Scribes and Stars Take Stands: What’s at Stake and What It Means for Your Favorite Shows
[IMG:L]An A-list Hollywood actress on one of TV’s most popular primetime series who shall otherwise remain anonymous found herself in a unenviable situation earlier this week when Hollywood’s striking writers refused to show up to work.
Left without the benefit of her scribes’ comedy chops to punch up a scene she was filming on set as they so typically do, she found herself putting her not-too-tested improv instincts to work to locate the laughs. And even though the showrunner and the writing staff’s departure had left her working without a net, she was commiserating with them just moments later when she delivered sodas to the team as they picketed outside the studio gates.
And that, in a nutshell, is how Hollywood was hobbling along in the first week after a crippling walkout by the very fuel that drives the engine of the entertainment world. The Writers Guild of America called for a full-scale strike during negotiations for lucrative residuals from a burgeoning new media market that includes DVDs, computer downloads, cell phone views and even technologies yet to exist.
The late-night talk shows were the first casualties, shuttering production as the week began, while TV series up and down the dial scrambled to finish shooting as many episodes as they could, often with unpolished scripts. Most primetime casts and crews showed up for whatever work was left on their shows lest they be considered in breach of contract–only a few, like the actors from The Office, decided not to show altogether–and wondered just how publicly to support the men and women who literally put words in their mouths.
Studios used the slowdown to trim their own corporate fat and negate lucrative production deals. Agents and managers continued to quietly take informal meetings in which they weren’t allowed to actually pitch any of their writers’ wares, while the movie industry movers and shakers anxiously eyed the entire scene and wondered just how long it would be before the slowdown impacted progress on their own big-screen projects.
Meanwhile, the town’s top writing talent stepped away from their desks and laptops to tote picket signs outside studio gates and encourage passing motorists to honk in support.
I Walk the Line
“We’re not working, so it’s important that we get our faces out here and our message out here,” said Lost executive producer Damon Lindelof, whom Hollywood.com found carrying a sign outside the Disney/ABC lot. “I’ll be picketing as long as we’re on strike and wherever the guild organizes us. We’re here today, tomorrow.”[PAGEBREAK][IMG:L]”We’re writers first,” agreed Scrubs executive producer Bill Lawrence, who was also on the line. “I’m going to be here every day.” Either of the men could have continued to work on their shows in their roles as producers, but opted for time in the trenches. “Damon and I, you’ll never catch either of us complaining about this because we’re so lucky and we aren’t the rank-and-file of the Writers Guild. We’re people that essentially lightning struck and we got to win the lottery so I’m sticking it out until the end.”
“I think on some level, there’s a direct equation between the amount of commitment people show and how quickly this goes away,” Lawrence said, “so I’m going to be out here all the time.”
Uncertainty is the prevailing mood both inside and outside the studio gates. “We’re either running a sprint or a marathon,” said Lindelof. “We just don’t know which.” He said the turning point is already looming, where both sides will determine “is this sort of a nuisance that we had to deal with for a week, or is this our new life? The real effects of a writer’s strike are being felt immediately, I think, but they’ll be felt very profoundly in about two months when all of television shuts down and they lose pilot season.”
“As a young writer, I don’t have the kind of big bucks saved up that a lot of people do,” said Andy Schwartz, a rookie Scrubs scribe and the grandson of legendary TV producer Sherwood Schwartz (The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island).”
“I might have to actually do other work, freelancing at other different places, non-writing obviously,” said Schwartz. “I’m writing a play because that’s something that I can put on myself. It won’t necessarily cost me. I made short films in the past and I would love to do a short film, which is also totally legal, but that costs a lot of money. It’s probably not the best idea to spend money that I don’t have.”
Outside the nearby Warner Bros. lot, veteran ER showrunner David Zabel also walked the picket line, largely because he felt the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers was not negotiating reasonably with the Writers Guild. “If the AMPTP companies decide they want to really talk, then a lot of us showrunners have agreed we would continue to do our jobs if there was a real negotiation going on,” Zabel told Hollywood.com, “but that hasn’t happened.”
“They’re saying, ‘We’re going to give you zero on the internet forever.'” Zabel continued. “That’s just not a viable position and anybody who understands that realizes that it would turn writers into paupers in 15 or 20 years.”
[IMG:R]”I think that obviously the CEOs are well aware that the business has changed dramatically,” agreed Lindelof. “Two and a half years ago, I walked into an Apple store and saw Lost and Desperate Housewives and Grey’s all over the place in signage and nobody had thought to tell [Lost producers] J.J. [Abrams] or Carlton [Cuse] or myself that this was happening. So the companies are well aware that the future of the business is in new media. Now we just have to catch up with them.”
