Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (25 page)

Says Marc, who, in his gentle, soft-spoken, literary manner, is very unroosterlike, “I won’t participate in any of the Internet benefits. It was always more of a theoretical than a money-in-the-pockets issue. More for future generations.”

They were the “respect” guys. They had a lot of Writers looking up to them and didn’t want to get screwed like in the last strike. Even if they weren’t around for the last strike, they had heard about it and felt that it was their responsibility to not let it happen again. It was the “we won’t get fooled again” faction. Their solidarity was tremendous, but unfortunately, the numbers they bandied among their troops were errant.

But despite their motivations, the Let’s Stay Out ’til June guys were becoming increasingly isolated.

Deadline Comments Board

Fuck it. We’re staying out till June.

Comment by ScreenVet—Monday, February 4, 2008, 7:02 p.m. PST

In January, the DGA started to negotiate with the Moguls in earnest and in the open, and everything heated up. That undermined the WGA’s leverage. The Writers, according to various members of the negotiating committee, tried to get Michael Apted,
head of the DGA, to “be more ambitious in the DGA’s demands,” and not to “roll over like they always do.” The DGA didn’t want to strike, they wanted to make a deal, and this frustrated the WGA. The Writers tried to buck the Directors up with their ambition and brio, and with their bigger numbers, which were, needless to say, different than the DGA’s.

Another factor was bearing down on the negotiations: The Oscar deadline was February 7, and no one, but
no one,
wanted the Oscars canceled. The Oscars are the peak of the movie year, its raison d’être. It was bad enough that the Golden Globes had been canceled. That showed that the Moguls were tough; and anyway, the Globes don’t belong to the community, nor were they then vital to the revenue of the studios. Enough was enough. The stars had had it, the agents had had it and even the studios had had it. But writers and actors wouldn’t cross the picket line for the Oscars. Even though nobody had figured out how Leno, Jon Stewart and Letterman kept working through the strike (“double talk,” per Norman), the Oscars were too high-profile to scab.

All these pressures, the DGA negotiating with the Moguls, a looming February 7 Oscar date, the showrunners’ pressure inside the guild, the flagging morale—even feature writers wanted or needed to work again, to say nothing of the furious crew—led to enormous angst on each side.

Then came the final intercession of some of the biggest TV and feature agents from the Association of Talent Agents (ATA), who could talk to both sides. They were friendly with the talent and with the Moguls; they could help to bridge the trust gap. Agencies were in critical condition. They were bleeding money; some of the smaller ones were threatened with closure, and many of the bigger ones had laid off staff. Everyone was off expense account, living on the edge. The ATA sent a few mega-agents from their Agents Negotiating Committee into the fray—Bryan Lourd (again), negotiating on behalf of the big feature writers, and Rick Rosen of WME.
Together with Peter Chernin and showrunners Shawn Ryan and Laeta Kalogridis (who was close to David Young), they all helped the dialogue.

There were conversations around the clock in January. The DGA closed a satisfactory deal with the Moguls on the seventeenth. Verrone knew that that would be the template for any final deal with the Writers; the Moguls would go no further. Finke reported that the hardest part of the last few weeks was getting Verrone to recognize how far off his data was from reality. But now we know why—fool me once, and all that.

Verrone and Young would have a hard job getting their own guys to accept the diminished terms of the deal, given the inflated expectations of their early formulas. But the pressure was on, and Verrone questioned how long he could hold his shaky coalition of feature and television writers in place. Writers wanted to go back to work.

On January 22, word leaked that Fox chairman Peter Chernin had told his friends at the Super Bowl that the strike was over, and the news spread like the wildfires that had kicked off the Ardent Fall. Verrone and Young took the offer to their membership on January 24 and recommended it.

As is clear from Verrone’s quote from his final meeting at the Shrine Auditorium, he was bloody but unbowed in February. He knew he’d gotten the best deal he possibly could, and now his job was to sustain the guild’s morale. He called out to the exhausted throngs: “Seven multinational conglomerates can fight back really hard. Who knew? But they thought we wouldn’t strike, and we did. They thought we wouldn’t last, and we did. They thought we wouldn’t win. And we did.”

