The Strike News, such as it is, is not good. The word is that the WGA dropped its demand for increased DVD revenues in exchange for a promise that the Producers would make a genuine offer in the area of Internet revenues. Then the Producers announced they were not making any sort of offer in the area of Internet revenues. Then the talks broke off — this all happened Sunday night — and the Producers walked out, except they say the WGA walked out, and the strike was on. Guild statements and rumors would seem to suggest that the demands with regard to DVDs will go back on the table whenever negotiations resume. The Producers are making noises like that may not be for a while.
What does it all mean? Hey, we told you more than a year ago here that — and I quote myself — "I think this town is heading for The Mother of All Strikes as the guilds demand a better deal for home video and the studios pursue their wish-dream of sharing nuttin' with nobody." That's where we are.
I'll post more about all this after I finish a couple of pressing assignments (not in areas the WGA covers, of course). In the meantime, go read Ken Levine and Brian K. Vaughan.
That's the lovely Penelope Pitstop, on her way to appear tomorrow on Shokus Internet Radio, a great thing to listen to on your computer. Actually, it won't be Penelope appearing tomorrow (Wednesday) on Stu's Show. It'll be Janet Waldo, the great voice actress who lent her tonsils to Penelope, Judy Jetson and many other fine cartoon characters for Hanna-Barbera and elsewhere. She will be a guest and my pal Earl Kress, Animation Writer and Authority extraordinaire will be a guest, talking about his work in cartoons and on their DVD releases, as well as any cartoon-related topic the callers deign to throw at him.
That's plenty but, as they say on infomercials, it's not all! I will also be a guest near the top of the show, phoning in to discuss the Writers Guild Strike, a topic near and dear to us all.
Stu's Show can be listened to for free if you go to the website of Shokus Internet Radio and select an audio browser. But this is not a podcast...you have to listen to it live as it happens, tomorrow (Wednesday) from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific Time, which is 7 PM to 9 PM if you're on the East Coast. The show also repeats throughout the week, usually in the same time slot, but it's more fun to tune in while it's actually happening. You can even call in and be a part of the show. It's a lot of fun and it's free and what more can I say? Just listen.
Jeffrey Whyte sent me a long e-mail from which I am extracting this question for a public reply...
I understand that you have areas of dispute with the Producers. What I don't understand is why you have to strike. Isn't there an alternative?
Yeah...not to strike. And at the moment, no one can afford that, especially since it can only lead to us losing a lot of money and ground and then finding ourselves in the same situation, only worse, when the next contract expires.
The issues here are really pretty simple and you don't have to have an MBA understanding of DVD revenues or a futurist's insight into the evolving Internet market to grasp them. Our old contract has expired. Management has offered us a new and lousy contract that would increase their already-immense profits by taking money out of our pockets in many ways. We don't want the rollbacks. In fact, we think gains are appropriate at this time. We have been given two choices: Take the bad offer or strike. We choose to strike.
That really is all there is to it. Honest.
I don't know what you do for a living, Jeffrey, but I presume you have a job and you get a certain wage for it. Your life is built largely around that salary. The home you live in...the places you eat...the necessities you skimp on and the ones you can afford...they all key off of the size of that salary.
Let us say you work for a company that is very healthy. It is not failing by any definition and its top execs and owners take home mega-sums of money. Tomorrow, they decide to up their profits by cutting everyone's salaries a dime an hour. In that situation, you might shrug and say, "That's too bad but it's not worth making a fuss over." The next week, if your pay is cut another dime an hour, you might wince and say, "Ouch...but it will really screw my life up to quit and go look for another job. So I'll live with it." And then the next week, there's another dime gone and another. And then the cuts start going up — fifteen cents, twenty...then you start losing quarters.
At some point, you have to go, "Whoa! This must stop. I can still make my rent and buy potato chips but there's no justification for these cuts beyond my employer's greed. If they go on long enough, I won't be able to live and I'll have to take a bold stand, maybe even to the point of quitting. Better to do that now than later, after I've lost even more." (And you also may have reasons for drawing that line that aren't strictly monetary. You find that as you roll over for these salary cuts, you lose respect within the company, you feel insulted and even your job has gotten more difficult. Because the folks employing you are learning that they can do just about any damn thing to you and you'll go along with it.)
So you take your stand as we have taken ours. We take ours by striking...not because we love having no income and so much uncertainty in our lives and walking around with signs, but because we really only have the two choices and the other one truly sucks.
