Writer's Strike Thread

[JackPeyton]

I think Guza's big rpoblem is he has good ideas, but lacks at everything else. keeping im on in some way i think would help out with the show. as much as some of us hate sweeps on GH - they do them big and they do them right and that does help with what budgett they get. to gir rid of that would be insane. tho this recent one didnt really too well so who knows.

my biggest fear with guza leaving is would they replace him with those who deserve it? i dont think so. and as bad as he can be at times, there are far far wose.

[Chris B]

I don't think it could get much worse than present day Guza. He's had his day and the repetitive nature of his GH is a large part in people losing interest. At OLTL they gave Ron Carlivati the HW position after serving as a staff member for over 10 years. With that in mind, it's not ridiculous to assume Karen Harris or Michele Val Jean could be upgraded as well.

Personally, I think GH should've given Jack Smith a go at writing the show. What was the point of signing him to that six month contract and giving him nothing to do? Judging his stint at Y&R, I see him fitting in better at GH.

[JackPeyton]

I don't think it could get much worse than present day Guza.

really? it could have B&E, LML, JP, HS, DH, DK, and so many awful other's behind it.

I feel Guza just need sa great EP - someone that will let him do his ideas, but keep him in check and remind him that he also has other people on the show. Maybe hire a co-HW to head non mob/sweep storylines and balance everything out.

I dont think Guza is the best by any means - but there are much much much worse.

[dragonflies]

Guza needs someone who can balance him out. Pratt was basically just as bad as him, that's why I never thought they meshed well.

[JackPeyton]

i couldnt agree more.

[Sylph]

OK, people, back on strike topics with some LA Times Scriptland articles:

Writers differ on obeying strike rule

To comply or not to comply: That is the question.

By Jay A. Fernandez, Special to The Times

November 14, 2007

To comply or not to comply: That is the question. One of the Writers Guild membership's most contentious issues in the strike's early going has been Strike Rule No. 8, or the Script Validation Program, which compels writers to submit copies to the Writers Guild of all their works in progress for struck companies.

The WGA policy is an effort to prevent scabbing, or continuing to write on projects for struck studios and networks during the strike, by having a record of where the writer was in the work when the strike began. But the studios threatened legal action against any writers who gave proprietary content to a third party, and many industry talent lawyers advised their writing clients not to abide by the rule. Writer message boards lighted up with concerns about how to bridge the impasse as the deadline to hand in material to the guild approached last Thursday.

The companies' desire to keep the content of their scripts private is a natural corporate impulse, and many writer contracts include confidentiality clauses to this effect. The truth is that this kind of thing is generally forbidden even outside of a strike context, even as agents and writers slip completed but not-yet-produced scripts to potential new employers as writing samples.

Several of the studios -- like Fox and Warner Bros. -- try to police this pretty vigilantly, fearing that their high-profile in-development screenplays will fall into the hands of competing studios, and the talent agencies honor the rule to varying degrees. But as with all things in Hollywood, personal relationships, and whether discretion is a hallmark of those relationships, carry the day. So with screenplays there remains, as one Oscar-winning producer innovatively put it, "an active universe of trust-based slippage."

Anecdotally, some of the greener writers have indeed registered their materials with the guild in the last few weeks, but the more established and experienced writers concerned about committing to the Script Validation Program have thus far either ignored it out of their own paranoia about who sees their unfinished work or split the difference by filing materials with their own lawyers.

Compliance with Strike Rule No. 8, which has been applied in previous strike scenarios, is nearly impossible to enforce effectively anyway. "And God help you if you do try to enforce it," says one writer, "because I think that's when whatever solidarity we do have is gonna erupt."

Other writers disagree that the guild leadership's coercion on this issue will affect membership morale and doubt that the studios' attempt to use it as a wedge issue will have any real effect.

"People are united," says another feature writer who's been tracking the chatter in WGA-membership Internet chat spaces. "There is a frustration with how bullying the guild can be. And most newbie writers or writers who aren't super-educated will comply with all of those rules. When you're talking about the A-list feature writers and the show runners, they're not cowed. They just get irritated. It's not going to divide the guild. It's a losing strategy for the studios. If they think that it's going to make members disenchanted with leadership, they're absolutely wrong."

Helm keeps his manifesto at hand

Given the endless series of devil's bargains that working screenwriters are forced to confront (even when not working -- see above), it's baffling that more of them don't keep something like Zach Helm's personal writing manifesto handy.

