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WGA's Biggest Enemy

posted: 9:13 PM, October 29, 2007 - est

A fed up writers’ union hopes to appeal to a sense of fair play. In Hollywood.

By D. Heimpel, LA Weekly

“You get asked by the network to do another season,” 35-year-old Dennis Michael Nemec said last week, “you feel like you are getting traction.” But with his union nudging closer to a potential strike against major studios well equipped to weather a long work stoppage, he says, “The notion that a strike could pull the rug out from under you is very daunting.” As he thinks about the prospect of 100 or more people who work on his show suddenly unemployed around the holidays, he adds, “It certainly doesn’t help me sleep at night.”

Nemec just wants to work. But if the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers decide to fight, it could not only cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars — it could also derail the careers of thousands.

Marshall Goldberg, a writer who, unlike his colleagues, found writing work after the long and painful 1988 writers’ strike, sees a walkout as almost inevitable, saying, “To make an omelet you have to break some eggs.” Still, he’s worried about the “sacrifices and costs. It’s not just dollars, it’s career momentum.”

The writers’ key goals, as they approach the October 31 expiration of the three-year agreement between the guild and the alliance, are to resist numerous rollbacks sought by the producers to make sure they get a fair shake on new media, and to rectify the WGA’s hasty acceptance, years ago, of a pay formula for writers’ work that went to video. That deal provided the writers residuals based on just 20 percent of gross sales. Distributors kept the lion’s share of the money from gross sales — an acknowledgment of the then-high price of manufacturing videos. But as profits for video, DVD and now downloads have shot up and the price of manufacturing has dropped dramatically, the writers’ cut has stayed the same.

“The guild’s loudness today comes from a sense of being screwed on the residual formula for video,” an insider with extensive negotiation experience says. With the Internet promising to revolutionize content delivery, writers want to be sure they don’t get screwed again.

read on . . .

» categories: D. Heimpel | Hollywood

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