Everybody has been asking, what good is this writer’s strike doing? Unless you’re lucky enough to have David Letterman for a boss, you’ve been out of work for two months, forced instead to picket production companies in the dead of winter. Meanwhile the big media companies are seeing profits roughly equal to what they were when the writers WERE working, because while reruns get lower ratings, they don’t cost anything to produce. Where is the positive side of all this?

I’ll tell you where - allow me to quote this opening paragraph from an article in the Associated Press:

The Golden Globes and NBC agreed Monday to scrap the show’s traditional format, which faced picketing by striking writers, in favor of a news conference that organizers hoped would save the unofficial kickoff to Hollywood’s awards season.

Yes, that’s right. Someone finally found a way to kill one of the awards shows.

Everybody knows that the Golden Globes, like a DANCING WITH THE STARS results show, has about two minutes of actual content. The bulk of the show (and it is bulk) is what are the stars wearing? Will the losers react gracefully? Who’s going to try to talk beyond their two minutes? And god forbid, will there be a dance number themed around THE SOPRANOS?

However, none of that nonsense can happen on camera if the stars refuse to cross picket lines. Well, okay, they could still mount the Sopranos dance number. But on some fundamental level, producers understand that that alone doesn’t make us tune in. In fact, that’s when we get up to make grilled-cheese sandwiches. I believe that the American Dairy Farmers sponsor all awards show dance numbers.

The Hollywood Foreign Press association probably could have negotiated some kind of deal to bring in union writers, just like Letterman’s company did. In fact, I think they tried. However, the guild didn’t go for it, and it’s a good decision on their parts. The strike isn’t hurting TV much, but they are still in a position to hurt movies. The big awards shows are, if nothing else, the world’s most glamorous infomercials. They’re a four-hour attempt to sell a second round of tickets for last years blockbusters. The media companies will surely see some kind of serious dip in profits without them.

Also, movies are coming out at a steady pace now, but for the last two months they haven’t been making them. The sequel to THE DA VINCI CODE, for example, is on hold until the strike is settled. They had a start date in February for principal photography, but that’s called off. And you know what that means - some locations will be unavailable, some parts will have to be recast, it will probably have to be re-budgeted. This goes for anything they would have started shooting now. For movies, the strike will impact the bottom line in 2009 and late 2008. Shareholders, bail out now!

Of course, all this pressure will only serve to get the producers back to the bargaining table. Most likely the writers will still cave on their most important demands, and get the same schmoe deal they always get - a flat fee and and handful of monkey points based on profits which will somehow never materialize. Will all their clout, the best the writers can hope for is that their union isn’t busted. Brilliant minds, terrible negotiators. I wish I could be less of a Cassandra about this, and I’m looking forward to being proven wrong, but the networks have their reality shows. And on reality shows, even though it’s unscripted somehow the narrative always goes the way the network wants it to.

-daniel k

POSTSCRIPT: I just read in the Hollywood Reporter that a planned tribute to Steven Spielberg will be rescheduled for next year’s Golden Globes instead, assuming that the strike is settled by then. So we’ll have to sit through a ten-minute pageant of clips and and half hour speech after all. Talk about snatching defeat from the Jaws of victory!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 1:59 pm and is filed under General, Marketing, Motion Pictures, Oscars!, 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.