Sonya Gay Bourne, the chair of the Committee of Women Writers at WGA, said it was inspiring to have the top writer-producers in lockstep with the writers. “It’s extraordinary to watch people like [Grey’s Anatomy creator] Shonda Rhimes, people like [Private Practice showrunner] Marti Noxon, a lot of the women that have been climbing the ranks in television very quickly for the last five or six years, to see so many of those women and men come out and essentially stand with us knowing that it’s going to shut down their shows.”
Still, despite the strides women writers have made based on their talent, Bourne said they weren’t above using their femininity to further their current cause. “Some of us ladies from our committee, we were going to do bikinis today to try and stop those last few Teamsters [from crossing the picket line], but based on the weather we had to abandon that. We may bring the bikinis out tomorrow, so you never know.”
Watching the whole process carefully is the City of Los Angeles, where the entire Industry-dependent town could experience devastating economic consequences if the strike drags out. “The financial cost in 1988 with a 22-week strike was a $500 million cost to the L.A. economy,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told Hollywood.com. “It’s big.”
[IMG:R]”I’ve said to the parties that they need to go back to the table,” Villaraigosa said. “You’re never going to resolve this strike when people aren’t talking, when they’re not at the table. It’s no guarantee that you’ll resolve the strike or come to agreement, but one thing’s for sure: if you’re not talking you won’t.”
“Clearly there’s a large gap between both sides–about a billion dollars in economics,” the mayor explained. “I’ve offered my services as a mediator. I’ve mediated a number of strikes in this town, long before I was even mayor. But the parties have got to want you in, and they’ve got to be close enough to what makes sense, and they’ve got to want an agreement.”
The Stars Respond
Hollywood’s famous actors have had to toe a tricky line in the wake of the strike. Certainly many of them, like the TV showrunners, draw salaries that are astronomically higher than the average writer in film or TV. But also like the writers, a vast majority of actors live modestly, and they recognize that their own guild will be soon dealing with similar issues regarding new media residuals.[PAGEBREAK][IMG:L]Actors have, by and large, been obligated to show up to continue production on their various projects, lest they risk violating their contracts, but many of them have also lent public support to the writers.
On Monday 30 Rock’s Tina Fey, a writer-producer as well as an actress, was among the first celebrities to walk a picket line with her writers. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose husband is a writer, joined picketers Tuesday outside a home in Toluca Lake where Desperate Housewives was being filmed, while the show’s Eva Longoria delivered pizzas to that picket line and grew teary eyed when criticized for continuing to work and finding her gift rejected.
On Wednesday Grey’s Anatomy stars Patrick Dempsey, Katherine Heigl, Ellen Pompeo, Sandra Oh and T.R. Knight toted protest signs with the writers outside Prospect Studios where the show is filmed, while ER stars John Stamos, Maura Tierney and Mekhi Phifer protested outside Warner Bros. Television Studios.
“I think it’s always dangerous when you have a strike,” Patrick Dempsey told Hollywood.com a day before the strike was called. “I remember the strike in ’88 and it’s damaging, financially, to the state and everybody involved. Certainly the supporting businesses around this industry are going to get hit. The people that are living paycheck to paycheck with families, it’s going to be devastating for them. It’s tragic.”
Kelsey Grammer joined 3,500 writers and their supporters–including Louis-Dreyfus and Longoria–at a massive rally in Los Angeles’ Century City on Friday. On the East Coast, Robin Williams, Tim Robbins, David Duchovny, Holly Hunter, Roseanne Barr and Julianne Moore attended a writers’ rally at New York’s Columbus Circle.
Jay Leno rolled up on one of his motorcycles to deliver donuts to strikers outside NBC’s Burbank headquarters–Leno’s refusal to cross the picket line has prompted the peacock network to consider firing The Tonight Show’s nonwriting staff, or possibly soldier on with guest hosts. Jon Stewart has suggested he may pay his striking writers out of his own pocket.
Other stars like Ellen Degeneres have provoked a small firestorm by continuing to keep their shows on the air without writers.
[IMG:R]”The real problem is how do you define the new technology?” wondered Dempsey. “How do you know where that is going to go? Everybody deserves a piece of the pie. I just hope that greed doesn’t get in the way, but it’s Hollywood, so who knows?”
“It kind of feels like the last day of high school and we’re signing each other’s yearbooks ‘Okay, have a good summer,” said Masi Oka of the slightly forced lightheartedness on the set of Heroes. “The biggest effect is if you go to our offices right now there are no writers there. It’s like a ghost town.
“The hardest, I think, is on our crew members,” said Oka, “because they’re the below the line folks, they have nothing to gain from this strike whichever way it turns out, whatever the result is. So my heart goes out to them, and especially our fans, who are going to be missing out on a great television season.”
