Monday, Nov. 12, 2007: strike day 8

Quote of the day: "How can you make a movie without a writer?" asks manager Patty Detroit. "You can't!"

Studios: What to shoot amid strike? (Variety)

Studios that scrambled to stockpile scripts in advance of the writers strike are now forced into a Darwinian dilemma: They must pick the fittest projects, and perhaps scuttle the rest.

...Every production chief faces the anxiety-filled challenge of actually proceeding with greenlit projects that will shoot under unprecedented duress, and "bubble" projects that have solid scripts but incomplete casting.

...A producer who has five films on the bubble, however, estimates that as many as 75% of the "go" projects are actually "up in the air." Inevitably, some will end up on hold or the chopping block.

How Mr. Burns would Handle The Strike (from Ken Levine via writers-strike.blogspot.com)

BURNS: Smithers! What is that infernal racket outside?

SMITHERS: There’s a big rally. The writers are striking.

BURNS: Writers?! I have writers?

SMITHERS: Yes, sir. Remember you bought that network and studio so you’d get invited to David Geffen’s Passover Seder?...

SMITHERS: We could perhaps negotiate with them?

BURNS: What?! When I could let them suffer, lose their saving and homes instead? What good is busting the anti-trust laws if I can’t squash the defenseless?...

Solidarity (from Digby's Hullabaloo)

The derisive tone much of the media has taken to the strike is nothing new, by the way. Just a few weeks back when the UAW went on strike against GM, Jim Cramer was apoplectic on Hardball screaming, "They have to break this union! They have to break this union!"(and Chris Salt-Of-The-Earth Matthews nodded in agreement.)

And they have always been especially hostile to the Hollywood unions, which were forged back in the day with battles in the streets. The right to organize in the entertainment business was extremely hard won and in many cases those who fought it were later blacklisted as commies for their trouble. It's never been frivolous...

Perhaps the seminal event in Hollywood organizing history is called "The War for Warner Brothers"...

Why We Strike (The New Yorker)

We are not cogs in some machine. While many of today’s blockbusters are written by that machine, we are not cogs in it, despite having originally written all the dialogue and characters and plot that this machine endlessly recombines and maximizes. When a bitter cop with a shattered family and a monkey on his back flees a narco-terrorist’s fireball while cracking that he’s getting too old for this, some writer wrote some parts of that, some time back.

Nor are we trained chimps. The last decent show written by chimps was “Jojo’s Poop Party,” which was largely improvised.

OUR DEMANDS: An end to the lying. Just kidding. We recognize that, without lying, Management would be unable to exhale and would thus perish. However, we are asking for a manifold increase in White Lies about how we are brilliant geniuses and the like, and a corresponding decrease in Brown Lies, about what might happen in the future.

Piracy and the Writers' Strike (from the blog "Philosopher's Playground")

When you illegally download something and the network doesn't get any money for it, they call it piracy. But when you download something or watch streaming video with commercials and the writers don't get any money for it, the networks call it promotion.

Writers' strike: Will it scuttle press tour? (from TV Barn)

The reason the networks want out, according to Ben Grossman in Broadcasting & Cable, is that presenting midseason shows is "not worth the costs that can total anywhere from $250,000-$500,000 per broadcast network for each one-day event."

Hollywood strike underlines bleak outlook for movie business

...the pot of money that the producers and writers are fighting over may have already been pocketed by the entertainment industry's biggest talent.

That is the conclusion of a surprisingly bleak new assessment of financial dynamics in the movie industry titled "Do Movies Make Money?" The researchers' answer: not any more.

The report, by the research company Global Media Intelligence in association with its partner Merrill Lynch, concludes that much of the income - past and future - that studios and writers have been fighting about has already gone to the biggest stars, directors and producers in the form of ballooning participation deals. A participation is a share in the gross revenue, not the profit, of a movie.

And a pointed comment on the above at muditajournal.com:

Translation: If the stars who are so “sympathetic” to the writers want to help the writers’ plight, they should offer to take a pay cut themselves. If anybody can afford to trim their bottom line, it’s the stars making $20 million for each movie they appear in.