[Scroll down for Dowd] Hollywood writers had to strike

and now they have to prevail

This article supports the writers' strike. Surprising, because it comes from Forbes magazine, the quintessential purveyor of the the capitalist creed.

When 12,000 Hollywood writers traded pencils for picket signs this week, they took a huge risk. Even riskier: not striking. Losing to the studios now could doom their union as television gives way to the Internet.

“We know that the future of the industry is the Web, and that in the near future television sets and computer monitors will merge into the same screen,” says Kate Purdy, a writer for CBS' Cold Case and a blogger behind a new strike-related writers' blog, United Hollywood.

Hollywood writers want compensation for work on new media platforms like the Web--the central fight in three-plus months of acrimonious negotiations with the studios and networks.

But as scripted television sheds viewers and work jurisdiction to other genres (like reality) and media (like the Web), they continue to lose leverage at the bargaining table.

That's a harrowing prospect for a union that's already been fighting for nearly two decades to overturn a stingy VHS/DVD residual formula negotiated in 1985.

Worse, the guild is no longer squaring off against a cadre of studio heads as it did during the last strike. Now it faces media giants like News Corp. Walt Disney, with massive pockets and businesses big enough to withstand a walkout.

The companies are equally desperate to keep the Guild from grabbing jurisdiction--and profits--from a new medium with unknown future revenues.

A Bite of the Bagel [Original]

By MAUREEN DOWD

Hillary Clinton had the bad luck to fumble a debate before the writers’ strike knocked late-night comics off the air.

Bernard Kerik and his old pal Rudy Giuliani had the good luck to have Mr. Kerik’s corruption indictment handed up after the TV zone of ridicule was blacked out.

“I shudder to think what’s happening to all the kids who keep in touch with world news by listening to reports of late-night comedians,” said David Thomson, the film historian.

Actually, I’m one of those people he’s shuddering about. I keep up on the news by listening to late-night comedians. I read a lot of stuff too, and talk to people. But I’m a satirical news junkie.

Knowing I was going to miss my Weekend Update from Seth Meyers on “Saturday Night Live,” I asked the show’s news co-anchor — and head writer — if he could take some time out from the picket line to give me a weekend update on the writers’ strike.

IT’S SUNDAY MORNING LIVE! (Sort of.)!

First of all, Mr. Meyers wanted to rebut any notion that the writers are well-heeled brats carrying Starbucks and Evian to the barricades in an attempt to get richer, while throwing TV’s steerage class out of work.

Mr. Meyers took issue with the Times article characterizing the New York picket line of Tina Fey, himself and other NBC writers in front of Rockefeller Center as “a glamour strike,” with Writers Guild members in “arty glasses and fancy scarves” rather than “hard hats and work boots.”

“Glamour show?” he asked. “Scarves and glasses? Have those not always been the accouterments of the geek and not the runway model? That’s how Harry Potter dresses, not Kate Moss.

"And while our glasses can be a little ‘arty,’ isn’t that the least we deserve after the ‘regular’ glasses of our formative years helped push us towards a writing career in the first place?”

Good point.

“I am a fan of studios and what I like most about them is this: They know how to make money,” he continued. “That’s why studios and writers are such a perfect fit.

"Without studios we’d be back where comedy writers were 100 years ago — in some backwoods farmhouse shouting jokes at each other in a makeshift ring, while drunken audiences throw nickels at our feet.”

The writers know that they have not been clever in past negotiations about new technology, and that their work, as Mr. Thomson puts it, “could be playing on your thumbnail in five years.” But they’re trying to catch up.

“Even my technologically challenged mother watches television on a computer — and she thinks an iPod is some kind of antelope,” Mr. Meyers said.

“Our request is simple: we get paid a small percentage of any revenue generated from our creative material.

“As a comedy writer, I am more than willing to admit that I need a world with producers, but do they need us? The answer is yes, for two reasons. First, without writers whom will the studios blame for their failures? Second, seriously, whom?”

Mr. Thomson has more respect for the TV writers than the movie writers because screenwriters are not “putting intelligent ideas and original material in films.”

The huge mistake the Writers Guild made long ago, he said, was not to insist on getting a copyright.

“If you write something for a movie company, they may pay you a lot of money, but they take it,” he said. “It alters completely the way writers get treated.”

Some industry analysts say that the writers may be engaged in a futile act, because they have no real power, can’t shut down networks that can turn to more reality TV, and may not be able to stop the conglomerates from squashing them — a scenario straight out of Paddy Chayefsky.

“Some of these writers are living check to check,” said James Brooks, the writer, director and producer — and a creative force behind “The Simpsons” — who is on the picket line in Los Angeles. “And I fear union busting. It’s happening all over the place, and we’re not immune.”

Dorothy Parker, once an unhappy writer in Hollywood, had an image of the town’s power structure as “a block-long limo with a gloved, jeweled hand sticking out the rear window holding a bagel with one bite taken out of it.”

The writers are running alongside the limo just trying to get their own bite. And maybe a schmear.

Seth Meyers says he is ready “to take the journey to new media with the studios. Ideally, in the back seats of their high-end cars that have computerized British voices telling you how to get there and when to turn.”

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