You’re at home, trying to enjoy your new post-2009-ready digital TV. But what you’re seeing is something like slow-motion crash test footage. The major networks are slowly– excruciatingly slowly– being crunched into shapelessness by the WGA strike. Sure, “American Idol” is back on (and you’re welcome to it), and God help us the revived “American Gladiator” is picking up quite a few ratings chips. But scripted shows have been slipping into darkness, turning to reruns, like sparks from a fire turning to black ash. To carry the analogy further: If Television is America’s hearth, they’re running out of decent, dry oak firewood, so they must substitute lignite coal. Yeah, you get a decent fire from coal, but everything that makes a fire nice is absent, and it smells funny.

In other words: The strike is starting to do what it promised to do– that is, affect everyone, even you.

The labor action seems to have no end in sight, either. The more recent DGA negotiations are proving more ominous than hopeful. So expect television to become worse. Movies can hold out a bit longer, but if this goes on for another eleven weeks the Christmas movie season will start to thin out. If, God forbid, the writers hold out for six months… Let’s just say you’d better develop a taste for Canadian cinema and zero-budget indies.

Almost every Guild member, save those lucky enough to fall under side deals, are gamely sticking it out. Good on ‘em. But have you ever wonder how this affects NON-Guild writers?

I sure have.

See, me and my writing partner John have been toiling away on a screenplay for just about two years. Yeah, that’s right, I said TWO YEARS. Twelve complete drafts. I have a storage box in my office I toss finished drafts and outlines into: It’s full. A rough estimate tells me there are about 4000 printed pages in there. Still, most studio people I told this to didn’t even flinch at the fact we’re on the thirteenth draft. Most spec scripts worth buying are only considered well-honed after ten drafts. And if we were writing it full-time, rather than evenings and weekends, we’d have been at D13 sixteen months ago.

(And to anticipate your next question: NO, I’m not gonna tell you what the script is about. It’s just too darn cool to share right now. I’m not being egotistical: we have LA people who think it’s cool too, and are waiting to read it if we ever finish it. So I’ll describe it as a commercially viable feature-film manuscript that has killed every time we pitched it.)

We’re steadily getting to the point when the thirteenth draft will be final– and the time will be nigh to make this enormous creative investment pay off. But… There’s this Writer’s Guild strike going right now. What to do?

The WGAw Strike Rules are long and exhaustive and cover all aspects of the profession of media writing. But most of the rules specifically apply to Guild MEMBERS. John and I are not WGAw members. We’re the very definition of Hollywood outsiders: Some serious connections, but we both live in the Bay Area and only work peripherally in show business.

How to proceed? The very last section of the strike rules– Directive 13, as it turns out– Addresses schmoes in our position, and then only barely.

13. Rules pertaining to non members

The Guild does not have the authority to discipline non members for strike breaking and/or scab writing. However, the Guild can and will bar that writer from future Guild membership.

This policy has been strictly enforced in the past and has resulted in convincing many would be strike breakers to refrain from seriously harming the Guild and its members during a strike. Therefore, it is important for you to report to the Guild the name of any non member whom you believe has performed any writing services for a struck company and as much information as possible about the non member’s services.

So the threat is: Break the strike, Mr. Nobody, and you’ll never take a lunch meeting in this town again. But doesn’t “strike breaking” or “scab writing” refer to purposefully displacing a striking writer? The Strike Rules are addressed to Guild members, not the public: Directive 13 seems to be in place to bolster the ranks. It also seems to address the protection of higher-profile, writing-staff, weekly paycheck Guild work. I suppose one could interpret the action of trying to sell a spec as vying for an opportunity that a Guild writer is normally entitled to. But if so, that doesn’t also sound like old-fashioned patent entitlement, one that favors membership over literary merit?

At our outsider/spec script level, the prudent moves is to get the story optioned– that is, agree to give a person or company agency to solicit the property for a fixed amount and period of time. The person or entity we’d be optioning to are almost certainly NOT going to be an AMPTP signatory, so this transaction cannot conceivably violate any WGAw strike rule. But optioning just transfers the problem: The option-holder is also prevented by Directive 13 from selling our script to a struck studio. If we are hoping for any decent measure of success, this means we’re effectively stalemated.

Then again, it’s not like we’ve been reduced to sitting on our hands and patiently waiting for the WGA labor action to end. There is still a dizzying amount of work to do to get the thirteenth draft final– more editing and line fixes. And we’re seriously considering a staged reading of the manuscript, so we can listen to real actors deliver the dialog we wrote. It’s a good way to workshop a script: Actors love it, give surprisingly good feedback, and gives us more control than being part of a peer-reading circle.

Hopefully, the end of the writer’s strike and the end of the writing process will coincide. I get the feeling that if goes on much longer than the time we have allocated to the end of the scripting process, we won’t have a WGA to worry about anymore.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under Acting, Copyright, General, Hosts, Lawsuits, Motion Pictures, News, 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.