HALLOWEEN was a bittersweet festival in Los Angeles last week for fans of Joss
Whedon, creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and other toothsome television
delights.
As dusk settled and hordes of American children ventured abroad in search of
trick or treat, Whedon, the godfather of the supernatural genre that
dominates American television schedules, announced on his website that after
a five-year break he was returning to television with Dollhouse, a thriller
starring the lithesome Buffy sidekick Eliza Dushku.
And, at the same time, the usually cheery son and grandson of Hollywood
writing royalty, the ultimate industry insider who cut his teeth spinning
gags for Toy Story and Roseanne, a bellwether for the mood of the industry,
announced that he was downing his pencils indefinitely.
The 43-year-old writer vowed that, despite already having outlined the first
seven episodes of Dollhouse and, like the geek he is, designed the poster
too, he would not put down another word until the looming conflict between
Hollywood’s artists and executive “suits” was settled.
And that, both sides now fear, could be months away.
Existing contracts between the 12,000-strong Writers Guild of America (WGA)
and Hollywood’s “big six” film and television studios (Disney, Fox,
Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros) represented by the Motion
Picture Association of America, lapsed at midnight last Wednesday.
There was no rush to arms, no bonfires of scripts in the streets or
Armani-clad executives stepping off ledges – although a few might have been
pushed by their assistants at big talent agencies which had already ordered
deep pay cuts in advance of the strike.
Instead, like the outbreak of the second world war, there was a hush as both
sides, and federal negotiator Juan Carlos Gonzalez – dispatched from
Washington to protect the £30 billion a year business from itself – took a
deep breath and surveyed the dread landscape in front of them.
The next night, 3,000 writers, normally not the most sociable group, gathered
in LA’s nocturnally deserted downtown to work out the ground rules.
Can they finish commissioned scripts? No. Can they write for British TV?
Unclear. Hey, asked one WGA wag, does anyone want to buy a barely used PC?
Not right now.
What most insiders are predicting is that, barring any last-minute compromises
or legal technicalities, the WGA will issue war orders tomorrow.
Then sympathetic unions such as the Teamsters (which represents film-location
scouts as well as lorry drivers) will instruct their union brothers not to
cross picket lines and the klieg lights will start going off all over
Holly-woodland.
The nub of the dispute is royalties from new distribution platforms, not just
DVDs which account for as much revenue as the traditional box-office, but
also movies downloaded at home or clips watched on such devices as iPhones.
The studios, saying they cannot predict how much this market will be worth
over the next five years, want a “universal rights” deal to cover all new
technologies, including some that will flare and flame out expensively – as
did the citizen-band radio or eight-track tapes in the 1970s.
They want simplicity – and compensation for the risks they, not the writers,
are taking in investing in the new technologies such as Hulu, the
video-on-demand service launched as a test product by NBC-Universal and Fox
last week. Its costs are unknown, but Providence Equity Partners reportedly
paid $100m (£48m) for a 10% share, so it’s not cheap.
The unions want a percentage cut from revenues made by such ventures and some
catchup compensation for the DVD boom; today a writer earns about 4 cents
royalty for every $20 DVD sold, while the person who manufactures the box
earns 50 cents.
More ambitiously, they also want transparency in the accounting system; past
court cases have proved that Hollywood is a master of voodoo bookkeeping,
ensuring that even the most magnificent block-buster can appear to have run
up a loss when it comes to sharing out the profits to the writers, directors
and other freelancers.
To complicate matters, and explain why the WGA leaders won a 90% mandate to
strike from their normally happy-to-be-employed members, there is a palpable
sense of a grudge lingering in the air.
The last big strike in Hollywood was in 1988. It lasted a bruising 22 weeks,
cost the studios $500m and both writers and bonus-paid executives ended up
selling so many homes it started a property slump.
A flashpoint then was a share of the hot young media: home video.
Most predict that if Gonzalez, at the end of the day a middle-ranking civil
servant, fails in his peace mission, the strike will be brutal.
And, to make it more unnerving for the recent wave of Wall Street hedge-fund
investors in Hollywood, if a template for future profit-sharing is not
agreed the strike will rope in both directors and actors whose industry
contracts end early next year. As far as Hollywood is concerned, that is the
apocalypse.
Thousands of jobs could vanish before Christmas. Hollywood contributes about
7% to the LA economy, a £15 billion a year multiplier effect rolling over
Californian hotels and car dealers, but its withdrawal will be felt on a
global scale.
Apart from being the last remaining “happy face” of America, Hollywood is a
massive economic engine for smaller cinematic industries, including the
beleaguered and confused British film community.
Last week, dozens of British film wheeler-dealers flew to Los Angeles for the
American Film Market festival, a low-key rival to Cannes where hard deals
are clinched.
Out of about 100 Britons who attended the UK Film Council’s soiree at the
recently gentrified Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, nearly all were gloomy
about the knock-on effects of the strike.
“We would love to jump in there, send over all our best writers by the
jumbo-load, but we would be penalised when the strike ends. Unions have very
long memories,” said one British talent agent in Los Angeles last week. “ I
am not sure Liz Hurley ever recovered her Hollywood grace after accidentally
stepping overa picket line against advertisers a few years ago, despite her
apology. No-one is willing to take that risk.”
There is opportunity, though. The 22nd Bond film is already written, by LA’s
Oscar-winner scriptor and Crash director Paul Haggis, while Bruno, Sacha
Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat, is a little stalled, say insiders, but
will pick up in time to score another hit for Britain.
And smaller films such as the Toronto festival-acclaimed Brick Lane, about
Muslim women in Britain, is standing strong against the glut of art-house
movies.
The first victims of the strike will be the American nightly chat shows, the
Jay Lenos and Jon Stewarts, probably much to the relief of the
frequently-satirised Washington elite (a conspiracy theory will follow).
After these will go the comedies and long-form dramas: hit science-fiction
series Heroes has already cancelled a spin-off due to the strike. And then,
finally, the movies.
Hollywood studios have been stockpiling programmes for the past few months –
production around Los Angeles hit an all-time record during the summer as
actors swopped the beach for the set – but there is six months of “product”
stored up, maximum. Then it’s all repeats and game shows.
Right now it’s a phoney war, punches as fake as Keanu Reeves’s accent.
However, the longer it drags on, the more likely it will turn into a dirty
war.
When the studios start leaking how much they pay writers, or at least the few
youngsters who are employed on a regular basis, public sympathy may well
evaporate.
American baseball never recovered from the players’ 1994 strike, since
eclipsed by basketball.
Already the younger generation prefer not to pay for movies – regarding it,
like music, as free from the internet – or watch live television. If
anything, they catch up on DVD box sets in mara-thon, advertisment-free
weekend binges or play 24 as a video game.
There is a real danger for both sides that, after six months of American Idol
and local news about cats stuck up trees, the talent and suits may shake
hands in Hollywood and find that nobody is watching any more.