You'd like to think there's a third option. On blogs discussing the strike, I sometimes see that — "It didn't have to come to this. If our leadership had handled things differently, we'd have a great deal now instead of a strike." But I never see what that alternative is or was. Even with the benefit of hindsight, those who say the preceding only seem to be able to explain it in vague terms like, "I would have set up a dialogue" or "I would have gone to the negotiating table earlier."
I don't believe there's ever been much of a third option. Why? Because the people we negotiate with — the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — like it the way it is, with only the two options. It's a system that usually works for them. It may also fill some emotional need they have to control the game and use their very size to intimidate others...but basically, they do it because it usually works. It enables them to grab those dimes. Most unions, when it comes time to negotiate, will give up something rather than plunge into a war. They'll be glad the dimes aren't (yet) dollars and might even hail that as a victory for their side.
The WGA has done it both ways in the past. We've had labor peace since '88 for two reasons. One is that in '88, we said no. We went on strike for 22 weeks in order to say no.
We took a huge rollback in '85. Immense. I think some members from that time are still In Denial as to how much we gave up that year. For obvious reasons, I have a kneejerk defense reflex when anyone belittles Writers but speaking of that contract, I'll say it: We were gutless idiots.
And then in '88, the Producers did what anyone would do when they had someone that stupid on the hook. They handed us another pile of rollback demands — not as huge but still huge — and again, gave us the two choices: Accept this or strike. That year, we struck. You can certainly make the case that in a strict dollars-and-cents accounting, what we gained did not balance against 22 weeks of loss, but that's not the point. We had to stop that pattern or there's no telling how much we'd have lost in subsequent contracts and how destructive it would have been to fight that battle at a later date.
Saying no in '88 was one reason there hasn't been a Writers Strike since the year Michael Dukakis was nominated for President. The other was that eventually, we started saying yes to the dime cuts. The first contract we made after '88 had no real rollbacks in it and actually a few modest gains. (Anyone wonder why that was?) In subsequent deals, we accepted some dime cuts and postponed some areas of contract improvement that we thought were overdue. I'm not sure that those were wise choices on our part. Some would say that our leaders — particularly some leaders who were writer-producers or maybe writer-PRODUCERS — were too reticent to make trouble. Others would say that for various reasons, the will of the membership was just not there. I don't know.
But I do know that this time, the will is there, just as I also know that the dime cuts have turned into dollars. This is the time to stop that tactic again.
I was explaining this yesterday to some folks on the picket line and one said, "There is a third way. We could have worked without a contract until the Screen Actors Guild's contract is almost up and then struck." That's a good point but it isn't a way not to strike. It's just a question of how to strategize that strike. After hearing the pros and cons, I think now is a better time. Sadly but really, it only comes down to the two choices.
One other thing. This is our battle but it's not our battle. Some of the things we're fighting for like increased jurisdiction over Animation, Reality Shows and Game Show are WGA issues. But all that Internet stuff, all that talk about wanting to be paid when our work is streamed over the World Wide Web...that's an issue for the actors and the directors and almost everyone in town. I wish the Screen Actors Guild contract was expiring now and ours was up the middle of next year instead of the other way around, because they may be better equipped to fight that part of the battle. They can shut the town down a lot faster than we can. But that's not the way the expiration dates happened to fall so we're the first ones into the fray. If you're not a fan of strikes — if you're weeping that your favorite shows are suddenly in reruns or endangered — you'd better hope the WGA does well. Because wait'll you see what SAG will do if they get stuck with the same two choices.
Paul Norris, who co-created the comic book character Aquaman, and who produced the Brick Bradford newspaper strip for a little over 35 years, died about four hours ago at the age of 93. He'd had a series of strokes in the last few months and had just been hospitalized for his most recent.
Paul was born April 26, 1914 in Greenville, Ohio. He studied at Midland Lutheran College and at the Dayton Art Institute before landing a job as an illustrator and cartoonist for the Dayton Daily News in 1936. Three years later, he assembled a portfolio of his best work and took it to New York in search of better prospects, which turned out to be comic books. No one, not even Paul, was ever certain what his first job was in that medium but by 1940, he was drawing for Prize Publications, where he launched several of their star strips — Yank and Doodle, Power Nelson and Futureman.
