Monthly Archives: December 2007

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…

The WGA has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board charging that the AMPTP is in violation of labor law by refusing to negotiate in "good faith." I'm not sure the AMPTP has ever negotiated anything in what the other side of the table would consider "good faith." Perhaps some DGA contract has been that way…but part of the current dispute is about the Alliance's usual modus operandi, which is to decide what they're going to give the union in question and make them accept that without any meaningful give-and-take. The AMPTP has responded by declaring the WGA actions are "desperate," which is not a surprising rejoinder. Right now, the WGA could send out for Chinese Food and the AMPTP would issue a statement calling it an act of desperation.

I wouldn't expect the N.L.R.B. to do much, if anything. Traditionally, they don't like to get involved in this end of contract negotiations and they boot decisions down the line, delaying them until they're meaningless. Maybe this time will be different but the most likely outcome of this filing is no outcome. It's still worth a few P.R. points for the Guild, though…one more notch in a rather successful campaign by the WGA to make sure that most of those who are paying attention to the strike see that we're not the problem.

Often in a strike, there's a tendency to blame the workers for walking out, rather than blame Management for offering them a deal they couldn't accept. Obviously, either party could be in the wrong but that possibility usually doesn't occur to those who really, really want the strike to end. It's simply faster for the workers to surrender. There are also those out there who think (in this case) that those who write TV shows and movies should be so glad to have that glamorous job that it's sheer greed to expect anything more. For some reason, it's not sheer greed for the companies to try and maximize their take…and it's not even greedy for them to try and lop a few million off some union's health plan and add it to some CEO compensation package. But somehow it's greed when writers don't want their incomes to go down. Right. You can find that viewpoint expressed in some news articles and on the Internet but it's not as prevalent as it was in our past strikes.

(I don't think, by the way, that writing TV and movies is usually as glamorous as it may seem to some people. I guess if you're stuck in a career you hate, any job of choice can look like Nirvana, and the paychecks you hear that some writers receive can sound like all the money in the world. But it's one of those "you have to be there" things. I don't know what good pay or working conditions would be in the dry cleaning business and my dry cleaner can't really evaluate those matters in mine.)

Lastly: There are reports today that the late night hosts — Leno, Letterman, O'Brien and maybe Kimmel and/or Ferguson — will all return to their shows in January, perhaps on the same day. So far, the reports don't quote a single person involved with any of those shows, nor do they say anything that would suggest that anyone spreading the rumor has talked to anyone involved with any of the shows. The story in The New York Post quotes Letterman writer Bill Scheft as saying of Dave, "…when and if he decides to come back, it will be the right decision." But that quote is several weeks old and was not sparked by any current developments. The Post also spelled Scheft's name wrong which may give you a hint as to the accuracy level of the whole article. For now, file this one in the "I'll believe it when I see a real announcement" category.

The other day, I posted a link to a video of Abbott and Costello doing "Who's on First?" with Spanish subtitles. I just received an e-mail from my amigo, Sergio Aragonés, who says, "The translation is pretty good, but it is not funny as is it in English."

Here's a nice little mini-documentary (four and a half minutes) on the voices in some Disney cartoons. One of the guys you'll see in it is my pal Will Ryan who says he reads my weblog every day and can prove it by calling me when he reads this to set up a lunch. I think that's Buddy Ebsen narrating.

People are talking about George Mitchell's report on steroid use in baseball and many of them are acting oddly shocked that it goes on. I don't really care a lot about it one way or the other, nor is it something I think about. In fact, when I saw the headline —

Mitchell's 'Roid Report Fingers Baseball Stars

— my first thought was that someone was making a fuss because a bunch of ballplayers had hemorrhoids. And someone was (ick!) fingering them.

Go read my pal Bob Elisberg on the current status of the WGA/AMPTP Negotiations (or lack of any). Bob and I didn't discuss this at all but we both thought it over and came out in pretty much the same place. The Guild will get royally hosed if it starts giving in to ultimatums just to get the AMPTP back to the bargaining table…especially since the AMPTP will just repeat the tactic to try and get us to give in on more points.

