If you’ve ever wanted to write a screenplay, now is the time to do it. That is, assuming you don’t mind being a scab. Reuters is reporting that the Hollywood strike is on… or at least the first part of it.
On Friday, members of the Writers Guild of America, the official union for film and TV writers, voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike. More than 90 percent of all members backed the WGA leadership’s request for advance approval to stage a walkout if they don’t get what they want.
So I guess the question here is what are the chances that they’ll get what they want? Most sources seem to indicate that the WGA and Hollywood’s studios are pretty far apart. The WGA is demanding higher residual fees for writers, particularly in the burgeoning market of DVDs and other non-theatrical formats. The studios are demanding that they keep swimming in their moneybin. If they don’t sort things out, it looks like the strike is ready to go for the end of the month.
Meanwhile, the big studios have been acting as if the strike is an inevitability for months now, stockpiling scripts and shooting as many projects as possible to tide them over should it come to that. The WGA isn’t the organization threatening to strike, next summer Hollywood’s actors will face a similar crisis. It’s unlikely that a walkout by film and television writers will have much of an impact for some time, but should both actors and writers end up going next summer… well brace yourselves for a lot of reruns.