A year later, he was at DC Comics where his most memorable assignment was Aquaman, which he and editor-writer Mort Weisinger created. (DC now puts a "created by Paul Norris" credit on all Aquaman comics. The absence of Weisinger's name is apparently a legal problem on DC's end, not a case of Norris squeezing out his former collaborator.) Paul also worked on, among others, the Sandman in Adventure Comics. He was the artist who revamped the character from his old costume — a business suit and a device that looked like a gas mask — and turned him, at editorial insistence, into a Batman knock-off. When Norris left the strip, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby took it over. During this period, Paul also worked on the Vic Jordan newspaper strip for the New York Daily PM.
Paul then spent some years in the Army. Upon his return, his main work was with the King Features Syndicate, initially as a kind of troubleshooter. Whenever one of their adventure strips was behind or in need of a temporary artist, they'd have Paul Norris draw some weeks of it. This included stints on Flash Gordon and Secret Agent X-9. In 1948, he took over the Jungle Jim Sunday feature for a few years when Austin Briggs gave it up and in 1952, he took over Brick Bradford from Clarence Gray. Paul wrote and drew Brick Bradford until the strip ended on April 25, 1987. During all that time, he never missed a deadline or even came close to being late.
That would be remarkable enough if that's all he did but beginning in 1947, he also worked for Western Publishing Company, beginning with comic books based on the newspaper strips he was ghosting. Eventually, he became a mainstay of Western's Los Angeles office, drawing westerns and TV-based comics. Many fans recalled his work in the sixties and seventies on Tarzan of the Apes and Magnus, Robot Fighter, as well as a short-lived book he drew called The Jungle Twins. He also occasionally dabbled in funny animals such as Woodsy Owl and illustrated childrens' books for the firm.
In the seventies, I had the pleasure of working with Paul on a comic book of the Hanna-Barbera feature, Dynomutt. He was a lovely man who worked very hard on his art but always managed to have it in on time. He usually delivered the work by mail but once or twice, when he was worried the work might not be early, he drove up to Los Angeles with it from his home near San Diego — three hours each way. Please note that he was not afraid of the work being late. He was afraid of it not being early.
For several years, we were honored to have Paul as a guest on the annual Golden Age Panel at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. He'd come to the con for just one day...and we'd schedule the panel for that day, whatever day he could make it, just so we'd have him on it. His last appearance on one was in 1999, I believe. He was supposed to be on the panel in 2000 but he drove to the convention that day, couldn't find a parking space and wound up going home without going in. He only called me about eleven times to apologize...and every year after that, he'd phone a few weeks before the con to say he was sorry but his health would not allow him to attend.
I think I oughta point out that he was the last of the great creators of Golden Age DC super-heroes. The guys who created Superman, Batman, Flash, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman are all gone...and now we've lost the guy who designed and first drew Aquaman.
In 1995, Paul insisted on doing a favor for me and I asked him to do a drawing of Aquaman. He said it was the first he'd done of the character in more than fifty years and I don't know how many, if any, he did after that one. It's up atop this obit. I just wanted to share it with you because it will always remind me of that lovely, wonderful man.
Whole lotta mail on the WGA Strike. Here are some of them, including some questions. This first query came from Brian Trester and also from a couple of other folks...
Why are not writers for the news services and TV news covered? You know like CNN, FOX, CBS, NBC and the like. I know Katie Couric can't even say "Iraq," let alone write a story about it.
News writers at some (not all) networks are covered by the WGA but under a separate contract with many different terms...or rather, they should be covered by a contract. As if my Guild didn't have enough to think about, news writers at some shops have been working under expired contracts for some time and are now talking about a strike vote. The group that seems likely to walk out soon would consist of the news writers working at CBS...so Ms. Couric may soon be speechless.
The next message is from someone who signs themselves "TW George"...
How much impact does public opinion of the strike have on what goes on at the negotiating table? Will a negative view of the strike by the public encourage the WGA to settle more quickly and/or embolden the Producers/Studios? Would the opposite be true if the public continues to
hold a positive view of the strike?
This is just my sense of things but I don't think general public opinion has much impact on the negotiations insofar as the WGA is concerned...and I don't think it matters much to the Producers unless it begins to manifest itself in boycotts and declining audience. Even then, I don't think people will stop watching a network or going to a studio's movies because of the suppliers' behavior in this strike. They might because the absence of WGA writers has resulted in too many reruns or badly-written shows.
On the other hand, it would certainly be nice to feel we had the public behind us and they weren't blaming us for the fact that they aren't getting new episodes of Jay and Dave for a while. And I do think most people understand that. They understand that if you're given a choice of taking a rotten deal or walking, you have no choice but to go for a stroll.
