As I expected, he’s a thoughtful and well-spoken guy. I won’t quote the letter in full but I will give you this, because it’s important.

i think you should include the REASON why we don’t allow our show to be filmed:  we don’t own the synch rights to the songs we perform, so we do not have the right to be filmed performing them.  if someone films us doing so, we get held responsible and liable.

Don’t think this is a minor point. The music industry has sued a 12 year old girl, an eighty year old woman and a laser-printer in a campus office for downloading music illegally. Cheese has every right to protect his livelihood.

He also adds this:

i didn’t “spit a glass of water” out into the audience.  This implies that a full glass of water was sprayed, which it was not.

Quite so. It was about the same amount of liquid in a typical spit take (see the work of Danny Thomas or John Ritter for reference) which is roughly half a swallow. Point taken, sir.

He also adds that he does the camera confiscating thing at a lot of his shows, whenever someone is watching him through a device instead of just, you know, watching him. He says he’s never broken a camera or damaged a cellphone in the five years he’s been doing the act. And contrary to what I’ve read around the ‘net, he didn’t wreck any hardware the night I was there. I was pretty close, and I’d have heard the crunching.

As a side note, Cheese also pointed out that I left out the word “like” in my previous entry, as in “a voice LIKE Steve Lawrence.” I have corrected this. One other thing I left out because it simply wasn’t apropos: the guy does an eerily accurate impression of Bjork. Seriously, it’s creepy. Check him out live sometime. But for God’s sake, remember that the only round glass thing between you and him should be a highball tumbler.

-daniel k.

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.

Here in America the 2nd Circuit court (there are two circuits, in case one blows) ruled that a new Federal Communications Commission policy penalizing accidentally aired expletives was invalid, saying it was “arbitrary and capricious” and might not survive First Amendment scrutiny. It stemmed from a couple of incidents of the “f-bomb” being dropped by celebrities on the Billboard Awards show in 2002 and 2003. The FCC decided that the word was inappropriate, citing another appearance of the word when Bono uttered it at the Golden Globes in 2003. Which they didn’t prosecute.

And of course, there were enormous fines involved. From the majority opinion of the ruling:

“We are sympathetic to the networks’ contention that the FCC’s indecency test is undefined, indiscernible, inconsistent and consequently unconstitutionally vague.”

The court said it could understand why the networks argue that the FCC’s indecency policy “fails to provide the clarity required by the Constitution, creates an undue chilling effect on free speech and requires broadcasters to ’steer far wider of the unlawful zone.’”

Meanwhile across the pond, shadowy media watchdog Ofcom has rejected complaints about comedian Russell Brand’s routine in the Brit Awards. Full disclosure: I am American and I have never heard or Russell Brand, don’t know what the Brit Awards are, and only have a vague idea of what Ofcom does. And I’m reporting it to you now.

The host’s risque jokes and drug-related references to singer Robbie Williams and Conservative leader David Cameron were investigated. But Ofcom ruled Brand’s comments were acceptable in the context of an established music awards ceremony. “A certain amount of controversy was likely to be expected by the audience,” the regulator decided.

Ofcom did, however, rule that some of Brand’s comments had been “on the edge of acceptability”. Some 262 viewers complained about the comedian’s remarks about intimate body parts, drugs, the Iraq war, the Queen and Robbie Williams.

I’m down with the body parts and Iraq War jokes, but keep your bloody pie-hooks off Robbie Williams mate!

We all need to learn some lesson from this - to me, clearly, it’s that the V-Chip must always be set to keep children away from awards shows. Indeed, who shouldn’t be?

A Los Angeles jury decided he acted in bad faith by slating the film, arguing over the script and inflating his book sales when dealing with (Crusader Entertainment). But the jury left the judge to decide whether Crusader owned Mr Cussler $8m (£4m) for the rights to a second book.

Both sides left claiming victory and Mr Cussler told reporters he was “relieved it’s over”.

I’m guessing that means no appeals! Everybody wins!

For those of you who aren’t entertainment lawyers, a little history. TV networks used to buy programs from independent producers like Aaron Spelling. The producers would usually produce the show at cost, with hopes that it would run long enough to sell in syndication. The talent would negotiate their profit participation based on the syndication money. Still with me?

In the mid-nineties the networks started forming their own production companies. These companies would partner with producers to make the shows. The idea was, the networks would participate in the profits, and also would be less inclined to play hardball when negotiating because after all, they’d be stickin’ it to themselves.

The talent, however, were getting a pretty good stickin’ to in this scenario. David Duchovney was among the first to notice that the X-FILES was syndicated from FoxTV to the FX network, at low low prices. He sued, which may be a factor in his working so little after the X-FILES. Don’t know what’s up with Gillian Anderson.

Anyway, the WILL AND GRACE trial turned on the same premise. The jury was convinced that NBC Productions had negotiated in bad faith and were about to deliver their favorable verdict when defense lawyers turned up the bombshell that the foreman, Dean Hartwell, had written anti-NBC screeds on his blog several years ago. Hatwell says he hadn’t remembered it, which I’m inclined to believe. I don’t even remember what this ENTRY is about. Do you?

Anyway, this led to the mistrial, and from there the out-of-court settlement, which both parties are agreeing to keep mum about. Will, who was a lawyer, would appreciate this outcome; Grace, who was a loquacious interior designer, would have preferred the earlier one. Strictly speaking no one would have cared about their opinion anyway because everybody watched to see what Jack and Karen would think. For the record I bet that Mutchnick and Kohan are walking away with more than the original award but less than they would have gotten after putative damages. NBC will make it up by suing people who illegally downloaded the show.

(Hear this read on the Box Office Weekly podcast here)