Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business

by Lynda Obst

  The $64,000 (not modified for inflation) question was, were the Writers willing to go out for months on end, losing millions for many, for what might turn out to be a few dollars per year? Or was there really a pot of gold at the end of the Internet rainbow worth holding out for, as they suspected?

  For days on end leading up to the strike, the Moguls stonewalled. Some decried it as a tactic—perhaps they were waiting for the DGA (Directors Guild of America) contract to expire in June. The DGA was always considered a more “mature” (i.e., less hotheaded) negotiating partner by the Moguls, which, needless to say, infuriated the Writers. When the two sides did communicate via the media or other intermediaries, their numbers were so far apart on the so-called new media that they hardly seemed to be in the same industry. The Moguls were dying to talk to someone they thought understood what they were saying (like directors). The Writers wanted a piece of this gigantic frontier.

  The Moguls said, “What frontier?”

  The Writers snorted, “We know you are making forty billion dollars now! Give us a piece!”

  The Moguls sneered, “These numbers are from where?! Who are you people?”

  They were talking moon rocks and refrigerators. Everyone was going batty.

  This is how crazy it was.

  OCTOBER 2007

  Right before the strike deadline, when movie people were dashing to finish scripts and turn them in to the studios (thousands of hastily completed scripts dated October 31 were simultaneously submitted to the Writers Guild and the studios’ production and legal/labor departments), I was standing in the parking lot at Disney after a development meeting with a Barbie of a writer, discussing the issues of the potential strike. Suddenly I found myself practically shouting, “It’s really true! They have no money! Their DVD library is gone! They are living from movie to movie!”

  She shouted back, “They have zillions of dollars! They make all these blockbusters! Don’t you read what they tell Wall Street?”

  “What are they going to tell Wall Street when they need financiers? That they’re broke and have no future?”

  She yelled, “The Internet is the future!”

  I yelled back: “There are no Internet profits yet! Everything is downloaded for free! Because of piracy we are all going to go broke! There will be no more movies!”

  And then we burst out laughing, realizing that neither of us had any idea whatsoever what we were talking about, that we were both simulacra of our side’s positions, repeating unadulterated propaganda.

  • • •

  We all turned in our scripts as commanded by the studios, just ahead of the strike deadline. There we were, writers, producers and agents, all complicit with the Moguls’ intention to stockpile material to get through the strike. But we all had to try to survive and get our movies made, right? The actors’ and directors’ contracts didn’t expire until June, and the plan was that everything that made it into inventory could shoot up until that final date. The networks claimed they could live without the crucial showrunners through reality programming, “unscripted television” that was cheap to produce. Showrunners, the writer-producers of television, guarantee the scripts will be ready on time and that the show will be delivered in time to air. As television goes, they are invaluable. Reality TV wasn’t taken seriously at the time, and the creative community pooh-poohed the networks’ strategy.

  The night before the deadline, after stonewalling the Writers Guild until the final moment, the Moguls met the Writers’ leadership to make their so-called generous offer. They took the “rollbacks” off the table. This is the way Moguls negotiate: They start from less than zero, so that getting to zero is a triumph. This is business as usual for Moguls in Hollywood. The Writers could have their residual payments back—the checks they receive for the reairing of their shows. But they could not have what they wanted in DVD and Internet profits. The Moguls thought they were being beneficent. This was a concession of sorts: The residual issue is fundamental to writers; it had been brutally fought for in the two longest strikes in movie industry history, in 1960 and again in 1988. Eliminating residuals had been called a nonstarter by the guild. Now the nonstarter had been removed, so maybe negotiations could start. For a day, everyone in the ghetto was saying there wouldn’t be a strike.

  Luckily for me, I have a brother, Rick, on the inside, and as the head of television at the huge agency WME,1 he repped many of the showrunners at the crux of this strike. They would likely be the first to see some Internet ad revenue if they won concessions, as their shows were already replaying on the Net. So they keenly watched the new media issues.

  During this critical juncture, Rick and I sat on his Bel Air porch. It was a gorgeous day; the wind was kicking up, and I commented on the lovely, bonfirelike smell permeating the air. It reminded me of Texas in the fall. Little did we know that it was the odor of people’s kitchens on fire.

  After some beating around the bush, I asked the big Q. “Will there be a strike?”

  “They [the Writers] have to give something up,” Rick said. “The producers did”—referring to the Moguls—“and now they have to. That’s how negotiations work.” So much for inside information.

  The WGA had thus far dismissed the Moguls’ offer. The ghetto was now holding its collective breath. Some were choking on ashes (the fancy Westsiders, who live west of La Cienega), and the rest of us were just choking.

  The Writers met the next day, November 1, and took a vote to authorize a strike should negotiations come to an impasse. The Writers Guild had elected a militant leadership headed by Patric Verrone, an animation writer who had been on the WGA board. But everyone believed (hoped?) there would still be serious negotiating to avoid a work stoppage and picket lines at all the networks and studios. Was this still possible?