The one thing that I think may matter is public opinion in and around show business — the sentiments of the other workers at the studio, the caterers, the suppliers, etc. I remember during the latter days of the '88 strike, a lot of writers I knew were troubled to hear what the strike was doing to their co-workers — production assistants, casting directors, office crew, etc. This time though, the Guild is so "together" (a 90.3% strike vote, let's remember) and the Producers' position seems so intractable and unreasonable, that I think we're a long way from that. This is my fifth WGA strike and I've never seen "the town" so firmly behind us.
Here's one from Richard Leung...
I am honestly surprised at all the silly emails you seem to be getting, the gist of which seem to be that screenwriters ought to be serfs earning minimum wage. I have no connection to the industry at all, but from what I know, screenwriters are severely underpaid and underappreciated. And that includes those happy few who are making two or three million per script. I think you are apologizing too much for the big earners in your profession. How come the actors and directors are allowed to make 10 or 20 mil per film, but not the guy who actually writes the thing?
That's a money thing that flows from a presumed audience habit. They go to see stars and not to see writers. If you're a distributor out selling the new Will Ferrell movie, you're going to get a certain amount of advance bookings, sight unseen, just on the strength of his stardom. If you're shopping a movie written by Sam Yutzman, it's not going to make your job as simple. So Ferrell has a lot more clout to demand top dollar.
I actually think writers moan too much about lack of respect. Some of us don't deserve a lot of respect and some of us don't seem to recognize it when we get it. My feeling is that if you're a writer and you feel you aren't getting sufficient respect, you may need to write something better.
From Jack Bagley...
I 100% agree with your stance on residuals. In publishing, they're royalties, and we earn them every time one of our books is purchased.
I have two sci-fi novels out there and, while they never hit the New York Times bestseller list, they did okay. And as you pointed out, every time someone buys one of my novels, I get a check.
I wouldn't want it any other way, and I know you wouldn't either. Those who ask such questions simply don't understand the difference between creative work and...well, whatever they do for a living.
From Steve Billnitzer...
For what it's worth, my group was assigned to the Colfax entrance at CBS Radford, the truck entrance. We had more than a few Teamsters who honored the picked line and refused to cross, but they all, or nearly all, merely waited around the corner till we left at 5 p.m. and then finished their deliveries anyway. As in your location, the only grumbling was the upset over the news that the DVD residual issue was reported as off the table, but that was considerable. Most marchers I talked to said they planned to contact the Guild and demand it be put back in.
Show runners on our 20-to-30 marcher corner included Steve Pepoon and Phil Rosenthal (I don't think I could recognize any drama writers), and we had sign-carrying SAG support from Justine Bateman and Jon Cryer, who was there the entire time. An interesting start to my first and hopefully only WGA work stoppage.
One odd thing that occurred to me on my line was that I was talking with a friend as we marched and I started to tell an anecdote about the '88 strike. Suddenly, everyone ahead of us and behind reacted and said, "You've struck before?" All the picketers around us were on their first-ever picket line and they were very interested. I am hardly an old-timer but I spent about twenty minutes answering questions and telling stories. I felt pretty good about that because, as I may have mentioned, there was this fear that the Guild has so many members who've joined since the last strike and might not understand what it's all about. But these people knew and were eager to learn more.
Lastly, someone named Mark asks...
Do you understand why the Leno and Letterman shows are doing reruns? Can't they simply drop the monologues and the comedy bits segments? To fill the time, book an extra guest or two for the host to chat with, let the music performer do couple extra songs, or have the house band do a number. Or are Leno and Letterman also members of the WGA?
Both are WGA members and as far as I know, loyal ones. Jay Leno was out on the picket line at NBC this morning.
I think the answer to your question is that these guys don't want to go on without writers. They could probably do their shows in a narrow sense by arguing that what they come up with is ad-lib and not written...but I think they like to think of that kind of thing as writing, and also know they'd be violating the spirit of the strike if not letter. I further suspect that the writers contribute more to those shows — that is, to more portions of those shows — than you think.
I'll post more of these later today. Or tomorrow. Or some time.
Here's a three minute video that may give you some sense of that Writers Guild Membership Meeting that I attended last Thursday night. For some reason, my friend Marv Wolfman keeps popping up in the crowd shots and in the background but trust me. There were other writers there besides him.
November 7, 2007