"I keep a copy of the newest version in my desk to go back and look at when I'm in a moral quandary or I'm stuck artistically," said the 32-year-old writer-director last week at the empty Bootleg Theater, where Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights he'll perform a favorite Spalding Gray piece, "Interviewing the Audience."

"It's incredibly helpful for me," he said. "Almost like a totem."

Helm's ever-evolving four-page list of personal policies was greatly influenced by Lindsay Doran, who produced Helm's screenplay "Stranger Than Fiction," the Dogme 95 collective and a variety of contemporary and past masters such as Hal Ashby, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Woody Allen and Wes Anderson. It is composed of guidelines for both the business and creative aspects of his professional life, many of which have been amended considerably in the course of pulling together his directorial debut, "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium," opening Friday.

"It's all about control, and it's all about inspiration," Helm says of the document's dual intent, shaped over 10 years of frustrating industry sloggery.

There are rules outlining the necessity of negotiating strong terms and a high level of involvement in any spec script he sells. But his most audacious self-regulation, enacted six years ago, is a blanket refusal to rewrite another screenwriter's work, which is like a popular politician turning down paid speaking engagements.

Helm had his epiphany around seven years ago. Just as he was accepting another sure-to-go-nowhere rewrite assignment, he was informed that Fox 2000 was moving his most precious screenplay -- "Magorium," the calling-card script that had jump-started his career--into the hands of another writer. After he played the good soldier and absolved them of any guilt for shucking him from the project, he received a ham in the mail as thanks.

Additionally, despite now being offered tempting pre-existing material to rewrite and direct, Helm has made his participation contingent on the original writer being re-hired to do the work. In a system that often treats screenwriters like disposable contact lenses, this demand has been met with quizzical looks -- as has his preference for writing a complete script free rather than pitch his take on it like everyone else.

After "Magorium," Helm hopes to direct "The DisAssociate," which should truly test the limits of the manifesto's workability. One of his earliest original scripts and "the best manifestation of the creative aspect of the manifesto," Helm's comedy about a corporate drone who receives visions from God, contains scenes with dialogue in made-up languages, scenes that repeat themselves and chaotic musical numbers.

While that should be something to see, for now Helm is keeping his own guiding vision private.

"The whole point was for me to say, my rules are not the same as the rules that they tell you in these [screenwriting] books," he says. "So if I put my manifesto out there, all I'm doing is giving another writer another set of rules that they think they should follow. That doesn't make any sense. They should make their own manifesto."

[Sylph]

Strikers' dilemma: to write or not


Guild members who abide by the rules may face a competitive disadvantage afterward.

By Jay A. Fernandez, Special to The Times

November 21, 2007



There's scabbing and then there's scabbing. For the Writers Guild and its supporters, it would be easy to condemn and/or punish anyone, union or not, who provided script material to a network or studio during a strike. And rumors have already begun to circulate on the picket lines of assistant directors on sets mysteriously receiving faxed, rewritten pages from anonymous sources.

But what about a writer who continues to work on a screenplay assignment in the privacy of his own home office during non-picketing hours, with no intention of filing pages to anyone until a strike is resolved? Well, technically, this is outlawed writing as well. The guild expects that not a single word should be written to further a script owed to a struck company, regardless of whether you keep it to yourself.

For many writers, the thought of dropping creative momentum on a script and trying to return to it months later is terrifying. "I would hate to have been right in the middle of something," admits Oscar-nominated writer Josh Olson ("A History of Violence"), who sold a pitch just before the strike started but had not yet started writing it. "But you shouldn't be writing."

Still, the push and pull between honoring the WGA's methodologies and the desire to be productive is a major dilemma for some of the striking guild members. And since writing -- particularly for feature scribes -- is usually such private work, confirming whether a writer is doing this kind of low-grade scabbing is tricky.

Several agents have asserted that their clients will quietly work away on their open projects but wait until a strike's end to turn them in. A prominent producer admits that she's hoping that her writers are at least "thinking" about the project at hand while pacing the 30 feet of sidewalk outside of Warner Bros. Gate 7.

One writer pointed out that, hypothetically, anyone could finish a script during the strike, then sit on it for a few weeks after the strike's end and claim it was written then. Even the guild's Script Validation Program couldn't police that maneuver.

"I don't know how you get around that," this writer says. "Are you gonna seize the computers?"

