Striking writers, studios break off talks again | Entertainment | Reuters
News that four straight days of negotiations had collapsed in acrimony came in a sharply worded statement issued late in the day by the studios’ bargaining arm, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
The studios blamed WGA leaders for making “unreasonable demands that are roadblocks to real progress.”
Damned writers. Probably demanded that they actually get paid a reasonable rate for what they do.
Screw it. Let Tom Cruise write his own movies.
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Nikki Finke has been doing a great job staying on top of the twists and turns of the strike. The studios are definitely playing hardball and using the media to blame the writers…
I’m with folks like Rob Long and Marc Andreessen who are hopeful that the industry will ultimately be forced to simplify its revenue and accounting models.
(as a technical aside, I tried to use the Quicktags in the comment input to associate a link to a specific article on Rob Long’s website. The url was http://roblong.com/?p=19 . When I pasted that into the input box, the text I was associating it with (Rob Long) disappeared. When I went in and manually typed the url, the text stayed visible right up to the time I typed the 1 in 19, then it disappeared. Odd…
test
What are you testing, John?
I’m posting this again…without the actual links since my first post seems to have vanished (I was having trouble with one of the links I added, which must have altered the pixel-packet continuum and launched my post into an alternate universe.. where now a bearded Captain Quick is demanding my head on a mousepad…but I digress)
Nikki Finke at www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com has been doing a great job of keeping up with the strike and its twists and turns. No surprise that the studios have been “negotiating” via a series of demands and take-backs. Looks like they’ll invoke force majeure on Monday, blame it on the writers and take the holidays off.
I’m with Rob Long (www’roblong.com) and Marc Andreessen (blog.pmarca.com) in hoping that the pressures of evolving distribution models will bring an end to one of the last vestiges of the studio system - their archaic and absurb “accounting” practices - and enable more straightforward accounting for revenues and residuals.
If that happens, maybe the guilds can become more like guilds and less like labor unions…or not. They’re the second to last vestige left from the old studio system, but necessary as long as distributors (studios) call the shots and control the pipeline.
He and Gil both had comments trapped by Akismet. I turned them loose.
Given Hollywood’s recent output, I’m not sure the result would be any worse.
As a writer, I have a lot of sympathy for their desire to be paid for their work. As a consumer, I’m sometimes surprised they can make a living writing such dreck.
Well, you have to get involved in the milieu and the process to understand.
First, writers aren’t stupid. If the only thing the crazed leftists are paying for is leftwing drivel, that’s what you write - if you want to get paid for it. That’s the milieu - although a fair amount of writers agree with the ideology.
Second, the general crappiness: believe it or not, most screenwriters who manage to work at a paying level are pretty good at what they do. But even the best script, after getting pissed on by the director, the producer, the stars, and their various girlfriends, boyfriends, pr advisers, and hairdressers, will generally end up looking like a piece of shit.
The amazing thing is not that so many scripts are bad, but that a few good ones do get through. That’s usually either an error on the system’s part, or due to a writer-director so powerful he has unlimited final-cut rights.
Another issue is that, while producers do buy outside stories, a lot of today’s films get written after the deal is made: So the writer is faced with: “We’ve got stars x, y, and z, and director w. Write me a vehicle.”
Back when everybody was under contract that did happen, but it didn’t happen nearly as much.
Yep. And it says a lot that it is considered far more important to lock up stars, directors, etc., with the writer/script considered almost an afterthought.
Unfortunately, when you make the script an afterthought, it shows.
Sorry, anyone who doesn’t think the term ‘writer’s union’ is a oxymoron has serious problems.
And defending a union? On DP?
The union, like anything that approaches the actions of individuals as if they are a collective, is always wrong.
oxymoron - Definitions from Dictionary.com
I don’t think oxymoron means what you think it means.
I’m not sure I “defended a union,” but here on DP we actually think, rather than spout dogma. In this case, writers have a legitimate grievance.
Always? Gosh, it must be nice to be able to substitute holy writ for, you know, actual thought.
So, unions are always wrong, corporations are always right? Is that how your dreary tune goes?
What was it the producers (as in providers) did in Shrugged? Oh yeah, I remember now, they collectively went on strike.
It’s not the unions that are a problem, it’s states that grant them absolute control. Once the law is written to provide a union with the ability to force workers to join and to shut a company down, the company has little choice but to give in or go out of biz.
Third option is to move, not always an alternative but one that business should consider.
Doesn’t always work. A food workers union trying to take over a Smithfield plant in North Carolina is stalking Paula Dean in Savannah, GA.
BTW the only reason they have not yet had a vote on the union is cause the union doesn’t want a secret ballot.
I used to host Wednesday night “salons” for some local libs here in San Francisco, pretty much just highly liquidized gab-fests, although every once in a while one of the women would pull a .357 wheel gun with a six inch barrel out of her purse to show us how pretty her new hollow points were.
Often present were folks like Vince Miller, founder of ISIL, and George H. Smith, the libertarian author and atheist, and Tim Starr, of no-treason.com.
