Saturday, February 9, 2008

Back from the Shrine

I keep being wrong about something with regard to the Writers Guild strike. Having lived through far too many of these, I keep expecting vitriol and anger and even loud and honest dissent. The dissent is fine, even healthy, though it has too often been exaggerated in the press and by the folks with whom we negotiate. Twenty outraged members have this odd way of looking to some like a sizeable percentage of a Guild whose membership numbers in the thousands.

Throughout this strike I have constantly expected it to start; for some meeting to devolve into a mud wrestling competition. And I have constantly been wrong...because this strike is just about over and at least as of the time I headed home from this evening's membership meeting, what I'd been expecting hadn't started. The mood in the hall was unified, respectful, grateful and even celebratory. No vote was taken. That will occur shortly. But the sense of the room suggested the deal will be accepted and not, as I hope with all deals of this sort, by a whisker. I must admit the terms sounded better to me there than when I read the summary, which perhaps is an important lesson. Several points needed some explaining and amplification before their value was apparent.

A feeling of victory seemed to be the prevailing mood. I lost count of the well-deserved standing ovations and when they opened the floor microphones for questions or arguments, they began getting only questions and minor suggestions about deal points. As of the moment I left, no one had suggested that the deal not be ratified...and it would have been very easy for someone to say that if they'd genuinely felt it was improvable.

I still can't quite believe it. It goes without saying that no one likes to be on strike and that they're always nasty, messy affairs where too many people — many of them innocent bystanders — are injured. Unfortunately, like some other things in life that we wish never occurred, strikes are sometimes necessary. There are times when those in power (the employers, the Powers That Be) go for the lowball and think they have the clout to maximize profits by bleeding those who work for them. They come up with an either-or proposition, one with only two options: Go on strike or accept a rotten deal. I'm always astonished at the number of folks who leap to blame the union for taking the only viable course of action in that situation.

Not only is a rotten deal unacceptable for us but if we take it, the other unions get rotten deals...rottener, even. And when the next negotiation rolls around, we get the rottenest one of them all. That's how it works. You have to say no and stop that. You want to know why there was a Writers Strike? Because they didn't offer us in November the contract that they offered us at 1:30 AM (or whenever) this morning.

And they could have. It's not that fabulous an offer. It won't hurt the profits at Disney, Paramount, Sony, et al, one bit. What it does mean is that the writers who don't make the Megabucks (and that's the vast majority of the WGA) have a better shot at making a basic living. That's all this has ever been about.

I'm feeling very good about this strike. Like I said, I've lived through several and am usually appalled by something done by "my side." Sometimes, it's been gross mismanagement by the leadership. Other times, the leadership has done the best job possible but has been undercut by the fracturing of our ranks. None of that happened this time. Our president Patric Verrone, our Executive Director David Young, WGA negotiating committee chair John Bowman and everyone on that committee, along with the staff and Board of Directors all handled a regrettable situation about as well as it could have been handled. And the membership was right there with them because the issues were so clear and the need to say "no" was so obvious.

Before I leave this topic, I should apologize for something. As I said in an earlier post, I had not planned to "live-blog" from the meeting but sitting there, taking notes on my BlackBerry of things I wanted to mention here later, I was suddenly struck by that odd obsession I have to blog from odd places and I put up a post. A few minutes after, Patric on the stage asked people not to live-blog and I quickly took it down. Or at least, I thought I did. It's easier to post via BlackBerry than it is to delete. Anyway, that post has been removed. I don't think I disclosed anything privileged...certainly nothing that exiting writers weren't telling reporters outside as I was leaving. But Patric Verrone and his associates have done the most amazing, commendable job I've ever seen of managing a strike...and if he thinks it's wrong, it probably is. So I apologize to him and the Guild and I'll never do it again.

• Posted at 10:53 PM · LINK

More on Jack Larson

Several folks this morning are writing to tell me that Jack Larson turned 80 yesterday, not 75. They base this on various online sources saying he was born in 1928. Ah, but in the first minute of the video interview of Mr. Larson that the Archive of American Television has now posted, he says he was born in 1933.

Here — go watch it for yourself. I haven't had time yet to view the whole thing but it's almost an hour of Jack Larson (who rarely does interviews and never for this long) talking about his life and his career. And if he says he was born in '33...well, maybe he's fibbing but I'd want a better source than Wikipedia before I said otherwise.