In other news: The DGA says it will hold off on negotiating its usual "early deal" with the AMPTP until January, which is not much of a delay, especially with the holidays looming. The DGA never really strikes. They did once for fifteen minutes but they do not have any sort of serious strike capability. There are a couple of reasons for this, the main one being that the Directors Guild does not merely represent directors. Its membership includes assistant directors, stage managers, production associates, unit production managers, technical coordinators and other folks who are not as directly impacted by most of the so-called strike points. Many of these people, for instance, only receive residuals indirectly through their health and pension plans. Many have no stake in the "creative" issues.

The other problem the DGA has in striking is that many of its members who are directors are rather entrepreneurial. They often own pieces of the movies they direct so aren't all that concerned with DVD revenues, or think of themselves more as employers than employees. That's a generalization, of course, and many DGA members are fine, dedicated creative types who care about everyone. But it's not easy for a union that contains so many disparate types to find the common ground necessary for a successful strike. What the DGA usually does is to make quick-and-dirty deals that get them a little more of whatever they want, and the AMPTP tries to build concessions into those deals that don't matter much to the DGA but which will matter to SAG and the WGA if the same terms can be forced on them via Pattern Bargaining.

Standard Operating Procedure for the AMPTP in this case would be to figure out a deal covering Internet Streaming that would benefit the DGA but if applied to actors and writers, would not result in any real revenue for them. The DGA would grab those terms and then the AMPTP position would be, "This is the deal. The DGA took it so the WGA and SAG must take it and we will not discuss any other formula, end of discussion." The 1981 WGA Strike was essentially about us refusing to accept the deal that the DGA had accepted for home video and cable.

In that case, we had a three month strike and in the end, the AMPTP backed down and gave us a different deal…one tailored for writers and their different situation. It was not only better for us than what the DGA had accepted but the directors later decided it would be better for them, too. (It was also such a good deal that in 1985, the AMPTP insisted on renegotiating it and cutting it back…but that's another story and not a pretty one.)

Something similar may happen this time but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that DGA negotiations can help the WGA by knocking down some stone walls. The AMPTP will have to give the DGA something better than they've offered us regarding the Internet and that may open the door for us there. They also may not be able to figure out a way to give the DGA a good deal there that won't be good for us and SAG. Moreover, there are points on which the AMPTP has dug in its heels with us that they'll have to relent on to sign the DGA — this idea that they can call anything they want "promotional" and not pay for its use, for example. I can't imagine the DGA buying that even if it does mean going on strike. If they can get rid of it, we can get rid of it.

And who knows? The AMPTP may just overplay its hand — it wouldn't be the first time — and not be able to make a deal with the DGA. The Directors have until the end of July before they'd have to walk out, by which time either the WGA and SAG will have made their deals or the town will be in full-scale chaos. The DGA doesn't have to have a new contract for a long time so they don't have to accept something markedly less than what they want. They don't have to undermine the other unions. And if they can't arrive at reasonable terms with the AMPTP, that will pretty much prove that it isn't the WGA that's the problem.

John McCain said something in yesterday's debate about Global Warming that I thought was very wise…

Suppose that climate change is not real and all we do is adopt green technologies which our economy and technology is perfectly capable of, then all we've done is given our kids a cleaner world. But suppose they're wrong and climate change is real and we've done nothing? What kind of a planet are we going to pass on to the next generation of Americans?

I don't think it'll change any minds but I think it's a good way to look at the problem.

Try to follow the subtitles on this one…

In the old e-mailbag, we find a message from Jim Teiner asking…

I don't understand why people who write cartoons aren't in the Writers Guild. Can't you just belong to the union you want to belong to?

Would that it were that easy…

A bit of history. In the forties when the entity that eventually became the Writers Guild of America was being formed, there was little thought of them representing folks who wrote cartoons. For one thing, the organizers had enough trouble then just establishing their right to represent live-action writers. For another, the storylines and gags for cartoons back then were created in a different manner than is today the norm. That work was done by "storymen" who were usually artists and who often dabbled in other phases of production…also drawing or designing characters or such. It seemed right and proper for them to be in the same bargaining unit as other artists.

