Strike

The days were largely interchangeable, beginning in darkness at 5:30 a.m. at Paramount’s Van Ness gate. Many drivers — both Teamsters and regular motorists — stopped to ask how negotiations were going. Since there’s a press blackout, we have no official information. But two days of talking in rooms beats two days of not talking, so that’s something.

Today, I had a great conversation with [Jed Weintrob](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0918554/), whose movie shot in a live-action 3D format. At the risk of invoking a Geek Alert banner, the technology sounds both fantastic and daunting, forcing filmmakers to confront a range of issues I hadn’t considered. In editing, for example, you might choose to cut the “left eye” or the “right eye” footage, but ultimately you’re going to need to watch each cut in converged 3D, since depth changes the perceived speed of shots.

Yesterday was largely about USC. Two current cinema students joined the line, mindful that whatever deal is reached in this strike will likely be the deal they’re working under for the next 20 years. Dana, a recent grad, came seeking validation of her plans for writer-directordom — specifically, whether to heed others’ advice to spec TV. As a general rule, I think most aspiring screenwriters should be ready to write for television, if only because there are many more episodes of TV shot than features. But in Dana’s case, she’s not a TV enthusiast in the slightest. Forcing herself to spec a series she wouldn’t watch is an invitation to misery, both for writer and reader. She’s better off shooting another short film, which she promised to do soon.

I got an email yesterday from a friend (and USC classmate) who works as an editor on a TV show. He was upset that in my blogging about the strike, I hadn’t talked about the many below-the-line crew members who have lost (or will soon be losing) their jobs as a result of production stopping. The politics and turf wars between the various guilds and unions are far too complex to explain here, ((This is my convenient way of ducking out of it, and hoping Craig Mazin will pick up the torch.)) but suffice to say that many of the non-writing, non-acting folks who are integral to making movies and television feel that the WGA was cavalier in calling the strike.

The thing is, we’ll never know. There were a hundred different ways it could have played out, so to label any event “necessary” or “unnecessary” presumes an impossible combination of hindsight and foresight; not only are you declaring yourself certain of all the facts as they stood, but also that a given change would have had a given effect. Alternative history can make for compelling reading, but it doesn’t get people back to work any sooner. ((But if we’re playing with alternative histories, let’s consider what could have happened had the WGA kept working without a contract until the SAG contract expired, at which point the aligned guilds would have had tremendous leverage. There would have been a de facto strike regardless, as studios would have curtailed production on anything that couldn’t be finished before the SAG expiration date. It would have also been summer, outside of the prime TV season, so the strike’s impact would have been considerably delayed.))

The better question — the question I asked my friend the editor — is whether there’s anything he’d strike for, even knowing that it would (at least in the short term) hurt him, his colleagues and others inside and outside of his industry. If the answer is “no,” that a strike is never an option, then he should be prepared to lose his health, pension, and other benefits. Because that’s how they were won.

My singular focus on the writers can seem insensitive to others affected by the strike. But this blog is about the profession of screenwriting, which for the past four weeks has been profoundly changed. So that’s all I’m trying to document. I’m happy to have readers from many fields inside and outside of the industry, and I hope that my writing about the strike has shed some light on the writers’ perspective.