Writer's Strike Thread

[Sylph]

January 26, 2008

Networks Ponder Poststrike Landscape

By BILL CARTER

Scripts have been junked, pilots have been canceled, deals with writers have been wiped off the books, and almost no one in the television industry has been able to make any plans during the past three months.

In an industry where business as usual means nobody knows anything, the three-month-old (and counting) writers’ strike has contributed a new state of uncertainty: Everybody knows even less.

What will television look like when the strike ends, and how is the next season going to be changed? Beyond the conviction that some scripted television series will be replaced by reality shows, network and production studio executives are expressing hope that one outcome of the strike will be a different, and much cheaper, process for getting scripted shows on the air.

That means more shows bought without pilots, more work from established writers and less from newcomers, and a rollout of new shows that extends throughout the year instead of being concentrated in September.

“We have to find ways to be more efficient,” said Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Universal. And a senior executive at a production studio said, “The cost of business has just been unsustainable the past couple of years.”

Mr. Zucker has been the most outspoken executive in declaring that the strike offers an opportunity to revise — and potentially revitalize — the business. He has suggested, for example, that NBC drastically cut back on its pilots (from dozens to five or six).

More decisions will be made to order a series “based on the gut of the programmer,” Mr. Zucker said in a telephone interview. He said networks would commit to shows from scripts alone.

NBC has struggled more than any other network in prime time over the past half-decade, but Mr. Zucker said he was encouraged by his network’s success over the past two months. It has finished first or second in ratings among the advertiser-preferred 18-to-49-year-old audience six of the past seven weeks. Mr. Zucker said he believed his chief programming executive, Ben Silverman, “has the gut we need.”

Mr. Silverman himself has promised more shows based on existing formats, many purchased from foreign networks. He is also going back to an old practice known as the backdoor pilot, which involves producing a television movie that might later become a series. NBC will have one of those next month, a remake of the talking-car series “Knight Rider.”

Networks have always relied on pilots because they demonstrate how a series idea is going to be executed, and pilots can be shown to focus groups before a series is commissioned. Programmers, who have highly tenuous job security anyway, have been notoriously reluctant to base series decisions solely on their gut instincts.

Still, even some production studio executives support a shift in development from pilot-heavy to gut-heavy.

“We can’t do any worse than we’ve been doing,” said the senior studio executive, who requested anonymity because the studio has restricted public comment on strike issues. “There were no big successes this season.” As always happens, networks generated dozens of pilots this season at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, only to see the vast majority scrapped like a pile of defective toys.

A senior executive at another production studio said, “I think that for some networks, half as many pilots as usual will be ordered, and for others a quarter as many.” The executive conceded that this would probably mean series creators with strong track records (meaning even one previous hit) would have an even better shot at getting new shows on the air than they do now, to the likely detriment of writers with less experience.

“The networks will take fewer risks,” the studio executive said. “Would a show like a ‘Seinfeld’ get on the air in this system? Good question.”

Cost is at the center of the drive to reduce the number of pilots, or at least to restore them to being television shows instead of mini-movies. Several executives pointed to the bloated costs of drama pilots, which have reached as high as $9 million, while episodes of the subsequent series cost only between $2 million and $3 million. Audiences then often decide that the regular episodes fail to live up to the pilot. One recent example: “Bionic Woman,” NBC’s remake of an old series, which got off to a roaring start thanks to a film-quality pilot and never measured up again.

“We’re using pilots as sales tools,” Mr. Zucker said. “That has to stop.”

But one studio executive, who also requested anonymity because of a ban on strike comments, suggested some caution.

“Be wary of absolute assertions,” the executive said, noting that the coming fall season already has two hugely expensive pilots on the books. Fox will soon begin production on a pilot called “Fringe,” an “X-Files”-like science fiction drama, with J. J. Abrams, a creator of “Lost,” as a writer and executive producer. The script was finished and sold before the strike started. The price to produce the pilot: $10 million.