Those were cartoons for theatrical exhibition, produced on deadlines and budgets quite different from today's animation business. The demands of producing animation for TV, both in terms of schedule and finances, led to cartoons being written in script form, not only much like live-action scripts but in some cases, identical to them and by the same people. Starting as early as The Flintstones, there were folks in Hollywood who made their living as writers of both live-action shows and cartoons. This led to a steadily-increasing yearning on their part to be represented not by Local 839, which then called itself the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Union or somesuch, but by the Writers Guild.

There were many reasons for this yearning but most fell into two categories. One was that it was a hardship for writers who did both to be in two unions. It was (and still is) quite possible to work an awful lot and make a darn good living…but to still fail to qualify for health insurance in either of your two unions. Usually, if you do enough work, you qualify but often, a writer would do 90% of the necessary quantity of work to get health insurance through the WGA and 90% of the work necessary to qualify through 839…and would wind up with a lot of payments going to two unions but no health plan to show for it.

But it was even more unfair than that, which brings us to the second category. Local 839 was designed to represent artists who come in, punch a time clock, sit and draw all day, etc. At times, it has been rather effective for those folks (and at times, not) but the whole structure of the union has understandably been tailored to them. It has never worked as well for people who do what I do. As one example, in the hearings I'll describe in a moment here, we showed the National Labor Relations Board that one year, the highest-earning writer in the business did not qualify for the 839 Health Plan at all, while some writers who earned a lot less did.

That has never been the least of it. Back in the seventies and eighties, most of us writers who were in 839 were amazed not only at how little our union did for us but that the gentleman who was then Business Representative of the union — i.e., the guy who ran things there, ostensibly on our behalf — was openly hostile to our needs. We pointed out to him that the WGA covered matters like arbitration of screen credits, separation of rights, banning "spec" writing, etc., and 839 did not. His response was along the lines of, "I'm too busy to bother with you overpaid whiners."

This was the guy who was in charge of representing us…and you'd think, well, at least we were overpaid, right? I mean, our union got us at least that, didn't it? Amazingly, no. For one thing, we weren't overpaid. We were just paid better than he thought we should be.

The least you expect from your union is that they'll negotiate a decent minimum scale wage for you…enough cash for the lowest-ranked workers (the ones with no clout to demand more) to make an actual living. In fact, the amount that 839 negotiated as scale for writing a cartoon script was so low that most studios raised it voluntarily. Even beginners at some of the stingiest companies in Hollywood received 50% above the fee the union had negotiated for us, and some of us got between double and triple that amount…which still didn't make us overpaid, by the way. We were just in a situation where the amount that our union said was a fair price for a script was an amount that even Bill "Do it as cheap as possible" Hanna was embarrassed to pay anyone. At one other studio, the writers fought a constant battle to not have the rates lowered to union scale. That's how mind-numbingly rotten 839 was back then as far as writers were concerned.

Before I tell you how it's better now, let me explain a bit about how we tried to change unions in the past, prior to the current WGA campaign. I was heavily involved in two separate suits before the National Labor Relations Board, neither of which succeeded. The second attempt was the outright organizing of a non-union studio. We won the case, won an election there and then lost on an appeal due to, I was told, a guy at the N.L.R.B. in Washington (a Reagan appointee) who was notoriously and admittedly opposed to workers being allowed to unionize. The precedents he cited in reversing our win were all later overturned but by that time, it was moot.

The first attempt was a lawsuit to bring about what is called Craft Severance, which means to cut a group of workers out of one union, thereby allowing them to join another. This is very difficult to do under labor law, which traditionally favors continuity over anything else. There are many management/labor relationships that exist today which seem to go contrary to common sense and/or the current statutes but the N.L.R.B. allows them to continue on the assumption that to rearrange things might destabilize an industry that has a long history. (When they do intervene to change things, it usually works to the advantage of the employers.) The desire for stability is why they won't just let people change unions because they want to.

We lost that first battle before the N.L.R.B. for reasons I still do not fully understand. I think we had the first O.J. Jury making the call. In one part of the decision, the presiding official cited my testimony as an example of writers having "substantial interchange" with the animators on the shows they wrote, and said we should therefore be in the same union. But my testimony was that I didn't have any contact with the animators in my work because with very rare exceptions, they were all in Korea and didn't speak English. The rest of the ruling made about as much sense.

