Kalin (“Swoon”) that premiered in Cannes last year.

“It certainly wasn’t planned,” says Rodman over a bowl of French onion soup outside a Venice cafe. “It wasn’t like I woke up one morning and said, ‘I’m gonna write a film for Sundance. . . . Oh, I’ll write two.’ [This is] just when the piggies got fat enough to come to market.”

Rodman’s relationship with the festival goes back 20 years. His first produced feature, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” premiered there in 2000, and he’s been an advisor at the Sundance Institute’s vaunted screenwriting lab. Though the festival has changed a lot since the first year he attended, it retains a special relevance for him.

“For me it’s always been a place where you can see films that a) you might not see any other way, and b) might conceivably change your life,” says Rodman, who is hoping to secure distribution for “August” in Park City. “As opposed to films that you walk out of and say, ‘That was well made,’ or, ‘That wasn’t so well made.’ ”

“August” follows the fraying relationship of two brothers as their dot-com company teeters in the weeks before 9/11. Rodman drew some of its modern noir flavor from his childhood love of pulp crime novelists like David Goodis (whose novel “Down There” became the 1960 Truffaut thriller “Shoot the Piano Player”) as well as his own “scribbling rivalry” (insert groan here) with his younger half-brother, also a writer.

“Savage Grace,” based on the nonfiction book by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, tells the too-bizarre-to-have-been-made-up story of the depraved Barbara Daly Baekeland murder in 1972 London. Rodman likens the film’s shocking, darkly funny tone to that of Nicholas Kazan’s Oscar-nominated “Reversal of Fortune” script, and, like “August,” it allowed Rodman to explore the spectacular implosion of a family in crisis.

“I like movies where the world around people falls apart and then they have to deal with it -- that’s fun for me,” says Rodman. “I know that sounds a little sad and sadistic, but . . . for my characters I try to make it a real, real bad day.”

WGA honors female writers

A word about women screenwriters.

It’s been an especially noteworthy week for honoring their talents, too often underused and underpraised.

On Thursday, the WGA cited three women in its original screenplay nominations: Tamara Jenkins for “The Savages,” Diablo Cody for “Juno” and Nancy Oliver for “Lars and the Real Girl.” (Adrienne Shelly’s original screenplay “Waitress” could have easily made the cut, as well as Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her” in the adapted category.)

Diana Ossana, Sofia Coppola, Shari Springer Berman, Emma Thompson, Jane Campion and Callie Khouri have all won the WGA award in the last two decades, and several years -- 2004, 1994, 1992 -- had more total women nominated (many were co-writers). But never have there been three solo voce screenplays written by women nominated in the same year, which speaks to a welcome surge of distinctive female voices receiving recognition.

Even though the WGA has announced that there will be no awards show this year without a resolution to the strike, I’ll be hoisting a pomegranate martini to you wonderful, ink-stained ladies anyway. (Winners will be announced Feb. 9.)

And one last notable development: The studio marketers behind the romantic comedy “27 Dresses,” opening Friday, wisely chose to play up its greatest selling point. The ads headline their pitch: “From the screenwriter of ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ . . .” -- which would be Aline Brosh McKenna, last year’s only female WGA award nominee.

Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. Please email any tips or comments to fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.