CBS has commissioned an only slightly less expensive pilot version of a British television project called “The 11th Hour” (also an “X-Files” derivative) from the prolific producer Jerry Bruckheimer (“CSI”).

At the same time big-name producers continue to land commitments for new shows, less-credentialed writers have had their network deals wiped out in the past month. About 70 so-called overall deals to develop new series, most worth several million dollars a year, were canceled under a contractual clause called “force majeure”: networks cited the strike as the “act of God” that allowed them to erase those deals.

Some familiar names, like the actors Hugh Jackman and Taye Diggs, and the director John Singleton, had their agreements canceled. Other writers, like Jon Robin Baitz of ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters,” Jonathan Lisco of “K-Ville” and Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green of “The Sopranos” also had lucrative development deals that were dropped.

With fewer pilots for fall, that may mean that first-year shows with uncertain futures, like ABC’s “Dirty Sexy Money,” will have a better shot at surviving, while NBC warhorses like “Law & Order” and even “Scrubs” and “ER” may live another season.

One prominent talent agent said to watch for networks returning to old ways, however. The networks will most likely all go along with curtailing pilots and eliminating overall deals with writers, said the agent, who asked not to be identified, in order to not alienate the networks.

Then a network or two will have a gut failure and strike out with its new series. “And then they’ll all lose their minds again,” the agent said.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/26/arts/television/26seas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=television&pagewanted=print

[Toups]

^^^ Sylph, can you link to those articles? Thanks!

[Sylph]

I added the links now, Toups!

[Sylph]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/arts/television/27ryzi.html?_r=1&ref=television&oref=slogin


January 27, 2008

Television


For Strikers, the Agony of Spare Time


By MELENA RYZIK

“OF course I have time to talk to you,” Kevin Bleyer, a writer for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” said at the beginning of a recent interview. “Let me just put down this copy of ‘War and Peace’ that I now have time to read.”

Like his fellow members of the Writers Guild of America East, Mr. Bleyer, 36, has been on strike for nearly three months. He was joking about “War and Peace,” though not about having enough hours to embark on a project of that magnitude. As the fight has dragged on between the guilds — East and West — and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over compensation for the use of material on the Internet, cellphones and other new media, he and his compatriots have had to find ways to fill their days, and their wallets. At press time, writers and producers had just started informal talks, the first meetings since early December.

“Writers don’t tend to be very good at time management or organization — if they were, they’d be producers, and therefore evil,” another “Daily Show” writer, Sam Means, wrote via e-mail. “So I think a lot of people are pretty frustrated right now, and some are downright bored.”

Mr. Means, 26, who has been using his spare time to pitch cartoons to The New Yorker, has been fortified, financially and creatively, by the fact that a satirical book he wrote, “The Practical Guide to Racism,” was published this month (under the pseudonym C. H. Dalton); his advance has helped offset his unemployment, he said.

For his part Mr. Bleyer has covered the primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina for National Public Radio and an online humor site, 23/6, an offshoot of The Huffington Post. Like most striking writers who have turned to freelancing to keep busy, he did it mostly for professional growth, and still frets about finances.

A few writers have returned to gigs they had hoped to forget: waiting tables, bartending, copywriting, tutoring. Some who began as performers have returned to the grind of auditioning for commercials. Many — especially on the West Coast, whose guild recommends 12 hours a week on the picket line (less is asked of the East Coast contingent, especially in the cold) — have discovered that striking is nearly a full-time job in itself. And as the picketing has continued, whatever excitement there was at its outset — The solidarity across genres! The networking opportunities! The Web videos! — began to fade.

“There’s definitely a winter malaise setting in,” said Bryan Tucker, a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” “The fun group dynamic that we had the first week or two has dissolved. It’s tough to see any kind of hope on the horizon.”