In any case, I will never forget — or forgive — the following scene. I am sitting in a hearing room of the N.L.R.B. huddling with Writers Guild lawyers who are seeking to get Animation Writers the right to join their union of choice. On the other side of the courtroom, allied against us, are the studios for which we worked — Disney, Hanna-Barbera, etc. — and Local 839. The Business Representative I mentioned above is sitting there, conferring with the folks he's supposed to represent us against, planning with them how to keep us in his union. And why do we think they wanted us in his union? Because he was the guy who was negotiating script fees for us that were below what they wanted to pay…and telling us baldly that our union wasn't going to address our other concerns.

That's why we didn't like Local 839 then. It is much better now. That gent was finally ousted and the current Business Representative is a bright, hard-working guy named Steve Hulett, who has helped remake the union into a vastly better organization. Unlike his predecessor, Hulett sees the advantage of working with the WGA where it can advance the interests of both organizations and he's been out walking the picket lines with us. However, it is still a union that is set up to serve people who animate and paint backgrounds and cels and such. It is still not equipped to do a lot of what the WGA does for its members. It is also part of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and you perhaps have read how openly nasty the President of that union, Thomas Short, has been to the WGA. He hasn't been much nicer to Animation Writers working within 839.

One thing to remember here is that the WGA's organizing efforts in animation are all on a "consent of the governed" basis. To organize any studio still requires an election and in this case, I doubt they would be close elections. Among Animation Writers, there doesn't seem to be much disagreement as to where we belong. I'm not in the thick of it these days but back in the eighties, if we'd been able to have elections and let writers vote as to which union they wanted to have represent them, I'd have bet my house that the WGA would get over 90% in any contest. At some studios, it would easily have been 100%.

This is not just because writers want and deserve residuals, which they expect the WGA to arrange. They do but two things should be noted here. One is my constant reminder to all that some Animation Writers do get residuals even without the WGA. Writing cartoons does not automatically mean No Residuals and that should never be taken as a "given" in any deal.

Secondly, residuals on all cartoon writing would not mean that much more money going to writers; not when you compare it to the over-all budgets of most animated projects. The payments would be important to the writers but the studios' pleas that this would disrupt the financial health of the business and drive profitable shows into deficit…that's all nonsense. They say that every time anyone wants a dollar more for doing anything. The last time it was said to my face over the issue of residuals, it was uttered by an executive who soon after received a boost in his own salary of, I think, four million dollars a year. That was somehow affordable for them but if they'd paid a couple hundred thousand bucks in residuals to writers — and that's all we were talking about — that would have "bankrupted the studio."

No studio has ever been bankrupted by residuals. They only pay residuals when they're selling reruns, which means they're getting paid. The desire to not pay residuals is never anything more than the desire to not share that new income.

Actually, the writers' desire to be repped by the WGA seems to me to flow mainly from what we might call the "moral issues," the desire to do our work protected from abuses that The Animation Guild, because it is not primarily a writers' union, is simply not set up to address. It is no longer a question of 839 being a bad union, as I believe it was in the seventies. It is now merely the wrong union, just as if you were a mailman, a union of textile workers might not be all that effective to cope with your particular needs.

What the WGA is attempting to achieve in its current bargaining with the AMPTP is to just take another step — and maybe not even a very big one — towards getting all those folks in the right union. The studios are opposing it because they don't like the idea of someone being in a union that might be truly effective in saying, "You can't do that to these employees!"

I have no idea how big a bargaining chip all this will be whenever the WGA Negotiators finally get to see the lovely faces of the AMPTP reps again. I would be disappointed but not angry if the WGA dropped its demands in Animation. I would especially not be angry it if were done as a trade-off for something more meaningful elsewhere in the contract. That would slow down the WGA organizing of Animation Writers but it would certainly not stop it. At the moment, I don't see that we're being offered anything in exchange for dropping our demands in Animation. At best, the AMPTP is saying that if we drop that plus some other things that we definitely should not drop, they'll come back to the bargaining table…probably long enough to tell us what else they insist we drop. I'd be disappointed and angry if we fell for that.