Additionally, any writer who truly honored the strike rules would be in a race against those who did sneak some writing during the strike to be among the first to file promised work to the studios and networks and have their projects move forward. In an atmosphere where the companies will be using the opportunity of a prolonged strike to cut loose extraneous talent, this kind of competitive crunch could be crucial.

Long before the strike began, it was assumed that feature writers would take advantage of a break from studio assignment work and turn to all those purely original ideas they never seem to have time to get to (which is the only form of screenwriting not banned by strike rules). A mordant joke at one agency has it that the desperation of a strike will provoke the kind of mind-blowing original scripts that writers only seem to turn out when they are starving.

But a producer who was working in the industry during the 1988 strike recalls her disappointment when the avalanche of innovative specs she and her producing peers expected after that 22-week work stoppage ended never materialized. Maybe that's because deep down most writers are looking for any excuse to dodge the excruciating process of pushing through endless layers of self-doubt that writing anything more complicated than a soup recipe entails.

"I've always said that you're not a writer until you have at least 100 excuses not to write," jokes Olson. "I know people who are reveling in the fact that they are allowed not to write now."

Certain things are just beyond them

A few weeks ago, Joel and Ethan Coen were quarantined in the 12th-floor hospitality suite of their "No Country for Old Men" film junket at the Four Seasons. Joel sat on a couch and sucked on a succession of hard candies, exuding either deep thoughtfulness or severe disinterest. Ethan was more animated, standing and pacing, and throwing out the occasional rueful chuckle.

They both seemed fairly uncomfortable with the junket situation, but perked up when reminiscing about absurd early screenwriting indignities (see, no one's immune). The Oscar-winning writer-directors also took a stab at describing their next two screenplays -- written around the same time as the "No Country" adaptation -- whose characteristically genre-defying nature stumps the creators themselves at times.

"A Serious Man," an original script that they plan to shoot in April, concerns a Midwestern Jewish community caught up in the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s that's colored by the Coens' own fairly observant Minneapolis upbringing (the first 10 minutes are in Yiddish).

"It'll blow your mind," says Ethan.

"It's a real mind-blower," Joel adds in a deadpan drier than the West Texas landscape. "It's '67, when people's minds were being blown. Hopefully people will be able to handle it."

For "Burn After Reading," another original that they just finished filming, they created characters specifically for George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand (Joel's wife), John Malkovich and Richard Jenkins. "We wanted to throw these specific actors together in a fun story, and it all kind of derived from that exercise," says Ethan.

(Internet claims to the contrary, their story has nothing to do with the Adm. Stansfield Turner memoir, "Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence," though both involve the spy agency and derive their titles from the most severe of secret classifications.)

So is it a comedy then?

"Mmm, sort of," says Ethan.

"It's, um . . . it's . . . " Joel trails off.

"Uhh . . . " adds Ethan.

Finally, Joel offers, "It's not a comedy like -- "

" 'Evan Almighty,' " chimes in Ethan helpfully.

"Or 'Anchorman,' " says Joel, laughing. "In a way, I wish we could do 'Anchorman.' How much did that movie gross? And I love Will Ferrell. He's really . . . funny."

"We tried doing that once," says Ethan. "We saw that 'Meet the Parents' had made $168 million. So our exercise was to make a movie that's going to [gross that]. How hard can it be?"

"What you realize is . . . it's really hard," Joel says.

"It's harder than you would think," Ethan agrees, laughing with his brother.

Joel pops another candy.

"It's really not in our capabilities," he says.

Ex-security guard now has security

"And then what?"

These were the words Preston Whitmore II's mother threw at him when he informed her 20 years ago that he had dropped out of law school to become a writer. Whitmore's response -- "And then what nothin'. This is it" -- was a bold claim for a guy driving to his Century City security guard job in a yellow VW bug.

Sitting on the outdoor patio at the Standard Hotel on a warm afternoon last week, the goateed 45-year-old picked at an artfully arranged late breakfast. He was trying to grease away a hangover from the previous night's premiere and afterparty of his third writing-directing effort, "This Christmas," which comes out today.

Clearly, Whitmore had backed up his early claim.

A poor Detroit native, Whitmore was a high school dropout who spent three years in Guam as a Marine before getting a GED, college degree and two years of law school. He had originally wanted to be a rapper and even released an album with the Boyz From Detroit (his nom de rap was Square Luv), but a friend who was a Motown songwriter pushed him toward movies by saying of his lyrics: "These stories are too big for a three-minute song."