But there was the expected flack on Nikki’s comment board from the Let’s Stay Out ’til June faction about accepting what was, essentially, the DGA deal. I think the WGA bought their own propaganda and fought mightily to right the real wrongs of the past.
Unmanaged expectations were the guild’s self-created enemies. To wit:

Deadline Comments Board

Please leaders, do not piss on my leg and tell me that it’s raining with a deal that resembles the DGA deal.

Comment by My Vote—Monday, February 4, 2008, 7:01 p.m. PST

At first, Nikki didn’t like the deal the membership approved, by 93 percent vote, days after Verrone’s speech. This prompted one of my favorite posts: “From what I hear, it is both incremental and excremental.”

A Writer responded to the chorus:

Deadline Comments Board

To all you people already frothing at the mouth about “this shitty deal” and “we stay out till June!”—we haven’t even seen the deal yet! What is the matter with you? Go and lie down for a couple of hours. I, meanwhile, hereby make a solemn vow to myself to try my best to stay away from this admittedly addictive but ultimately unhelpful, provocative site. Bye.

Comment by Paul—Monday, February 4, 2008, 9:09 p.m. PST

The DGA and the WGA got essentially the same terms, with perhaps some minor differences I will get back to you on once I get my law degree. The thorny new media issue was postponed for three years, as the thorniest issues in a negotiation often are. It will be revisited one day.

The bitterness of the strike, as well as some of its darker implications, appears to have sunk in to the WGA. Few seemed to want to repeat the past, so they voted in Chris Keyser (
Party of Five,
Lone Star
) over Patric Verrone in the WGA leadership elections of 2011. You could read the undercurrent during the election. Keyser didn’t explicitly say, “I’m the anti-Verrone candidate,” and yet, he wasn’t Verrone. The strike, the recession and the Great Contraction scared or tamed everyone, for good or for ill.

I sat with the congenial and insightful Keyser at a chic Santa Monica coffee shop, and we looked back on the whole thing. He said a good part of his job was to try to understand and help prolong the life span of the Writer in the poststrike world. It was fascinating.

“How do we make a living?” he began. “Not just the one percent; how do we make sure the middle class of writers is able to move through a career? Not just a moment, but a whole career. How do we make the writing profession viable?”

I admired his long view. He didn’t sound like a firebrand, so I asked him his philosophy on striking.

“I believe no union can be powerful unless it has a viable strike threat.” He added, “I ran by saying it’s okay to talk first before you strike.”

I then asked him about the thorny question, how he viewed the pursuit of a market whose value hadn’t yet been calculated. He could see I viewed it with some skepticism, but he opened my eyes to the union’s strategy by saying something both simple and profound.

“Once we know exactly how much a market is going to be worth,” he said, “it’s much more difficult to get concessions. At the moment when the companies know completely and exactly how lucrative the market is, it becomes a much more difficult conversation. It’s much more likely for us to have some leeway beforehand.

“For example, once it was clear what DVDs were worth, we could never change that formula. It was
never
going to change. The issue is, you can’t be too late, and you can’t be too early—so what is that perfect time?”

Insiders say that the key issue of the next negotiation won’t even
be the Net, but the health and welfare and pension plans that crusader Frances Marion fought so hard for. It is said that they are in terrible shape, a state from which only the hideous Moguls can help bail them out. These bread-and-butter issues may take priority next fire season and push the Internet back under the burning rug.

The strike officially ended on February 9, and the Oscars were held at the Beverly Hilton on February 12. Like refugees emerging from bombed-out buildings after months of shelling, we donned our finery and headed out to the muted festivities.

During this somewhat hysterical time for all of us, I was prepping
The Invention of Lying
with my son and tending to my mother, who was dying in Florida. This entailed escaping from Paramount’s creepily silent Potemkin village to scout and cast on location with the hilarious Ricky Gervais, then hopping on a plane to West Palm Beach, where it was not so funny.

