strike
Me! Of all people!
When Bernie and I lived in Napa, we were devoted readers of the St. Helena Star. They had a seemingly endless supply of stories about people who grew up on vineyards, pursued other avenues, and then, surprisingly, at mid-life, found themselves with vineyards of their own, often inherited from their families. The emphasis in these […]
reality
One of the reasons management walked out of the talks with the Guild is that we wouldn’t take reality off of the table. The WGA wants to represent reality writers. And reality writers need us. They’re working sixteen hour days on a flat rate with no overtime! Without a union, they have no protection from […]
Calling Peter Chernin…
At the end of the 1988 debacle, as we were in the midst of capitulating, one of the few clear wins WGA executive director Brian Walton was able to announce was that we now had a “hotline to the C.E.O.s,” he could not emphasize enough just how important and hard won this hotline was. I […]
strike update
Talks have broken down again. Management seems to really hate us. I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing productive happens through the holidays. So I’ll be back at the picket line on Monday, even though I pulled my groin picketing last week. It is my first strike injury, an aggravation of an old basketball injury, and […]
three generations of Schwartzes!
The WGA is starfucking so compulsively, so thoroughly, that they’ve already run through all the actors, and have now turned to balling themselves. Yesterday at CBS Radford, my picket line ground to a crawl so ninety-one year-old Sherwood Schwartz (creator of Gilligan’s Island and the Brady Bunch) could take a lap with his son and […]
Les Moonves
In entertainment news: Nikki Finke at deadlinehollywooddaily.com finally catches up with my suggestion that it might be a good idea to test management’s solidarity (“a reasonable template,” 11/16). And the president of CBS is now, by all indications, a black male. So why isn’t the prime time schedule more diversified?
moral dilemmas all around
Last night, I was at a dinner party for the writers of Lipstick Jungle. We finished writing six episodes before the strike started, and now they’re shooting them in New York. It felt like a scene from the Way We Were–some writers are much more adamant about the strike, others are more casual and have […]
a reasonable template
In 1988, Carsey-Werner made a deal with the WGA during the strike and went back into production. I’ve been asking incessantly on the picket line why something like that doesn’t happen today. A recent Wall Street Journal article poses the same question: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119482950368089597-qZSQTKZ51Qd7BNpglPdeNNbPDDo_20071211.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top It would be nice if some of the few remaining independents stepped […]
St. Crispin’s Day
In 1988, most of the meetings were held at the Hollywood Palladium. Our debonair executive director Brian Walton would get the crowd whipped into a reliable frenzy. Even in defeat, he gave the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” Standing O! At the meetings, there […]
writer’s guild v.i.p.?
I heard there was a sign with those weird words pointing upstairs at the strike meeting at the Convention Center. I haven’t been able to confirm the report, but issues of status have crept onto the picket line, and in ways that cut deeper than John Stamos and unavailable tee shirts. There was a strategic […]
Jack Silbert, curator