Saturday, December 15, 2007

New Late Night Wars!

This whole thing with the strike is getting odder and more fraught with possible scenarios. David Letterman's company is going to seek an interim deal with the WGA that would allow its writers to go back to work and therefore, Late Show (and Craig Ferguson's show) to resume. CBS has issued a statement that says — well, here: Read it for yourself...

Regarding David Letterman's company, Worldwide Pants, seeking an interim agreement with the WGA: We respect the intent of Worldwide Pants to serve the interests of its independent production company and its employees by seeking this interim agreement with the WGA. However, this development should not confuse the fact that CBS remains unified with the AMPTP, and committed to working with the member companies to reach a fair and reasonable agreement with the WGA that positions everyone in our industry for success in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Nothing in there about CBS stopping Worldwide Pants from making a deal. That was not the way the network played it in past strikes. In '88, a lot of companies in a position comparable to Letterman's wanted to sign interim deals with the WGA and their networks stopped them. (By the way: I don't know how interim deals will work this time but in the past, they were "favored nations" contracts. The company signs with the WGA on the WGA's terms and then, whenever a deal gets struck with the AMPTP, the company can elect to switch to its terms, which presumably will be more favorable.)

Letterman, of course, doesn't have to worry about some of the "deal killer" issues that are presently said to be an obstacle to a WGA/AMPTP settlement. He doesn't produce any "reality" shows. He doesn't produce any cartoons. Excerpts from his shows do stream on the Internet via the CBS site but that could be curtailed or kept within a window that the WGA would agree was promotional. There are, as yet, no DVDs of old episodes of Dave's show. So it's hard to imagine they won't be able to make a workable interim deal.

Meanwhile, NBC is telling reporters that on Monday, it will announce the return of The Tonight Show and Late Night in new episodes, possibly January 7. (One source told me it may be even sooner than that.) Since those shows are produced by NBC, the network probably can't and won't make interim deals for them so if Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien elect to go back, they'll be crossing picket lines and working without their writing staffs. So far, no one has said for certain that Jay and Conan will do that, which leads me to suspect that's being argued about right now. It certainly puts those guys in an awkward, perhaps dangerous position. Apart from the obvious anger they'll feel from the Hollywood community — look at what's been directed towards Ellen DeGeneres and Carson Daly — there's the question of whether major stars will want to be a part of those shows.

Just taking Leno's situation, it sounds like lose/lose. He'll be out there doing a limited version of his show — hampered by a lack of writers and probably of top name guests — against Letterman with his full show and a lot of good will. If Jay does his usual long monologue, he'll be accused of employing scabs. If he doesn't do it, he'll lose his most valuable segment. His show has already taken a lot of hits from critics and doing it without writers will just give them fresh ammo to go after him again. And of course, he'll be working to save a program that NBC has already arranged to take away from him. About the only thing that may make him happy is not having to pay the staff out of his own pocket...which I thought was kind of a raw deal, the way he was pressured into it. (Hollywood is full of very wealthy people who are not paying their staffs during the strike, and no one faults them for it. And some of those people, unlike Leno, own their shows and are the actual employers.)

But the big question is what Letterman signing an interim deal will do to the strike situation. Will Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert follow? Will other shows? Is it just Dave who has enough clout that his network is not going to do what they've all done in the past and blocked interim deals? If Dave goes back on and starts clobbering Jay, will that add pressure to NBC to push for a quicker settlement? We're in uncharted territory here so it's gonna be interesting.

• Posted at 7:17 PM · LINK

Happy Hanna-Barbera Day! (Yesterday)

Fifty years ago yesterday, a new era in the field of animation began. NBC telecast the first episode of the first show produced for television by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Ruff & Reddy.

It was not the first cartoon produced for television but it was darn close. More importantly, it was the business role model for all that followed. Bill and Joe showed there was money to be made in TV animation and others followed.

Ruff & Reddy wasn't a great show, especially compared with what followed. Today, the animation looks primitive even by Hanna-Barbera standards and the narrative seems a bit leaden. Still, the show had intriguing stories and colorful characters, as well as the expert voice work of Daws Butler and Don Messick, and I wasn't the only kid hooked from the start. I'm pretty sure I saw that first broadcast, which was hosted by a gentleman named Jimmy Blaine, assisted by two bird puppets, Rhubarb the Parrot and Jose the Toucan. That week and each week for years after, he showed two episodes of a Ruff & Reddy serial along with a vintage theatrical cartoon produced by the Columbia Cartoon Studio (usually, a Fox & Crow short).

I remember the impact on me of new cartoon characters. I was five and a half years old at the time but already, I had a lot of the constantly-repeating Bugs Bunny and Heckle & Jeckle cartoons committed to memory. Ruff the Cat and Reddy the Dog were new friends, so appealing that I didn't notice that they didn't move as smoothly or as much as other animated superstars. Or if I did, I didn't care. The following October, Bill and Joe introduced their second show, which was even better and all-cartoon...Huckleberry Hound. Before long, they were the kings of Childrens' Television.