“This is something that has to happen, and we can support our writers while still finishing the episodes that they worked hard enough to finish,” said Ugly Betty’s Becki Newton. “They were dedicated and wrote a few extra scripts in anticipation of this happening and so we’re still business as usual in some ways. We’re just trying to do these next few episodes as well as we possibly can, and then we’ll see what happens from there.
“Our show is what it is because of the writing,” Newton said. “Without our writers it’s not going to be Ugly Betty, so we’re really grateful to them and support them.”
The actors also recognize that the WGA’s progress at the negotiating table is directly linked to their own future–with the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild of Amerca entering similar negotiations next year, the writers achievements will set a precedent–or, if their strike continues, actors and directors will follow suit, essentially shutting down all production in Hollywood.
“If we don’t have a resolution by May then everybody else goes on strike,” said House star Lisa Edelstein. “It’s horrifying. I love my job. I want to do my job. I love the writers that I work with–love them. I’m so happy where I am in my life right now. [But now] I’m feeling really sorry for myself and I’m feeling worse for other people.”
“I’ve had a job for three and a half years so I have money in the bank,” Edelstein said. “I’m actually not going to go belly up but a lot of people will…People will lose their homes. I know some people already who have their homes on the market. It’s really a horrifying situation.”
[IMG:R]For the most part, the television stars are finding themselves a bit adrift, not certain if they should try to book a film project or stand ready to jump back to work if the strike ends suddenly. Desperate Housewives star Teri Hatcher half-jokingly begged The View hosts for a regular gig on the daytime chat show, while My Name Is Earl’s Jason Lee might risk a getaway.
“I’ll just use the time to rest and maybe go on vacation,” Lee told Hollywood.com. “If I had enough time I’d probably go overseas somewhere, but I’d hate to be on a 10-hour flight over to Europe, land, check my messages and hear, ‘Turn around, the strike is over.’”
“I wish I had Hiro’s powers,” mused Oka, who has no qualms about affecting history like his time-traveling character. “So if you can go forward and say [how did this end?] and then come back and say ‘Okay, this is what you guys agreed on in the future.’ Let’s just cut to the chase. Agree on it now so we have no heartache.”
What Happens to The Shows?
Of great concern to both the creators and fans of TV’s comedies and dramas is the looming question: what happens to our favorite shows is the strike stretches out for more than a month or two? Most regular primetime series seasons consist of 22 to 24 episodes, and continuity-driven series like 24, which was expected to return in January but has already been postponed indefinitely, aren’t likely to see full seasons.[PAGEBREAK][IMG:L]In the case of Lost, Lindelof said, eight episodes of the series, which was due back in January, will have been written and shot by Thanksgiving, but only two of those have been edited.
“Worst case scenario, there will be no season, period,” Lindelof said. “It’s sort of like only half the season is written, so it’d be like saying to J.K. Rowling, ‘Let’s take book seven of Harry Potter and break it into two halves. We’ll call one book seven and one book eight.’ She’d say, ‘But it’s not a complete book. Why would you do that?’ That’s kind of how we feel about it.”
Scrubs faces an even more disappointing possibility, as the current season was leading into the finale of the entire series, and now there’s a question of closure.
“If the strike doesn’t go away, I would imagine there won’t ever be a finale of Scrubs, which is a drag, but that pales in comparison to all that we’re trying to get done here,” said Lawrence. “I’ll figure out a way for our most loyal fans to tell them how the show was going to end, even if that means writing the script and putting it online.
With only a dozen scripts in hand, Lawrence resisted the urge to conclude the series with the 12th episode. “I wasn’t going to do it, man. Someone called and said, ‘You should have the two characters do this or that in the last episode,’ but I’m not going to do that.”
Dempsey said Grey’s Anatomy is “halfway through our season. We are probably going to finish out this next episode, in the next week or so, and that will give us 11 shows for the season. That could be it for the year.”
[IMG:R]The planned spin-off series Heroes: Origins has also been scuttled indefinitely, and the parent show Heroes will likely experience a truncated season. “We’re going to do 11, which is going to end Volume 2,” said Oka. “After that everything is still in flux. As far as I know, we’re probably not [doing more]…We kind of shot an alternate ending just in case that might be the case, so we don’t know. Everything is up in the air.”
At ER Zabel says two scripts remain unshot, bringing the season total to 13. “As far as I know, they’ll shoot those scripts without the writers around. They won’t get the rewrites that they’d normally get… I hope that they don’t put out a shoddy product because of that, but it clearly will be affected by the fact that it won’t be taken care of the way it normally would.”