  The Moguls thought the WGA negotiators were provincial and naïve, and the WGA negotiators saw the Moguls as immoral liars, much like progressives view the Tea Party and vice versa. These views of one another solidified early. Verrone was elected to avenge the losses of 1988. The Moguls’ rollback of residuals inflamed an already incendiary situation. The Moguls felt that the expectations of the Writers were numerically way out of line and emotionally biased. The Writers had been lied to in the past about DVD revenues and believed that they were being lied to again.

  The stage was set for … well, let’s say, not a party. The Moguls waited for a counteroffer. And waited.

  Days later, everything changed. For a year, everyone had been planning production schedules around a “worst-case scenario”: a June walkout of all the unions (WGA, DGA or, more likely, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), who, according to the Moguls, were the Taliban of the unions). If they could keep talking through June, the network showrunners—even if they couldn’t write—could keep up their producing duties, and the studios could shoot the scripts they had stockpiled. The Moguls were confident they could eventually reach an agreement with the DGA, which would “grandfather” everyone else into the best deal they could get. The DGA had the best relationship with the Moguls, and there was a history of pleasant negotiations between the two. This gave the DGA confidence that they could get the WGA and SAG the best terms, and perhaps avert a walkout altogether.

  But the Writers were not so sure they were going to go along with the strategy. There were suspicious mutterings questioning whether the more powerful (in film) Directors had the Writers’ interests at heart. (Do they on set?) Then suddenly, on November 4, the Writers exploded a nuclear device. They walked out.

  I tried to figure out how this happened. After reading his book about the future of screenwriting, What Happens Next, I sought out Marc Norman, a WGA negotiating committee member. The reflective Papa Bear–like Norman, who cowrote the Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love, sat with me in my office for hours discussing union strategy.

  “We didn’t really anticipate or plan it,” said Marc. “We saw no reason to wait for the—let’s call them unpredictable actors.”

&nbs
p; I asked him if he thought the directors were too cozy with the Moguls. He smiled. “The timing wasn’t premeditated. It wasn’t highly debated. We thought, Why are we waiting for them? Why don’t we go on strike?”

  This totally unexpected move left the network heads exposed without a new season, or sufficient episodes for the fall’s upcoming shows. It was the middle of pilot-writing season, and scripts could not be rushed. Big hit shows went unresolved. As for the studios, any unfinished and unsubmitted scripts had no chance of getting made that year. This placed the Writers in a better negotiating position than ever before. No leisurely wait until June. No orchestrated nice-nice negotiation.

  Suddenly, I absorbed a new fact: The Writers had, for a moment, stumped the Moguls. I sat in my office and reevaluated everything. This was good! I was on the side of—work! Maybe the Writers playing hardball would make the Moguls cave!

  Sure.

  The Writers thought the studios would run out of material for their summer and winter blockbusters, and they were counting on the failure of reality TV to fill the audience’s appetite for good television. In fact, on November 7, two days after the Writers hit the picket line, the town’s ace reporter and soon-to-become-much-more-than-that, Nikki Finke, warned otherwise. She had it from good sources that the TV brass was happy to trash the entire 2008–9 season, which was already looking like a stinker. Was that posturing or truth? We were falling down a rabbit hole and giving birth to an Alice.

  THE MAKING OF A NARRATOR

  One of the most fascinating things that happened during the strike was that it grew its own narrator, and then its own Norma Rae. Nikki Finke was already something of a phenomenon: the town’s top columnist, breaking news reporter and terrorista if you got on her wrong side. Her Web site, then self-owned and called DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com (now deadline.com), was a must-read well before the strike, but it became much, much more during the strike (and even more afterward; its popularity forced the perennial trade journal Variety onto the block by 2012 and into a weekly by 2013). It became the town square, our industry bulletin board, our way of communicating, slugging it out. It has remained so ever since. But it was a remarkable social and political phenomenon during the strike. At its peak in January and February, there were 90–105 comments per update, and often 10–20 updates per day on every side. Everyone was leaking there. The longer the strike went on, the more vital (and ultimately valuable) Nikki’s Web site became.

  In the tradition of the great Hollywood reporters from Hedda Hopper to Walter Winchell, Nikki inspired fear, respect and devotion among her sources and readers. Some sample entries:

  Comments

  You are the bomb, Nikki. Hope you’re feeling better—glad you’re back …

  Rock on, Nikki.

  I know this is so last week, but I have to say it anyway: You go Girl!

  Do they give Pulitzers for online writing? You rock!

  Nikki’s news was inside and up-to-the-minute. She had the detailed reports from every secret or public meeting and official or off-the-record negotiation. And she had a point of view. Nikki’s readers tagged the Los Angeles Times and Variety as shills for the Moguls, while Nikki was their fearless, populist leader. When she got sick, people were virtually apoplectic over the absence of information.

  The most riveting aspect of the Web site were the comments. The town fought it out on the comment board: exhorting fellow strikers, criticizing each other for not picketing enough hours, calling out names of potential scabs, accusing posters of being Mogul imposters who undermined the will of the masses by slipping in antiunion economic information about new media. Ultimately, an ugly class war broke out between the trade unions and some overly frenzied Writers about what a union was and the value of each other’s work, though some less drenched in ideology chimed in on the crew’s behalf.