NBC has abandoned its bizarre idea of airing very old Jay Leno Tonight Show reruns. This week's are no older than 2004 (one is from last April) and next week's are all from 2006. I don't know what was on their mind but whatever it was, it didn't work.

Tomorrow, Turner Classic Movies is running The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again, back to back. If you've never seen them, at least the first is worth a peek. Both starred Larry Parks as the great singer…with the real Jolson dubbing the singing voice. (There's also one long shot in The Jolson Story where Jolson dances and it's the real guy standing in for the guy playing him.) Neither film is particularly accurate in its biographical storyline and the second one is really a case of no one having an idea for a movie but they went and made it, anyway. Still, there's something fascinating about the movies and most of the singing is wonderful.

And it's only twenty-one days until TCM runs my pick for the strangest movie ever made…Skidoo! Better start warming up the set now for that one.

This is the last of the four cartoons produced for the Hill & Range Company and aired annually on Chicago's kid's shows. If you want a DVD of them all, here's where to get one.

This is Suzy Snowflake and like the previous one, it was animated by Centaur Productions, the company run by master sculptor and special effects guy Wah Ming Chang. I'm told that the vocal group in this is the Norman Luboff Choir and that the female soloist is Norma Zimmer, who was one of Lawrence Welk's "Champagne Ladies" for around six hundred years. Take a look.

I wonder how many people, when they heard Ike Turner had died, thought "Great Musician" and how many people thought, "Wife Beater."

Sometimes, your sins just never go away.

Here and there on the 'net, I see people making the suggestion that the WGA abandon its demands about representing Animation and Reality Writers. These are two areas near and dear to my aorta. I have worked in Reality Programming, back in the eighties when it was all represented by the WGA. I still work occasionally in Animation and was one of those who spilled a lot of corpuscles to try and move that area under the umbrella of the Writers Guild. It's important to note that the WGA does represent writers on some so-called "reality shows" — Dancing With The Stars, to name one. As far as I know, that series is still successful and has not been destroyed by its WGA contract.

We should also underscore that the WGA already represents some animation writing at some studios…and in some pretty significant venues like The Simpsons and The Family Guy. One of the sillier claims that's being made is that WGA coverage of animation writing would hurt the studios and cause profitable ventures to become unprofitable. The amounts of money involved are, to the studios, petty cash. They'd mean a lot to the writers but in the overall budget of a show, they're pretty insignificant. More to the point, shows already covered by the WGA are for the most part doing pretty well, and the ones that have failed would not have succeeded with cheaper writers. The Family Guy is a wildly lucrative cash cow and The Simpsons may soon prove to be the single most profitable TV series ever produced. So why would it kill someone else to make the same deals with us?

Equally important: Keep in mind that our current demands also would not give the WGA jurisdiction over all Animation Writing, either immediately or in the near-future. In fact, on the WGA site, it says that what we're now asking for is to…

Modify the definitions of "television motion picture" and "theatrical motion picture" to expand coverage of the MBA to all theatrical and TV animation except those that are covered by other labor organizations.

Those are my italics there. Disney, Warner Bros. Animation, Sony Animation, Fox Animation, etc., are all currently covered by another labor organization…The Animation Guild, Local 839. Writers on some projects at these houses have been repped by the WGA and that will probably continue and expand, but that's not what the current bargaining is all about. It's about allowing the WGA to organize where no one else currently has jurisdiction. Obviously, there's a long-term goal to cover everything but what we're presently asking for are some alterations of language that will make it easier for the WGA to bargain for Animation Writers not currently covered by 839. We will not wake up one morning soon — and perhaps not even in this century — to find that everyone who writes cartoons in this town is WGA.

