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The Writers' Strike That Wasn't

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from: Paul Attanasio
to: Rob Long

Posted Tuesday, May 8, 2001, at 2:30 AM ET

Paul Attanasio was nominated for Academy Awards for his screenplays for Quiz Show and Donnie Brasco. Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood. He wrote for four seasons on television's long-running Cheers, and he is the author of Conversations With My Agent. This week, they ruminate on whether the Writers Guild got what it deserved.

To me there is one historical lesson to the near-strike of 2001, and that is that the Writers Guild has never been nearly so unified. There was strong leadership, the leadership got organized and focused early, the membership of the guild was 99 percent behind that leadership, and as a result the relative strength of writers in the film and TV industry, which has already become a reality of the daily intercourse of the business (about which more below), was the central driving force in the negotiations. This is by no means insignificant. The guild is a big tent. Television writers have very different interests from feature film writers. Rich writers have very different concerns from struggling writers. But we all stuck together. And the studios knew that we would.

It is a tribute to the guild leadership (and particularly John Wells, who could effectively mau-mau the studio heads simply by the subtextual fact that he was even richer than they were) that in a time of economic contraction the guild turned up with significant, concrete gains. Those who express skepticism about the relative gains realized in the contract should consider the climate in which they were achieved. What we should have wound up with, a month after Disney announced 5,000 layoffs, was rollbacks.

What was otherwise striking was how much the discussion in the media followed the dry riverbed of an old mythology. Writers are not seeking "respect" to be legislated by contract—they seek a contract that ratifies a respect that we long ago earned. Irving Thalberg, the production chief at MGM, remarked famously that screenwriters were "shmucks with Underwoods." That brutal and witless aperçu was delivered nearly 70 years ago. At that time, MGM was a studio run by producers. Today producers (with literally a handful of notable exceptions) are all but extinct in Hollywood. So, who's the shmuck?

The fact is that writers have always run the TV business, which on the whole is a better managed, less volatile, and considerably more profitable business than the movie business. As for the movie business, auteurism is the watchword of the wax museum. The generation of the elders, who stood on their auteurist prerogatives, is, with the obvious exceptions, in the process of being farmed out to the land of the lifetime achievement award. The fact is that right now every studio in town would rather work with a young, up-and-coming director who is willing to work with them (and who only costs a million dollars) than with a distinguished older director, with his six- or seven- or 10-million dollar fee, who stands on his auteurist prerogatives. At the most successful studios in town, the watchword is that the script is king—it is the best insurance you have against the $100 million loss that is a flop nowadays. By extension, the screenwriter has an unprecedented amount of power in the new world.

In this context, the "film by" credit is an embarrassment to the Directors Guild, and it was better for us to abandon our position, the better to give the directors enough rope to hang themselves. A world in which the Barney movie is credited as "A film by Steve Gomer" is a world in which the less said, the better. The truth is the best directors (for example, old-school Woody Allen and new wave Steven Soderbergh, winner of this year's Best Director Oscar) have abjured the "film by" credit. Again, the reality is that the number of films each year in which (in David Lean's famous formulation) the director conceives the idea, acquires the property, hires the writer, develops the script, chooses and hires the cast, shoots the film, edits the film with final cut, and supervises the promotion and release, is at best five and quite possibly zero. (I have never worked on such a film.) The more typical film would involve the director being hired to shoot a script that was developed by someone else, because a movie star is already attached who has a window of availability in April, which movie star turns the 12 weeks of production into a gauntlet of humiliation for said director, for a studio that has greenlit the film only because it desperately needs a Christmas release, and which gets recut by the producer after the director's first cut tests poorly before a focus group.

dialogues
entries
12
from: Paul Attanasio
to: Rob Long

Posted Tuesday, May 8, 2001, at 2:30 AM ET
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Paul Attanasio was nominated for Academy Awards for his screenplays for Quiz Show and Donnie Brasco. Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood. He wrote for four seasons on television's long-running Cheers and is the author of Conversations With My Agent.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


There's a lot of us writers out here who did not stand up on their stack of unsold scripts and cheer. We are the writers who aren't concerned about residuals, vanity credits or Internet sales. I'm talking about us writers who just aren't very good. Or is it very well? A strike would have given most of us writers a wonderful rationale for unemployment. "Damn this damned strike. Now how do I feed my kids?" This works on so many levels. First, I don't even have kids. I just didn't want to take the chance of adding one more child to the literary landscape who, upon reaching eighteen, would be more attractive to the networks than me.

Second, I get to sound like a radical, the dream of every writer. I haven't felt radical since the late sixties peace marches...er, um...which my parents told me about.

Third, and most importantly, it gives me a cool explanation for why I never get any work. Do you know how valuable that is to a writer? Do you know what it's like to have your eighty-year-old mother (she had me when she was around fifty-five) asking every other day, "How are you making it?" "Have you heard anything from that Spielberg boy yet?" "Why don't you become an exotic dancer like your sister? She makes good money."

--Steve Young

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I just thank the good Lord in heaven that the writer's strike was avoided. Without the Hollywood writers, where would we find our new, original classics like Batman, The Grinch, Josie and the Pussycats, The Brady Bunch Movie and others? Or what about the poignant films that define our age like Little Nicky, The Waterboy, Dude, Where's My Car, and other cinematic marvels?

--Whit

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