A lot of e-mails pouring in with questions about the WGA strike. Before I get to answering, let me underscore that I am not a WGA official. I am not on the Board or Negotiating Committee — boy, am I happy I am not on the Board or Negotiating Committee — though I was on a big Strike Study committee some years ago and I was heavily involved in some of our past walkouts. That said, here are some questions and my answers…

What happens to the late night shows like Jay and Dave and Conan and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report?

Probably reruns. No one expects any of those shows to remain in production without their writing staffs. The one exception, if the rumor mill is correct, may be Jimmy Kimmel. Depending on when the strike is called, this coming Saturday's Saturday Night Live may not happen. If it does, it may be the last for a while.

Will scabs write the shows?

One would certainly hope not. It's bad for my union, it's bad for the shows and it's usually even bad for the scabs. Not only are they then subject to disciplinary action or exclusion if they later try to join the Guild but the folks they aspire to work with usually don't think much of them, either as writers or human beings. (Those two categories are not mutually-exclusive.)

Why don't the directors, actors and writers all just link arms and strike at the same time for a better cut on DVDs?

Well, for one thing, because they don't all have the same interests. It's sometimes rough enough for those guilds to serve the wide disparity within their own ranks, let alone some other union's. The Producers would have little trouble formulating a proposal that would benefit one of those unions at the expense of the other two…and then what happens? You'd like to believe that would not disrupt intra-union solidarity but the truth is that it probably would.

Also, unions cannot just strike whenever they feel like it. When they do sign a deal for three or four years or whatever, there's a thing called a Contract Bar that essentially says the union will honor the pact for the entire term. If they walk off the job before the contract expires, they're legally in breach of that contract. The one exception to this is if the union has a "conscience clause" in its contract, which means that the worker may refuse to cross another labor organization's picket line and not be in breach…but very few unions have that clause. The Teamsters do, which is why it's such a big deal that they're in solid support of the WGA effort. They can, if they so elect, refuse to deliver to a struck studio or to provide other services that would involve crossing a picket line. The Casting Directors are now in the Teamsters.

I'll post more of these tomorrow.

And now it's later and I'm home. Here, as they say, is the lede: Yes, the Writers Guild of America is going on strike. When? They'll tell us tomorrow. The Board will vote tomorrow morning and we should have an announcement by mid-afternoon. The sense is that tomorrow is the last day there will be any non-scab writing of TV and movies for a while.

Obviously, a strike is not good news but I came away from the meeting feeling good about the situation. I already had confidence in our leadership and now I have a lot in the membership. We haven't had a strike since '88 and an astonishing percentage of the current WGA membership has joined since then and, some feared, might not understand the occasional necessity. That sure doesn't seem to be the case. The hall was packed with, all in all, a pretty youthful crowd. There seemed to be a solid grasp of what's at stake and what must be done to achieve it. There was also, I should add, a lot of joy at the gestures of support from the Screen Actors Guild and the Teamsters.

I've been going for more than half my life to WGA meetings where we were either already on strike or talking about it. This is the first where there was no dissent; no one outside passing out leaflets or taking the audience mike to make the case for accepting Management's latest offer. In this case, I don't believe we even have an offer that we could accept but even if we did, no one seemed to feel this was the time to grab at such a thing. (One group was passing out leaflets but I don't think they were against the strike. Matter of fact, I read the one I got and I'm still not sure what it was trying to say.)

A couple of folks at the microphones in the aisles did ask how long the strike might last. Our leaders couldn't exactly say this but I think the answer is "Nobody knows." A certain amount of this is out of our hands and out of sight…the internal squabbles of the AMPTP. One should never underestimate what can happen if all those powerful people are bickering among themselves, nor can you discount the idea that they'll stick with a rotten battle plan simply because they can't believe it's not working. For the most part, long strikes in this town occur because someone has drastically misestimated the opposition and is stuck without a Plan B. That was clearly what the long '88 Writers Guild Strike was all about. The Producers thought we'd take a crummy offer, we didn't — and they were left in a pretty impotent position with their negotiators mired in a strategy that hadn't worked as predicted. Are we in for this again? Sure looks that way.

Undoubtedly, you will hear some say, "The WGA could have played it smarter…done more to head this off." I don't think so. You can't really negotiate with an entity that believes its greatest strength is in its refusal to negotiate; that strives to avoid the concept that these things ever have to be a two-way street. They do, of course, and at some point this will probably be settled by some good, old-fashioned give-and-take. But we're still at the stage when the Producers are unprepared to abandon the idea that they hold all the cards and we can only win what they'll let us win. That works for them most of the time but I don't think it's going to work this time. Not based on what I saw tonight.

Haven't spoken to anyone this evening but the word across the 'net is that the Producers are holding firm on the following position: That there will be no increase for Writers in DVDs and they define "DVD" as including when your show is downloaded via the Internet, and they probably define it to include several other forms of delivery, as well. Furthermore, the AMPTP is saying, until the WGA drops its demands in that area, there will be no movement on any other part of the contract.

The WGA is unwilling to drop that. Our leaders certainly are not…and while I'll know more about the mood of the membership after tomorrow night's big meeting, I suspect the rank 'n' file are overwhelmingly in the same place on this.

Which means we're looking at a strike, probably but not necessarily as of tomorrow night.

I've received a number of e-mails — some from writers but mostly from folks who are not in the WGA — asking if I can briefly summarize what the conflict is all about. I believe I can and will attempt to do so in the following two sentences…

There's a ton of money being made in DVDs and other forms of home video and these amounts are expected to skyrocket. For as long as possible, the Producers want to keep as much of it as possible for themselves.

Believe it or not, there really isn't much more to it than that. What's more, regardless of what they may say in public, everyone involved knows that that's what this is about.

You'll hear and read a lot about recoupment and softness in traditional markets and deficit financing and all sorts of biz-babble and some of it may even be true. But it's by and large irrelevant to the core of the situation, which is that the companies want to maximize profits and the people who run them want to maximize their own personal take-home pay and bonus moola. They don't want to say that even though everyone knows that…so they put up the smoke and mirrors and say, "Gee, we'd love to cut you guys in for a better piece but there are all these complicated business-type reasons why we can't." The folks explaining that do not buy it for one second when it comes time to negotiate their own compensation but, you know, this is how the game is played.

Do not believe there's anything going on here other than the situation I just summarized. Yeah, there are issues about respect and creative controls and minority hiring and screen credits and a number of other things, and I'm not suggesting they don't matter. They matter a lot but they don't matter enough for either side to allow a strike to happen over them.

To underscore that point: As I was typing the above paragraph, I received my copy of tonight's mass e-mailing from WGA Prez Patric Verrone. It says, in part…

After three and a half months of bargaining, the AMPTP still has not responded to a single one of our important proposals. Every issue that matters to writers, including Internet reuse, original writing for new media, DVDs, and jurisdiction, has been ignored. This is completely unacceptable.

It's also completely typical, as you'll see if you read back through some of my past postings on the subject.

This will be my fourth (or is it fifth?) strike since I joined the WGA. In every one, I've lost something…some important project went away, some break broke. On the other hand, I've done okay through them because my income has never been wholly dependent on work that the WGA covers. The real pains have come from the distraction, the emotions, the politics and labor of striking, and the holding of hands (figuratively) of friends who are frightened or hurting. I believe that some of those 4-5 strikes were mismanaged from our side but on the separate question of whether any given strike was warranted, I never felt we had a choice. I don't see that we have one this time.