Saturday, May 3, 2008

Hollywood Labor News

It's not looking good for the Screen Actors Guild in its negotiation with the AMPTP. The talks have been extended but every word leaking from within says that the studios are trying to force SAG to accept some version of the deal already made with the DGA, WGA and other unions. And SAG is saying, in effect, "That deal — and your version of it, in particular — doesn't work for us."

I haven't been following this one as closely as I followed the WGA negotiations. I don't have any real sources within SAG calling me. But from all I read, the operating assumption is that SAG will have to either take a deal it abhors or begin making picket signs. In the meantime, the AMPTP will soon be sitting down with AFTRA, the other actors' union, and everyone seems to think AFTRA will take darn near whatever the studios offer. This would further undermine the SAG position and create a lot of ill will between the two unions.

Twice in the last half-dozen years, there were proposals that came close to merging SAG and AFTRA into one big union that probably would have been stronger than the sum of its parts. Each time, the leaderships of both unions endorsed the proposal. Each time, it was then necessary to get a 60% vote of the memberships to consolidate. Each time, the AFTRA side voted overwhemingly in favor. And each time, the SAG side fell a bit short. The SAG vote was 52% in 1999 and 57.8% in 2003.

What will happen next time they talk of merger? Your guess is as good as mine. The current situation probably makes the SAG members who voted against the alliance regret that vote. But depending on how things roll out, the two unions may not speak to each other for years.

Without knowing the terms on the table, I think it's safe to assume that SAG is presently being slammed by the old Pattern Bargaining trick...a longtime fave of the AMPTP. The idea is to craft proposals in a form that works for Union A and not for Union B. Then after Union A accepts, you try to force the same deal on B as a done deal, a precedent of how business must henceforth be done. In this case, SAG has the added pressure of knowing that AFTRA will probably accept the pattern...so SAG negotiators are being boxed-in from all sides.

I'll stand by my previous prediction, which is that there won't be a SAG strike but it's going to come awfully close and look very likely. Despite all this, SAG still has a lot of clout. A strike — even a short one — would hurt the studios a lot. For that matter, it will hurt the studios if this thing goes down to the wire, to the expiration date of the current SAG contract, which is June 30. There a lot of movies that are prepped to shoot soon but won't as long as there's the possibility of that walkout. In a sense, the SAG strike is on now because a lot of projects are being scrubbed or postponed.

More news when there's more news.

• Posted at 2:58 PM · LINK

Just Before Bedtime

I'm not sure what I'm doing up at this hour, either. I should tell the students in my class that the advantage of writing comedy material at five in the morning is also the disadvantage: Everything seems funny.

In another life when I was working on Welcome Back, Kotter, my partner Dennis and I would sometimes be at the studio or at Gabe Kaplan's house 'til five or thereabouts in the ayem, trying with occasional success to rewrite that week's script into something worthy of videotape. The hours were especially rough on Mr. Kaplan when he participated in the rewrite, as he often did. Unless it was Friday night, he had to be at the studio at 10 AM to rehearse what we were writing. The rest of us could straggle in a bit later.

This was before Internet or computers or fax machines. If a page of the script needed a major redo, we'd type a new page on a thing called a typewriter. If we just had to change a line or three, we'd handwrite it in on the appropriate page of the previous draft. I usually did this because I had the neatest handwriting. Then when we were close to done, I'd phone the script service — a company that charged and got a fortune for executing the following tasks. As we left, I'd leave the revised script in an envelope either with the guard at the studio gate or if we were working at Gabe's house, on his doorstep. The script service would send a runner to pick it up and he'd take it back to their office where a squadron (I assume) would retype the whole thing, sometimes for Xeroxing but sometimes for mimeographing, a reproduction process that was becoming largely Flintstonian in the seventies. On the front of the script, there'd be a note with the phone number of one of the participating writers — usually, me — so they could call if they had a question. It was understood that they were to do this only in the most desperate of circumstances.