We had the union discussion one night, and came to the conclusion that there was nothing in either Objectivism (we were mostly Objectivists) or libertarianism as we understood it that would look askance at free men banding together in mutual consent to seek mutually desirable goals. A union might become corrupt, but there was nothing evil in the concept of a union.
And if you know anything about the WGA - the Hollywood writers union - and I do - “collective” is about the last way I’d describe that particular herd of cats.
Completely agree. Aside from corruption, where the ideal breaks down is when unions collude with government to forbid companies from hiring strike breakers.
Also, as a matter of public policy, I don’t think government employees should be allowed to unionize. If they don’t like the conditions, they can quit and get jobs that actually do good for the nation. Despite overblown claims that various government services are vital to continued human life, you’ll notice that the only actually vital federal government function, the military, is conducted by non-unionized employees.
The flip side applies: the government should not involve itself in disputes between unions and employers. I can’t find any Constitutional justification for Reagan’s blacklisting of air traffic controllers, regardless of the inconvenience they caused.
Certain types of federal, state and municipal employees are barred by federal law from striking. Postal, ATC, police and fire come to mind. Three of them deal with public safety and the fourth is needed to deliver your delinquent tax notices.
No, I think I know what oxymoron means.
Apparently, so do you. It’s one thing to chide me for putting forth a hard-to-grasp notion, but when that’s done, you really should think twice about using the same notion.
When thinking in an individualist vs collectivist mode, the concept of a union is, most definately, evil.
Ideally, in an individualistic frame of mind, the goal is that everyone is completely self sufficient, that there are no relationships based in need(by need, I refer to the state in which there is a benefit to numbers that cannot be had as an individual). A union, is, by definition, a statement that individuals are weak, collectives are strong.
Since we, sadly, live in a state in which this is true–in which even the cause of individualism is better advocated collectively, it is better to acknowledge, right up front, that the system we use is corrupt.
No matter the nobility of the goal, the inherent danger of working collectively needs to always be addressed.
The idea that free men might band together to pursue a mutually desirable goal is fine–until ‘need’ enters the equation. Unions, as they exist, exploit need to maintain the union–often at the expense of the members. Need makes differences in ability and status become power, which tends to make one member dependant on another. At that point your group of free men suddenly includes one or more who are no longer free–they are dependant on the group.
Okay, now I see it. Hard to grasp notion? No, you’re just a lousy writer. When in one sentence you foggily advance the notion that a “writers union” is impossible, when you’re talking about an actual writers union that exists in the real world, and then move briskly along to talk about that same union you claim is impossible as if it actually existed (defending a union at DP?) why, I can’t imagine how anybody could misinterpret what you are so badly trying to say.
Horseshit. As is the rest of your explication on that notion. Your “individualistic frame of mind” is a gauzy cloak for anarchy, and this:
Is just a silly observation of the obvious, although you seem to think it is some sort of indictment.
Many are stronger than one. Duh. And this somehow morphs into the evil concept of “need,” which destroys perfect equality. Well, if the union of free men no longer parallels the “needs” of some of the free men in that union, as free men, they are free to leave the union!
That is, in fact, how many companies have broken both strikes and unions in the past.
Consider the following statement:
An army is, by definition, a statement that individuals are weak, collectives are strong.
Both statements seem to be trivially true and yet curiously wrong.
Huh? Isn’t the goal that is desired a need? I think I understand what you’re trying to say here but it’s difficult to be certain given the way you’ve stated things. Heck, a literal read of this
would indicate that you’re ideal individualistic society would have no employers.
I cannot imagine that the idea of a collection of independent people working in concert toward a common just goal could ever be considered evil.
Ooops, sorry Bill. I took way too long to compose my response to jack and I see I should have refreshed before posting.
Alfred, the more, the merrier. DP is not just a forum for me, personally. And many opinions are stronger than one.
I’m against it unless I’m for it.
I’ve decided that your amusement value no longer suffices to balance your stupidity factor.
You’re banned.
I wondered how long that would take. Most of the time you can’t cure stupid.
Ideally, there would be no need for employers if everyone was completely self sufficient.
The problem, of course is ‘ideally’. It’s easy to postulate an end–harder by far to create the means by which that end can be achieved. And still harder when the means necessarily include structures antithetical to the end that is postulated.
I’ve already blathered on about ‘right’ and ‘left’ being anti-statism and statism. Taking that into a more descriptive terminology I think individualist and collectivist fit better.
The ideal endpoints I extrapolate for each side are, for the collectivist side, a hive, and for the individualist side individuals who are capable of fulfilling all their needs as well as their wants.
However, to achieve the individualist endpoint, we will have to work collectively at times–and doing that leads to the temptation of collectivist thought.
Which we fall for all too easily.
If I read you correctly, you are saying that, ideally, everyone does everything for themselves (completely self sufficient), i.e., no one employs anyone else to do anything for them. I just can’t imagine how this situation could be considered ideal even in the case where each person is a perfectly rational self-interested agent.
That’s a hypothesis which has not been adequately tested. We need to experiment with methods for curing stupid. Physical beatings should not be ruled out.
Physical beatings should not be ruled out.
I am not against that. I am also for completely removing the source if necessary.