Zabel also resisted the notion of some sort of seasonal closure. “There was pressure to try to do that in case we were going to be off the air for a long time, but that ran counter to my feelings,” he said. “That’s not in solidarity with what we’re doing, and it also violates sort of the creative flow of the season. We design our season in advance. I wasn’t going to change the design based on something I was hoping was not going to happen.”
“It’s a little bit confusing,” said Bones executive producer Barry Josephson, whose show would finish about 14 episodes. “We don’t have a close-ended episode for the last episode of Bones right now because we had a full season that we were thinking of and lots of things to unfold, a serial killer and all different things. So the strike hurts that a little bit. I’d say if the season ended, I think it will end where you are left wanting more certainly.”
One top-rated show that will not be knocked out of commission by the strike is American Idol, according to the reality competition’s producer Nigel Lythgoe, “Although we’re thoroughly supportive of the writers and what they want, it doesn’t affect us because we don’t have writers as such on American Idol,” Lythgoe told Hollywood.com. “American Idol writes its own stories.”
[IMG:R]When asked if that means that, due to a derth of original competing programming, Idol’s viewership will soar even higher this season, Lythgoe chuckled. “If [they do], it’s going to be attributed to the strike; if it isn’t, they’re just going to say we’re going downhill, so either way…”
Fears for Films
In preparation for the event of a strike, Hollywood’s movie studios had been fast-tracking as many film productions as possible to get projects as far into the pipeline as possible before the screenwriters stepped away. Now the film side of the Industry is nervously eyeing the effect of the strike on television and hoping its own output can whether the walkout.[PAGEBREAK][IMG:L]”My pencil is down. I’m not doing any writing,” Judd Apatow, one of the hottest writer-producers in town after colossal hit comedies like Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, told Hollywood.com. “I don’t even have any creative thoughts. My daughters want to play with me and I say “Daddy is not being creative. He won’t do fantasy doll land with you because that’s a form of writing.'”
“I support the writers,” Apatow said. “What people don’t understand is that the studios are asking the writers to take a big cut in pay, and it’s as simple as that. And most writers will go years between getting a film produced or getting a TV job. It’s actually a real struggle for most writers and they can’t survive if you cut back some of these rates.”
Even though he has several film projects already in various stages of production that he needs to shepherd through to completion as a producer, Apatow is making time to hit the picket line as well. “Yeah, I’ve been out there and it makes me feel good, it feels ethically correct, and I think it’s good for my cholesterol,” he laughed.
Actor Willie Garson told Hollywood.com that the cast and crew of Sex and the City: The Movie is about halfway through filming, and will proceed without the benefits of rewriting. “We’re just not going to write,” Garson said. “It’s going to be interesting. I’m a horrible ad-libber and that’s not going to happen. They wrote up until the moment of the strike, they sent it to us and that’s it. There’s no more writing. So we’ll shoot it out and then we’re done.” It helps that the film’s director, Michael Patrick King, is also the script’s credited author and executive produced the original TV series.
[IMG:R]Never one to shy away from a stance on an issue, Susan Sarandon hopes that both sides can conclude negotiation amicably. “I am hoping that everybody isn’t real greedy and that there is some way to work it out,” she said. “It should be fair. People are getting paid less and less. Producers are getting more and more. There has to be some way to participate later. Especially for people that aren’t at the very top, actor-wise, those residual checks mean a lot.”
“I hope they have level-headed people trying to talk it through,” said Sarandon. “I know from the last commercial strike that it was tough when you are up against Corporate America, so we’ll see.”
Transformers director and producer Michael Bay doesn’t understand why the AMPPA and the WGA can’t just cut to the chase of what he sees as an obvious resolution. “If you get rid of all the chest pumping and you look at strikes in history, four and a half percent is the most anyone’s ever got,” Bay told Hollywood.com. “I want writers to get paid. They should get paid. The studios should be able to give up something, but it shouldn’t be so contentious. Because ultimately, there are not a lot of writers out there who can just keep their families on budget for five or six months. It’s bad for everybody.”
Bay said the conflict could be both ugly and protracted. “The studios, if they want, could wear [the writers] out. They have more money. They’re Wall Street companies. GE–do you think they give a fuck what Universal is making? They make plane engines. They make a lot more from making plane engines than movies. They’ll ride ’em out.”
[IMG:R]Veteran film producer Joel Silver, who has both movie and television projects stalled by the strike, took a view that was both concerned and sanguine. “It would be terrible if the industry shuts down for everybody,” Silver said, “but the guilds have things that they believe in…We just have to live with it. It’s not quite as horrific as the fires, but it’s a disaster.”
–Additional reporting by Fred Topel, Gerri Miller and Andrea Simpson