Another correspondent noted that I interviewed his Adventures of Superman co-star, Noel Neill at the Mid-Ohio Con last Thanksgiving and will be doing so again at the WonderCon in two weeks. "You should get the two of them down to San Diego this year for a joint appearance," the e-mailer suggested. Yes, that would be great but Larson seems to be pretty shy or maybe just disinterested in that kind of thing and has always declined such invites. Maybe someday he'll change his mind. For now, you'll have to be content with the online interview.

• Posted at 9:36 AM · LINK

Deal! (Probably)

The Writers Guild has reached a tentative (meaning, the membership still has to vote to accept it) deal with the AMPTP. A summary of the terms may be read at this link.

It's late and I have to get to bed...but it seems to me like an acceptable but not great offer. I think the membership will go for it though, of course, there will be those who will feel that after however-many-days-it's-been, the terms should be better. They are not wrong about that but I suspect it's the best deal we're going to get at this time. It does seem better on several points than the Directors Guild deal and one wonders if the DGA has some kind of "favored nations" provision that will upgrade those deal points to match ours.

As rumored, the deal runs through May 1 of 2011. Wonder how they arrived at that date. If the DGA and SAG both renew for three years, that means that in '11, the three unions will all have their contracts expiring in a three month period...and again, we're stuck going first.

Reserving the right to modify my view after the meeting tonight, I feel both pleased and disappointed by this deal. I am pleased the WGA took the stand it did. I believe that if we hadn't struck in November — if we'd caved and accepted the kind of offers they were positioning us for then — we'd have gone a long way towards destroying our livelihoods and those of many others who work in this industry. I'm sure some clown somewhere is going to crunch the numbers wrong and say, "Well, the strike cost Writers an amount totalling X dollars and the gains in the contract only amount to Y over the next three years." But really, this strike was never about that kind of math. It was about a more long range variety that took into account the entire future of our participation in new ways in which the shows and films we write will be marketed. There's no way to calculate the worth of that, and you certainly can't only look at what we will make in the next three years.

The whole battle was also about the way in which we negotiate...or, in most past cases, don't get to negotiate. It all invokes the old analogy of the schoolyard bully who demands a nickel from you one week, a dime from you the next, then a quarter, then fifty cents, etc. At some point, preferably early on, you have to put an end to that because even if at some point your losses seem trivial, they won't stay that way. The AMPTP has an almost inalterable rule: When you accept a bad deal from them, they come back the next time and try and force you to take an even worse one. I shudder to think how terrible the contract would have been in 2011 if we'd taken the kind of thing they were dangling at us last November.

I'm very pleased and proud of the solidarity that the WGA has shown to date. It may get contentious at the meeting tonight because now we can better afford to be contentious. But before the strike I had a lot of dire expectations of members threatening to split the Guild and of far more vituperative attacks on our leadership. With a few exceptions — and only a few — I think this was a very well-run strike. Admittedly, in some cases, the manuevering of the studios did not leave us with a lot of choices...but where we had choices, I think our leadership made the right ones.

Like I said, I'll write more after the meeting. I gotta get some sleep. Good night, Internet!

• Posted at 3:33 AM · LINK

Con Jobs

I have a lot of comic book conventions to attend this year. Usually, I don't make it to as many but I have this book coming out so it seems like a fine time to make the rounds. My whole schedule, if anyone cares, is over on this page.

Two weeks from today, my companion Carolyn and I will be in San Francisco for the annual WonderCon, where we always have a fine time. I, of course, will be hosting some panels and you can find a list of them on this page. You can find the entire programming schedule for the con on this page but why you'd want to go to any events other than mine is beyond me.

• Posted at 12:25 AM · LINK

Happy Jack Larson Day! (One day late)

I'm nineteen minutes late with this. Yesterday was the 75th birthday of Jack Larson, who was so perfect in the role of Jimmy Olsen in the Superman TV series of the fifties. Those shows were done for about a buck and a quarter, with scenes shot wildly out of sequence to the point where the cast often wasn't sure which episode a given scene was even for. Still, the sheer personality of several fine actors made it all work, and Larson was a key reason.

I only met Jack Larson once and he seemed shy and a bit embarrassed by my telling him how much I admired his acting. He gave that up long ago and has had a fine, successful career as a writer and producer, which I assume makes him happier, which is all that should matter. Not long ago, he sat for a lengthy video interview for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation's Archive of American Television project. It should be available on Google Video in the next day or so and when it is, I'll link you to it.

• Posted at 12:19 AM · LINK