I'd drive home and get whatever sleep was still possible. While I was doing this, the script service would be mass copying the scripts. If it was a Saturday morn when I awoke, there'd be a copy of the revised draft on my doorstep, just as everyone who worked on the show would be finding one on theirs. If it was a weekday, there'd be a crate of copies at the studio when everyone arrived. It never seemed humanly possible but it was always done.

One night, we were at Gabe's 'til about five...and we were not only rehearsing but taping later that day. It was us, Gabe, a producer and one other story editor and we were all punchy. To amuse ourselves, and maybe to send out a cry that we were working this hard, we began inserting obscene stage directions. One of the milder ones was something like, "Mr. Woodman enters the classroom and begins french kissing all the male students." Others would have made Larry Flynt blush.

Now, understand that we were not suggesting that any of this would actually be performed on the ABC Television Network, especially during the Family Hour. It was just there to amuse us and the cast and the staff, and everyone was highly amused. Everyone except the Standards and Practices lady — i.e., The Network Censor. She insisted that the scripts be collected, destroyed and reissued with proper stage directions. We suggested that she had no jurisdiction to demand this. She could rule on what we proposed to put on the air but not on our stage directions.

I'm not sure why the producer stuck to his guns on this one for even a few hours...we'd already gotten our laugh from the crew. Eventually, he took pity on the Censor Lady, who was honestly concerned that we'd cost her her job. Near the end, she was arguing that though the scripts were just for us, they did have a way of leaking out and being sold and even studied in classrooms. I rewrote all the offending stage directions.

That night, just before taping, I was backstage and John Sylvester-White, who played Mr. Woodman, came up to me. John was a lovely little man with a wicked sense of humor but before each taping, he suffered a brief panic attack. Everyone had to assure him that he'd be fine, that the audience would love him, that we'd given him all the best lines in the show. (All of that was true.) I gave him the customary reassurance and he headed for the stage. But before he went, he turned to me and said, "Hey, remind me. Which is the scene where I french kiss all the male students?"

Good night, Internet. See you in the morning.

• Posted at 6:00 AM · LINK

Student Teacher

I haven't mentioned it lately here but I'm still teaching once a week in the Master of Professional Writing program down at USC. The course is called "Writing Humor: Literary and Dramatic." Next week is the last class of the Spring semester and I'm making it easy on myself by bringing in a guest speaker...a superior writer friend of mine named Treva Silverman, who wrote for The Monkees and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and many other things including a number of successful movies for which others got the screen credit. Earlier this term, I had in two other guest speakers...Marvin Silbermintz (who writes for that Leno guy on The Tonight Show) and the most brilliant comic actor on this planet, Chuck McCann.

Other weeks, it's just me, telling my charges whatever I think I know about comedy writing, critiquing their homework assignments, etc. Some weeks, we watch and analyze funny movies, TV shows or comedy routines. We did one week on Laurel and Hardy, one week on The Dick Van Dyke Show, one week on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, etc. For one class, I brought in hundreds of Henny Youngman jokes and we just sat around and took turns reading them out loud and discussing why the ones that made us laugh made us laugh and why the ones that didn't didn't.

Before I started, someone else who'd done this kind of thing gave me advice I haven't been able to use. He said that the greatest good I could do my students would be to discourage the ones who aren't funny and will never be funny and need to know that they can never make a dollar in that line o' work. I guess that's true but I didn't have anyone this term who needed that kind of attitude adjustment. Maybe next year.

Yeah, I've decided to keep on doing this. I'll be teaching Funny again during the Fall quarter, and I think the class is already full or close to full. (They even have a profile of me over on their faculty page.) I dunno what the students are getting out of it apart from becoming overly familiar with Henny Youngman's act...but I'm sure learning a lot.

• Posted at 3:26 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Tom Lehrer favors us with "The Masochism Tango"...