My mom struggled to be her best when I arrived, and I did the same to lift her spirits. She was a gifted teacher, all about her mind (she could recite the English kings backward), and it suddenly wasn’t working anymore. My father was devastated. At the hospital she would only speak French. (She didn’t make it easy.) But my visits made her very happy, as hard as it was for me to see her this way. It was all that I could do to just help my parents have a better weekend than those they’d recently been having. Then I flew back to Lowell, Massachusetts, where I immersed myself in preproduction details and petty fights with a difficult financier. My mother died a month after the strike ended, and shooting started soon after that, on April 14.

THE TIPPING POINT

The aftermath of the strike started playing out as I was blithely shooting away in Lowell. It was, in Malcolm Gladwell’s term, the
tipping point that commenced the New Abnormal. How did the strike propel the new business model in the direction it was already going, just more quickly and drastically?

It is not good to leave Moguls with time on their hands. And during the strike they had way too much time on their hands to spend with clever business affairs execs, international marketing execs and accountants—all getting scowled at as they passed through the gates—modeling numbers in their cloistered offices.

Suddenly, without having to be in the reactive, competitive posture they are always in—responding to spec scripts, listening to pitches, reading scripts, making offers, making deals, packaging their slates, being competitive for material with other Moguls, making decisions about what movies to put into production—they had time to strategize.

I don’t think they were wondering how to bust the union forever. Hollywood is and always will be a union town. I think they were trying to figure out how to stay in business during the recession without the DVD cushion. Hollywood is not a state run by a right-wing legislature and governor; it is a feudal ecosystem. I think what they were wondering instead was, where would the bulk of new profits come from? What were the most reliably growing revenue streams? And unlike the Writers, they didn’t see the rainbow in the new media, but in the international market. They had to cut fat and determine how their costs would be prioritized. The Writers were the first to go; because of force majeure, their deals had begun to be suspended anyway. They were lessening their overhead. It felt good in a recession. More deals were soon coming up for renewal.

Should those deals be renewed poststrike? Of course, for the networks, yes. The showrunners and writers were critical for their business, as TV is a writer’s medium. Their deals would be renewed at the television studios and networks. But in the meantime, reality television had made dangerous inroads into prime-time
territory. Networks and agencies would emerge from the strike with huge reality divisions to rival their scripted divisions.

But what about the studios? What were
movie studio
writers’ deals for? To hear what they wanted to make? Who cares? The studios knew by now that they needed to make internationally driven blockbusters that spawned franchises, which would continue to spawn awareness and perform overseas. Therefore, it was now more the Moguls’ job to tell Writers what the studios’ mandate was and then hire Writers to make their production and release dates. Of course, they’d always done this to some extent, but now they could focus on it and cut the fat—i.e., anything without preawareness or not bound for franchise territory. There would be no more Writers or unnecessary producers (the next to go) whose job it was to generate original material, independent of this mandate. No more bloated inventory of excess development, untargeted for the bull’s-eye.

This is what I’ve come to recognize as my extrasensory paranoia, and it works retroactively as well as reactively.

“Look,” they must have said to themselves. “We can generate our own material. Why not? We already know what we want. Franchises! Awareness! Titles! Let’s hold on to franchise-generating producers and find those with cofinancing money.” To be sure, some of the more secure and stable studios held on to their producers and made them part of their franchise machinery, notably Warner Bros. But most cut back drastically on these deals. And why not? Without franchises, cofinancing money or deep ties to the studio, producers and writers could be hired only when needed! So studios let many producers’ deals expire after the strike. The strike allowed them to save money. There was a recession, and their resources had to be spent on the ever-inflating costs of marketing tentpoles.

It’s the model we emerged with, and the timing allowed studios to streamline a process in the direction they were already traveling.
This contraction inside the contraction made it cost-effective. The end of the strike and all the changes it wrought made for the end of the Old Abnormal.