When I'm around cartoon buffs and the topic turns to Hanna-Barbera, I hear two distinct reactions, sometimes from the same folks. One is negative, especially from those who began watching cartoons when the H-B output consisted of things like Scooby Doo and The Smurfs and Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch. The other is positive, fixing on how many people loved the shows and how many animation folks bought homes and fed their families thanks to Bill and Joe. Some called them the guys who saved the animation business when theatrical animation was dying out. There's some truth to all of that but it's especially positive to those of us who remember those early Hanna-Barbera shows and discovered them when they firsy debuted...starting with Ruff & Reddy.

Here's the opening of the show...

• Posted at 2:38 PM · LINK

Strike News

We're hearing that David Letterman's company will attempt to make an interim deal with the Writers Guild to get his show back on the air. This could be interesting. In past strikes, the network hasn't allowed a supplier to make such contracts. Moreover, Leno and O'Brien couldn't do it as easily because their shows are produced not by their own companies but by NBC. Stay tuned.

• Posted at 1:55 PM · LINK

Strike Rambling

Some time next week, I'll change that logo to say "Contract 2008," since that's becoming a foregone conclusion.

Not a whole lot to talk about today. The Writers Guild has announced an informational meeting out at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Monday evening. This figures since I have another event I was looking forward to that evening and now must choose between them.

The Guild is about to try an end-run around the AMPTP, seeking to get companies to negotiate with us on an individual basis. I will be surprised if this yields anything in the way of results and I suspect we're doing it more for the p.r. value — hey, we're trying to make a deal here — than with any optimism than Universal or Sony or anyone will break ranks. This will probably be discussed at the Monday evening meeting but I wouldn't expect any real major announcements there. What I would expect is a couple of angry members (we always have angry members) getting up and arguing over what, if anything, we should do to get the negotiations going again. Personally, I think anything we give up to get the AMPTP back to the table is setting a suicidal precedent. It's telling them they can get us to give up things we care about just by refusing to negotiate if we don't.

I don't sense that there's a lot of sentiment in the Guild to go that route and start abandoning demands. But one thing I've learned about the WGA is that there's always dissent...about everything. It sometimes is very loud and it almost always gets publicity far in excess of its actual strength. The Guild has a tendency, because it's so firmly committed to Free Speech, to sometimes afford too much dignity and attention to complaints and contrary views. There's nothing wrong with fifty people expressing an opinion opposed to our leadership but they oughta be treated as fifty people, not as a meaningful faction in a union with 10,000+ members.

My pet peeve in the area of Member Complaints would best be described by example. All I have to do is re-create a conversation I witnessed during the 1988 strike between an angry WGA member and a man named Brian Walton, who was our Executive Director and chief negotiator. It was during a period when the AMPTP had walked away from the bargaining table (they like to do that) and was making noises like they were never coming back. The angry member told Walton that the strike was being egregiously mishandled and Walton asked him, "What would you do differently?" The exchange then went almost exactly like this...

MEMBER: I would get in there and negotiate with them.

WALTON: They're refusing to negotiate with us.

MEMBER: Well then, you have to make them negotiate with us.

WALTON: And just how are we supposed to do that?

MEMBER: You sit down with them. You establish a dialogue.

WALTON: Sit down with who? The people who are refusing to talk to us?

MEMBER: Whoever you have to talk to to get a dialogue going.

WALTON: We've been trying since Day One to have a dialogue with these people. They give us their terms and then they throw us out.

MEMBER: That's because you didn't get a dialogue going with them. My agent told me that if he'd been representing the Guild, he would have established a dialogue and that would have segued into a negotiation where he could have gotten us everything we want.

WALTON: When your agent negotiates for you, does he get you everything you want?

MEMBER: No, but then he doesn't have the clout of representing the whole Writers Guild.

As a general rule, you can't make even a great deal in this town without some agent telling you, "I could have gotten you more."

Meanwhile, the AMPTP is hammering our current Executive Director, David Young, selling the idea that he's the problem, especially because he's never negotiated this kind of deal before. It's more or less a fact of life that anyone we send into negotiations is either going to be attacked for inexperience or, if he has experience in this area, attacked for what he's done in the past. If the AMPTP weren't attacking our chief negotiator, I'd figure he wasn't doing a very good job for us.

I understand we're going to have the regular picketing schedule on Monday. Then Tuesday, whoever pickets is going to be waving signs outside AMPTP headquarters. Then after that, there'll be no picketing until 1/7/08. So I think I'll try to get some in Monday or Tuesday...and now that I'm in the mood, I'm leaning towards going to the meeting on Monday evening.

• Posted at 11:38 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

The Bullfighters was the last American feature to star Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I think it was their poorest film and you can almost tell that from the trailer...

• Posted at 12:07 AM · LINK

December 16, 2007 • Current • December 14, 2007