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

by Lynda Obst

  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.

  But force majeure and learning to live without writers and producers generating original material brought on a new level of development autonomy for studios. No more unnecessary pitches. No more weekly bidding for scripts. No more agency-driven, speculative writers’ market. No more producer-driven ideas. One manager told me, “Suddenly we couldn’t get anyone to read a script on a Friday if we tried.” We had woken up in the New Abnormal.

  I arrived home from production of Invention and returned to Paramount for the last time. The writing was on the wall. I got a call from Bryan Lourd, my feature agent, who only calls with either very, very good news or very, very bad news. At this time in the biz, there was no very good news for producers without franchises. Brad Grey, though not my adversary by any means, was not Sherry Lansing. He had his own priorities. The consoling yet pained tone in Bryan’s voice was clear. Paramount was not renewing my deal.

  For thirty years I had always been what we called “re-upped”—that is, a negotiation on my next contract would be initiated months before it came due, so the issue never came up except when you talked to your lawyer or agent about what great new stuff you got (or tried to get) in your new deal. Now, postrecession, poststrike, post–making only two movies in almost eight years, Bryan’s voice said everything.

  Would I go to another movie studio? There were very few, if any, new deals at movie studios for nonfranchise “nonfinancing” creative producers and makers of romantic comedies. Bryan didn’t even have to tell me. I hadn’t made a franchise kind of picture since Jodie Foster went to the center of the galaxy in Contact.

  I had some very bad nights, nights of self-recrimination and hindsight—woulda, shoulda, coulda. What if I’d thought of making a deal with a movie star? They had become a smart new breed of producers with the leverage to get movies made, who were in production when their partners were. Or what if I’d found a director to partner with, as so many smart, forward-thinking exagents and managers had done? And what of these managers who were becoming producers and controlling the talent and seeming to make us old-school producers obsolete? Why hadn’t I thought of that? But all this second-guessing was useless; I’d done my best, what I knew how to do, and couldn’t torture myself over it. There was too much slack to pick up, too many other people who would be happy to take my place. Nora Ephron and I had a saying we’d repeat to each other when either of us had a flop: “Take another swing at the bat!” Then we’d paste big s
miles on our faces and start strategizing. That’s what the game is all about: longevity.

  I would still make movies, but what I’d been thinking for a while is that I would be moving to a new medium as well, one I would have to learn, where pitches still abounded: television. It seemed that more and more what I was missing in movies—making stuff up, creating original ideas—was the coin of the realm in TV. And television’s boundaries were expanding as the movie business’s were contracting.

  I would have to start watching more television, that’s for sure—and not just cable. It was time to have a long talk with my television-oriented brother. I was headed to a new deal at a TV studio. I had been on movie lots for more than twenty-five years, and for the first time, I was to be housed on a different kind of lot. It was kind of sad, and kind of scary, but I had to shake that off very fast. There was no time for nostalgia. I had to fly with the times and learn a complicated new language. A new business, really, with different seasons and time slots, and drama and comedy rules, and millions of things I’d have to learn in three months, or three seasons.

  But the good news was that it was all about writing and writers. I could make up ideas again. And there was much better news than that: As movies had been getting dumber, television had been getting smarter. As movies constricted their parameters, television’s parameters were growing exponentially. HBO and cable had helped push what was possible, and longtime TV writers picked up the mantle and ran into brilliant uncharted territory. Feature writers felt the creative action happening in TV, and an exodus began. There was a blooming, booming business in this business—a way out of Egypt into a tempting, changing new land.

  *

  1. William Morris Endeavor.

  2. Buchwald v. Paramount, 1990 Cal. App. LEXIS 634, was a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed and decided in California in which humorist and writer Art Buchwald alleged that Paramount Pictures stole his script idea and turned it into the 1988 movie Coming to America. Buchwald won the lawsuit and was awarded damages, then accepted a settlement from Paramount before any appeal took place.