  The politics got baffling. It was much like the Stalinist-vs.-Trotskyite years, as my grandfather explained them to me: the narcissism of small differences. Years later it makes for an astonishing social history, and Nikki Finke’s Web site and her fans will guide us through the wild Mr. Toad–like roller-coaster ride Hollywood took for a while, crash-landing only in time for the Oscars.

  THE FOUR SEASONS OF THE STRIKE: THE ARDENT FALL

  The Writers walked out onto the picket lines that formed in front and in back of all the studios and networks on November 5, 2007. They were having the most wonderful time on the line (as opposed to online). They were having romances. Bromances. They were making alliances, forming writing partnerships and spawning webisodes and fresh concepts for movies and series by the thousands. One girlfriend, a talented screenwriter, was having the best social life of her career. Imagine a bunch of isolated people who usually stay home all day long staring at their computers suddenly coming together at the studio with scores of cute, like-minded people and being fed pizzas by their agents, all with a single purpose: Defeating the Man! They had a cause! And they were getting fed for free and they had to be there and they couldn’t write. Nobody could make them write. And there’s nothing a writer loves more than being forced not to write.

  I remember driving past Kiwi Smith (you remember Kiwi from the Bridesmaids premiere) and Marc Klein (Serendipity, Mirror Mirror) in the line in front of Paramount, two great friends and collaborators, as they yelled, “Lynnie! Lynnie! Wave and honk!” As the granddaughter of a beloved labor-organizer, crossing my first picket line was pure agony. I had to honk and wave to Marc and Kiwi and all my friends, and then I’d drive through their line to my office. I thought the world was coming to an end.

  But for WGA leaders Patric Verrone and David Young, who had been elected on a “get ready for a strike” platform, the world was an opening oyster. They had an enthusiastic, untapped labor force in a new generation that had never picketed before, and the public was on their side. Verrone was in full command of morale all the way through the rank and file.

  “It’s like we were catching a tailwind from Enron,” Marc Norman, of the WGA strike leadership committee, told me. “One of the things that was interesting about this strike—and I mentioned it in a piece I wrote at the time—was that for the first time, we had a sense that the public was kind of on our side. If there was any public interest at all in the Writers Guild—which there never is—it was on our side. We were the beneficiaries of luck. There was an antiestablishment, anticorporate mood in the country. And we could portray ourselves as Clifford Odets’s peace workers going against the owners.”

  They had all the people power.

  Celebrities were joining the Writers on the picket line, creating juicy, national publicity, public relations you can’t buy and general whoop-de-doo, while the Moguls hired PR agencies to help them build a counteroffensive and put out viral videos, all to no avail. They accused the union of using scare tactics, and then leaked to the newspapers terrifying things about what the strike would do to the economy. The more they tried to look like the good guys, the more they looked like the bad guys.

  Deadline Comments Board

  I’ll explain … It’s the AMPTP accusing us of using tactics that they themselves have employed.

  The AMPTP is refusing to negotiate.

  The AMPTP leaks rumors of a nine-month strike to local news outlets, who then report the rumors as news, so as to create financial fear among writers and all the other unions as well …

  Comment by Writer who earned 60K in ’07—Tuesday, November 13, 2007, 3:00 p.m. PST

  Soccer moms drove by the studios after picking up their kids to honk and wave at the Writers, and the Moguls were the butt of jokes on late-night comedy shows. If you liked artists, you were for the WGA. Hillary and Barack both supported the Writers. The Writers’ agencies sent Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the picket line even as their expense accounts were canceled and their bottom lines began to cave. This didn’t stop the anger directed at agents as a group from being vehemently expressed on the comment board as if they were the source of the Writers’ anguish. Those str
iking Writers who didn’t have agents took the opportunity to hate agents even more. It was a pointless diversion of fury that nevertheless flourished on the board for days.

  In the midst of it, in the absence of any negotiations whatsoever in November, people searched for a hero, a glamorous Superman.

  Deadline Comments Board

  Where’s Hollywood’s favorite son? No, not Tom Hanks—the Governator! He’s the only one with the clout, the pro-business and pro-talent reputation, and the power to solve this.

  His office said today they don’t want to get involved. Tell him to get off his butt and back to Hollywood so all his old friends can get back to work.

  Comment by Mr. Wants a Good Deal—Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 4:32 p.m. PST

  The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, still thought of as the Terminator in his former (and now current) Hollywood home, stayed far away, apparently too busy for a legacy. In the Old Abnormal, this impasse would never have happened. As in Washington, where, prior to the congressional debt-ceiling debate of 2011, the process had been pro forma for years, labor relations here had been pro forma for years, and everyone knew how to get along. This degree of labor strife is a semirecent phenomenon. For decades, labor negotiations were handled by the guy at the top and his Fixer. They had “everyone’s” interests at heart—that is, making movies. There was a Big Man (in the African sense) who ruled the town, Lew Wasserman; he founded MCA and eventually merged it with Universal. He had a Fixer named Sidney Korshak, who was a labor lawyer (and much, much more) with ties to the teamsters. Korshak had even represented Jimmy Hoffa.