Whitmore was a security guard at a condo complex and part-time law clerk when Gersh agent Richard Arlook found him. At the time, Whitmore was writing on a Radio Shack word processor with a tiny window and little memory on which he had to type half the script, print it and then erase it before he could write the second half.

He's since completed nearly 70 feature screenplays ("The Walking Dead," "Fled" and "Crossover" among those produced), a full third of them originals.

"I never start a script I don't finish," he says of the discipline he picked up in the Marines.

A large part of Whitmore's determination to succeed stems from his relationship with his late father, a custodian who never got to see any of his son's produced work.

When Whitmore was first trying to make it as a screenwriter, he kept a Hollywood journal in the form of dispirited, imaginary letters written to his father.

A few positive developments finally led to a hopeful journal entry, so Whitmore decided to send it to his dad.

Four months later, when his father's neighbors discovered him dead of a heart attack in his Detroit home, they only knew he had a son in L.A. to notify for one reason: the blood-speckled, crumpled letter they found in his back pocket.

[Kubla Khan]

OK, this appears on WGA-E's website. It's basically "signatures" of writers who are not crossing the picket lines. Time to anaylze to see who's not on the list! Hmmm! LOL.

[Kubla Khan]

SO...these are the writers that have not signed the list. Very interesting to take a look at. (I may be missing people, so I welcome any corrections! I did my best though).

AMC: Barbara Esensten, James H. Brown, Chip Hayes

ATWT: Susan Dansby, Cheryl Davis

B&B: Bradley Bell, Kay Alden, Betsy Snyder, Michael Minnis

DAYS: Dena Higley, Gordon Rayfield, Meg Kelly, Renee Godeila

GH: Robert Guza, Garin Wolf, Michael Conforti, Elizabeth Korte

GL: Lloyd Gold, Christopher Dunn, Tita Bell, Jill Lorie Hurst

OLTL: Fran Myers, Michelle Poteet Lisanti, Gary Tomlin (Mark Christopher and Victor Gialanella are also not on the list, although they have recently departed OLTL).

Passions: No one appears on above list

Y&R: Josh Griffith, Shelley Meals, Darin Goldberg, Michael Montgomery

[Toups]

Thanks for posting that, KK! Let's take a look at who's not on the list. Now of course it doesn't mean that these writers have gone on Fi-Core. The only two we know so far are Josh Griffith and Gary Tomlin.

AMC

James Harmon Brown

Barbara Esensten

Chip Hayes

Karen Lewis

ATWT

Susan Dansby

Cheryl Davis

B&B

Bradley Bell

Michael Minnis

Kay Alden

Elizabeth Snyder

DAYS

Dena Higley

Renee Godelia

Meg Kelly

Gordon Rayfield

GH

Robert Guza Jr.

Michael Conforti

Garin Wolf

Elizabeth Korte

GL

Tita Bell

Christopher Dunn

Lloyd Gold

Jill Lorie Hurst

OLTL

Fran Myers

Michelle Poteeet Lisanti

Jeanne Marie Ford

Gary Tomlin (Fi-Core)

PSNS

James E. Reilly

Marlene Clark Poulter

Darrell Ray Thomas, Jr.

Shawn Morrison

Clem Egan

Pete T. Rich

Y&R

James Stanley

Valerie Ahern

Darin Goldberg

Shelley Meals

Michael Montgomery

Josh Griffith (Fi-Core)

ETA: Looks like we had the same idea, KK.

[ChangedBYSon]

WOW! I see Vola Voof is on the list of those not crossing the picket lines.

Somebody told me they saw her on the picket lines serving everybody coffee,

but I thought he was making it up. I'll have to apologize now.

[Kubla Khan]

Woops Toups!

We both were working on lists at the same time it seems like!

Yours is prettier.

[Toups]

LOL Thanks.

Hmm....that list is every interesting, especially from Passions - that's the entire writing team! LOL And there's a few HWs too! Hmmm.....

Of course the person I'm most interested in is Jim Reilly. I wonder what his decision was.

[Faulkner]

See, this is why I love the Internets.

Great lists, KK and Toups! It will be interesting to see if any of the non-listed writers speak up.

[bellcurve]

Is Brad not signing because he is crossing the picket line(as an Executive Producer ONLY)? I thought he did some picketing too. Is Kay Alden a producer too? I have no clue why Kay hasn't signed.

Interesting that Valerie Ahern hasn't signed but Christian McLaughlin DID, especially because they are, in many ways, a team. They worked together at MARRIED WITH CHILDREN, CLUELESS, and of course, SPYDER GAMES.