Liberal bias: Been there, done that.What about literary bias?Since it began last November, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike in Hollywood has been spun as a familiar David-versus-Goliath tale: the writers as 12,000 plucky heroes, the entertainment conglomerates as merciless giants.
By contrast, no less an eminence than “Entertainment Tonight” host Mary Hart declared last fall that by shutting down Broadway productions, those erstwhile stagehand strikers were breaking the hearts of untold thousands of New York City tourists. But, lo, she stood foursquare with the writers.
Talks between the WGA and entertainment company reps have been stalled for the past month. There is, as of this writing, no deal at hand, and the thought of the first-ever cancellation of the Oscars ceremony is harder to bear than even the sight of late-night talk show hosts in beards.
Throughout, there have been mildly lip-bitten reports about the strike’s impact on so-called downscale workers — nonwriters such as hair and makeup artists who don’t have previously signed contracts or long-term projects to fall back on.
Just before the ho-hum, perfunctory press conference that stood in for this year’s Golden Globes ceremony, CNN ran a report on the sad fate of the designers, caterers and party planners who took the economic hit of the dramatic foreshortening. “A year’s worth of work down the drain,” lamented, for instance, Michael O’Connor of Platinum Guild International. (No actors to sport the jewels, you see.)
At Newsgroper.com, “Katie Couric” appeared to have turned on the strikers, calling them “ungrateful” and boasting that, “Just because I lost my writers doesn’t mean I can’t craft my own poorly researched, totally innocuous, hopelessly bland nonquestions.”
The column was, of course, a parody.
Everyone, it seems, is with the writers, not least actors. With the glamless Golden Globes already history, most of the actors say they’ll forgo next month’s Oscars ceremony, too, rather than cross the writers’ picket line. That means, as it must, no red-carpet adulation, no windy, weepy speeches and no swag-bag goodies.
For actors, one imagines, solidarity with the writers truly will have been a sacrifice.
But consider, as well, the writers’ most natural constituency: The media, which is full of … writers. And not a few of those writers — especially within the entertainment press — are would-be screenwriters who’d like nothing better than to kiss goodbye the grind of journalistic hackdom and write for the movies … which presupposes a union card from the WGA.
The possibility of objectivity here is, shall we say, remote.
There are, to be sure, the merits of the writers’ case: As movie and television producers move more and more of their content online, the Writers Guild wants to ensure its members receive a fair share of the action in this emerging market.
Over its mass grave will it repeat the same mistake it made at the advent of DVD technology, when the writers struck a bargain of four-cents per DVD sale. They want to double that compensation, incidentally, in addition to hashing out the terms of payment for online content.
Yet this is no simple matter of labor equity.
In Variety magazine’s estimation, it’s not just the writers who face long odds; the movie and TV businesses together have been dwarfed in the complex scheme of entertainment company portfolios. Movies and TV are, in reality, just chump change: “Hollywood is a mere plaything of the international congloms, and Hollywood product represents a relatively minor sector of the product line.”
Such a striking disparity of scale renders the writers all the more sympathetic, even if they don’t look, on the surface, like, well, sympathetic laborers.
“It’s not your average picket line,” reported Peter Howell of the Toronto Star. “You might not find blue-collar workers drinking Starbucks coffees or talking about existentialism outside a struck General Motors plant. But the brainy bards of the WGA are no less firm in their resolve.”
Quick, somebody cue up “We Shall Overcome.”
Small and insignificant though movies and television shows may be to the bottom line of entertainment conglomerates, that doesn’t mean those divisions have a blank check.
As Michael Hirschorn, a VH1 executive and occasional culture critic at the Atlantic Monthly, has noted, networks spend on average $7 million apiece developing TV pilots, for a total of up to $200 million a season.
At a time when the viewership of reality shows like “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars” far outpace “hits” such as the CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men,” such free-spending ways will end sooner rather than later.
Considered bloodlessly, the WGA’s plight is not so much that studio executives are trying to hoard future online revenues — though that certainly may be the case. It’s that profits from writer-driven entertainment, at least on television, will become an ever-shrinking pie.
That really is a shame.
And, no, I don’t have a script I’m trying to sell.
Or a stone to sling.
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