Friday, November 30, 2007

Flash Point

As a member of several Academies and Guilds, I get a lot of invites to screenings, free DVDs and copies of screenplays. All are intended to maybe, someone hopes, cause me to vote for the film or TV show in question in whatever awards competitions I vote in. The DVDs often come packaged in elaborate, attention-getting packages designed by someone who either doesn't know or doesn't care that the main appeal of DVDs is that they fit neatly on your shelves. I get a lot of screenplays, too.

Today, I received a "first." Warner Bros. Pictures sent me — and I guess, most members of the Writers Guild — a USB flash drive containing PDFs of four current movies — The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Brave One, The Bucket List and Michael Clayton. They take up 893,952 bytes on a flash drive that holds 58.8 MB and is imprinted with the names of the four movies on one side and a WB logo on the other.

At first, I was leery of plugging the thing into my computer. After all, I'm on strike against this company. What if it's some instrument of revenge with a lethal virus that will turn my hard disk into guava jelly? Maybe there's a hidden program on there that will, without my knowledge, post a message on my blog that the latest AMPTP offer is a windfall and we'd be lamebrains to not grab it and scurry back to work.

These are both valid worries but I decided to live dangerously. I plugged the thing in and even read one of the scripts on it. I may read the others before I wipe the drive and use it to back up my work.

• Posted at 10:53 PM · LINK

Coyote Ugly

If you've sent me an e-mail lately, be advised: The e-mail end of my Road Runner High Speed Internet Connection seems to have encountered some diabolical invention of the Acme Company that slows it to about the pace of a banana slug on valium. I'm just now receiving some messages sent to me last night and I got one that its sender swears was dispatched on Tuesday.

Hey, here's something about e-mail that sometimes bothers me. When I was in New York, I sent some e-mail via a rent-by-the-hour computer in the Business Center in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania. I didn't notice that the clock on the computer was set wrong and as a result, all those e-mails arrived at their destinations bearing time stamps a day or two before the correct date. They therefore didn't show up at the top of some folks' inboxes, and a couple of recipients didn't notice they had new mail from me. Why do e-mail readers work like that? Shouldn't the time stamp they display on a message be the time/date it was received? Or actually sent?

I get a lot of e-mails that are dated for the year 2000 because the sender didn't have the date set on their computer at all. I have a friend who keeps turning the clock back on her computer because she doesn't want a certain piece of "time trial" software to expire. As a result, every e-mail I get from her is dated before the one before. It's like she's pulling a Billy Pilgrim, coming unstuck in time.

Don't bother explaining this to me. It's not going to change and a good reason for it won't make my e-mail files any neater. I'm just venting.

• Posted at 2:12 PM · LINK

More Strike Stuff

Any optimism out there that the WGA/AMPTP strike would be over shortly seems to have been dashed with the latest news out of the negotiations. The Producers have offered what they call a generous deal and what the WGA analysts call a crummy deal full of rollbacks. Seems to me I remember us being in pretty much this same position once or twice before...or maybe in every single one of our past strikes. A negotiator we employed in one called these "Trojan Horse offers" and explained them roughly as follows: You offer to buy someone's old car — it's worth maybe $2000 — for $5000. The person is so eager to get five grand for the jalopy that they don't read the fine print in the offer which says that they rebate you $1000 for every tire on the car that you decide, at your sole discretion, is in need of replacement.

If they grab your offer, great. You then demand four thousand back for the four tires, plus maybe another thousand for the spare in the trunk. If they do catch on and refuse, you can at least go around and say, "I'm not cheap! I made him a $5000 offer for a car worth less than half that." In the midst of an ugly strike, with public relations at least as important as the actual offers, that might not be a bad chess move. Plus, there's always the chance that the strike leaders are getting weary and either might not realize how lousy the offer is or might seize on the opportunity to end the war and look, at least briefly, like heroes.

Of course, I'm assuming here that the WGA analysis of the offer is correct. It probably is but wouldn't it be nice if we had a neutral third party to assess such things? Like say, the press? During past strikes, I thought it would be great if Variety or Hollywood Reporter or the L.A. Times engaged an attorney with some solid math skills not to take sides but merely to fact-check and explain the various offers and proposals, and to cleave through the spin from all factions. Out here in the cheap seats, most of us don't have the data to make those assessments, nor do we even get the precise language being proposed. I'm thinking about that now because we're likely to now get a sales campaign from the AMPTP that will try to tell the rank-and-file of the WGA that we have a great, lucrative offer but that our leaders are too dumb and/or battle-crazed to realize that.

I was going to write here that I don't understand why the numbers have to be so complex and arguable but I guess that's the whole point. In past negotiations, we often hit a point where the Producers were saying, "This proposal of ours would pay writers at least $200 million a year" and our side was saying, "No, it wouldn't." In those situations, I don't know why the Producers don't just say, "Okay, we'll guarantee that number. If it turns out to be any less than $200 million, we'll donate the difference to the WGA Health and Pension Funds." Wonder why they don't do that.

Anyway, I have men coming any minute now to begin ripping out walls in my dining room and kitchen where that leaky upstairs toilet did its damage. So I'll just answer this question from Christopher Jones and then attempt to take the day...

I'm curious how the rules are set up for what writers can't do during the strike. Could a screenwriter be working on a screenplay for a film as long as it wasn't commissioned by a studio or some other entity covered by the strike, as long as (s)he didn't take any steps toward selling or promoting that script until after the strike was settled? I guess I'm trying to understand where the boundaries are as to what work is covered by the terms of the strike and what isn't.

The official rule is that we don't write anything that might contribute to the production of motion pictures or television by a struck company, during or even after the strike. That means that if you're a staff writer or story editor on Ugly Betty, you don't even sit at home working on Ugly Betty ideas and scripts to submit after the strike. The Producers have to settle with us and then you'll get back to it.

Now, in truth, a lot of writers seize on the opportunity to work on "spec" scripts, usually for movies, that will be shopped around after the strike, and no one has ever even suggested that this be viewed as scab work. I doubt anyone ever will fault a WGA member who does that but it's not the letter of the law.

I have a piece coming up over at The New Republic (I'll link when it's up) about scabbing. One point I may not be able to shoehorn into the article is that non-WGA members who dream of writing screenplays sometimes think (wrongly) when we strike, "This could be my golden opportunity!" They suddenly deluge agents and producers with scripts...and I'm not sure anyone has ever even come close to selling one of them. The stark reality of the situation is that it costs a lot of money to make movies. Studios don't like to gamble tens of millions of dollars to make a movie these days until they've gone through a few dozen drafts by several of the top, most trusted screenwriters. They're not inclined to risk that kind of loot on a script written wholly by one guy who couldn't sell anything until 10,000 more experienced writers became unavailable.

But actually, the strike is even worse news for the wanna-bes...because after it's over, there are all these spec scripts suddenly being shopped about that the successful guys wrote during the strike. So the odds of a gas station attendant selling his spec script are even worse...not that they were ever better than one-in-a-zillion before. It's just that the competition is even more formidable then.

The doorbell just rang, the construction guys are here and I gotta go.

• Posted at 9:18 AM · LINK