I'm curious as to which AMPTP companies are stonewalling on this issue and how much they really care about it. Is Disney willing to keep the industry shut down over it? Even though the WGA isn't asking for jurisdiction over writers at Disney? True, expanding the WGA's representation of animation might impact Disney years in the future…but not now. Now, I suspect, the studios are a lot more eager to get the issue of "Distributor's Gross" off the table. One of the six areas they said had to be dropped before they'd return to the bargaining table is the one to which they responded as follows…

…we cannot agree to any new residual formula based upon the concept of "Distributor's Gross." That is, any residual formula that requires payment to be made based upon the receipts of an entity other than the signatory Company is unacceptable to us. Our agreement to share revenues with you must be limited to those revenues actually received by the signatory Company.

As I explained here, Distributor's Gross is the money that the company actually receives. It's easier for an outside party to monitor Distributor's Gross and less prone to bookkeeping shenanigans, which is why we want any formulas that pay writers to be based on it. The studios would prefer to base deals on Producer's Gross, which is not only a lower figure but a number from which they can deduct darn near anything they want. A studio could offer to pay you 110% of Producer's Gross and then make so many deductions that Producer's Gross equals zero.

That has to matter a lot more to them than the WGA demands in the areas of Reality programming and Animation. When they say they won't come back to the table until we drop the six demands they listed, those aren't the ones they most want us to abandon. The Animation one won't change that much, at least for quite a while. The one about the Distributor's Gross is where the money is. (So, to a slightly lesser extent, is the one about "Fair Market Value.")

The strategy behind the Six Demands is to get us bickering over how much we want to hold out over Reality and Animation. They hope that we'll crater over that, agree to back off on those points…and maybe the ones about Distributor's Gross and Fair Market Value can quietly disappear along with them in a kind of package deal. Personally, though WGA representaton of Animation matters greatly to me, I don't think that even if the studios give us what we're asking for, it will change that much…which is as good a reason to keep it on the table for now as it is to take it off. It won't matter either way if we hold fast on the money issues and we ought to hold on those. The issue of Reality Programming is more complicated and I'll try to address in a future posting why I think that's still a noble and proper area for the WGA to assert itself.

Really though, I don't believe Animation and Reality are true obstacles to getting the Alliance back to the negotiating table. This strike is still about their determination to lower the compensation not just of Writers but for Actors, Directors and anyone else whose deals would be impacted by ours. And it's also about the fact that at some point, the AMPTP is actually going to have to negotiate with us instead of deciding what they want to give us and shutting down the talks if we don't accept it. I would hate to see their Six Demands strategy succeed because it will just lead to the Six More Demands strategy. And then Six More and Six More or however many it will take until we don't have any left.

Time for another of those animated shorts produced for (and rerun incessantly) on Chicago kids' shows. This one is Hardrock, Coco and Joe, and it was done for Christmas of 1956 and for the Hill & Range Company, which I guess was marketing the song involved. The actual animation was done by a company called Centaur Productions, which was run by a gentleman named Wah Ming Chang, who specialized in sculpture, stop-motion animation and odd props. He did a lot of the props on the original Star Trek TV show, for instance (he built the communicators that predated cell phones, as well as the Tribbles) and some of Elizabeth Taylor's most notable headdresses and jewels in Cleopatra.

In animation, he did most of his work over the years in commercials and for George Pal's company — much of Tom Thumb, to name one thing — as well as a few things for Disney.

Here's Hardrock, Coco and Joe. If you're interested in obtaining a DVD of the shorts done for Chicago which I'm showcasing here, click on this link.

The University of Southern California has a superb College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and that college has something called the Master of Professional Writing Program which outputs some very fine soon-to-be-professional writers. Some of them take this course that the school offers…

Writing Humor: Literary and Dramatic

This course analyzes the specifics of humor — wit, irony, satire, parody, and farce. Work is read in class for discussion. Assignments are a six-page and 8-10 page essay or fictional work, a critique of a sitcom or film comedy, and a humorous radio commercial. The final dramatic comedy assignment is predicated on action/conflict and the probable inevitability of humor.

That sounds exciting until you find out that beginning with the Spring semester, the course will be taught by me. I've guest-lectured at classes like this before but this is the first time I've had a whole batch of wanna-be writers placed in my care. I mention this not to solicit students (the class is already full with a waitlist) but just to let you know what I'm up to. And who knows? Maybe, by the time the class is over and those who take it are prepared to venture out into the world of professional writing, the strike will be over.