Yes, there’s been a lot of belt-tightening in showbiz lately, but clearly this goes too far. The National Academy of TV Arts & Sciences (NATAS) has announced that it will only pay for one emmy statuette per category in the upcoming Daytime Emmy Awards. If a team of editors wins, for example, they’ll have to artfully cut the statuette up and perhaps swap a couple of parts, or weld a foot to an arm to create a selection of smaller but more meaningful statuettes.

Actually, NATAS has said that extra winners in a catagory can reimburse the organization for the award; they cost about $350 apiece. Furthermore, there is a west coast branch of the same organization (NATAS is New York based) which says it will shell out for the extra little gold chicks themselves, because they don’t believe a winner should have to pay for their award.

I think this is a further erosion of the vast pile of money upon which the business sits, but Variety frames it as an East/West rivalry much like in rap music.

ATAS (west coast branch) late last week was to file suit against NATAS, accusing its New York counterpart of trying to launch a massive roster of Broadband Emmy awards without proper approval. NATAS denied the allegation and expressed surprise that ATAS walked away from ongoing negotiations surrounding the proposal.

As you’ll recall from the coming writer’s strike, the first thing anyone accuses the other side of is walking away from ongoing negotiations.

In any event it’s nice to know that the ELLEN set-design team doesn’t have to go out of pocket for their professional bling.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 1:55 am and is filed under General, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.