Mr. Tucker, 34, was speaking from the Upper East Side home he shares with his wife and two young daughters. A veteran comedy writer whose credits include “The Chris Rock Show” and “Mad TV,” he has been struggling to keep afloat, and has returned to his roots as a stand-up comic to keep busy and funny. Performing in comedy clubs, he said, he has been paid “between nothing and $100,” averaging about $20 to $40 per gig. He has also written humor articles for newspapers and magazines. But, he said, “if I added all the money up for all those, it probably would not make a week’s pay for what I make writing in television.” Though his wife, Rachael, has a secure job in finance, they are cutting back; even joining a gym to make the most of the time off was deemed too costly. At one union benefit performance Mr. Tucker joked about having to be a temp worker, a solution he later said he would seriously consider: “I’m certainly not too proud to go back to doing that.”

Aaron Solomon, 32, who lives in Burbank, Calif., has weighed the same option. Mr. Solomon, who has written questions and host patter for “The Weakest Link,” “One Versus 100” and “The New Pyramid,” has actually been on strike since August, when he and three other union members walked off “Temptation,” a syndicated pop culture game show. The show’s production company, FremantleMedia, would not negotiate a guild contract. (About half of all game shows are covered by the guild, a union spokeswoman said; most reality programming is not.)

Mr. Solomon went on unemployment, earning the maximum compensation, $450 a week — about a quarter of what he made in TV — but that is about to run out. His prolonged joblessness, and unexpected car repairs, have nearly wiped out his savings, he said. Still, he serves as a volunteer strike captain, spending up to 20 hours a week picketing, attending meetings and sending e-mail updates. He has also turned down seven invitations to be interviewed for reality-show jobs, he said.

“I don’t believe in contributing to the genre that we’re trying to get covered,” he said. “They work as hard but don’t get any health care or the same salary, or even the respect of being given the title of writers. I think it’s absolutely the right thing to do.”

So he has cut back on expenses and started eating at two Los Angeles-area restaurants, the Bob’s Big Boy in Taluca Lake and Swingers, where an anonymous celebrity benefactor has offered to pick up the tab for any card-carrying writer. He has also looked into temp work as a closed-caption writer.

Career shifts may be more common in the coming weeks, as residual checks dwindle. Depending on many factors — including the length of the show and whether it is on cable or a network — payments can be lucrative for first-time reruns, but they decrease exponentially with each broadcast. Still, for people like Nina Bargiel, who wrote 17 episodes of the Disney hit “Lizzie McGuire” a few years ago but isn’t currently working in television, that money is much appreciated. “If they’re doing a marathon, and they play six of your shows, that’s $300,” she said. “I’m lucky if I make that in a week.”

The unions have tried to stress that, while some of their 12,000-plus members nationwide are Hollywood-level talents, with multi-million-dollar incomes to match, many more are middle class. According to union statistics, nearly half of the West Coast members are unemployed at any time. (There are no such statistics for East Coast members, but the union spokeswoman said the figure was similar.)

Among the unlucky in Los Angeles are Ms. Bargiel, 35, whose last guild writing job, for the Nickelodeon show “Romeo!,” was in 2003. She has also been employed by nonguild shows like “The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy” on the Cartoon Network, but by 2006 those jobs had dried up. She wound up working part-time behind the desk in a gym where she was once a member, and software testing for an Internet start-up while hustling for more television work. She also pickets four or five days a week, which sometimes means working from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Because any settlement is not likely to be retroactive, “I personally may not gain anything,” she said. “But ideally the person who comes behind me will not be scrambling to get from the gym to the software beta-testing job to the picket line.”

One benefit of the strike, said Michele Mulroney, a screenwriter, “is, you’ve inadvertently radicalized a bunch of otherwise mellow people. Like, maybe we will make our own Internet content.”

Ms. Mulroney, 41, quickly added that she and her husband and writing partner, Kieran Mulroney, were among the privileged few who could ride out the strike: they have polished scripts for films like “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” and were juggling three projects when the walkout began.

But newcomers like Andrés du Bouchet, 36, who joined the union in August, when he received his first television writing job, on “Talkshow With Spike Feresten,” a new late-night program on Fox, may not be so fortunate; he has not even finished paying his initiation dues yet, and the lag might cost him career momentum. Also, he’s not much of a self-starter at home. “I get easily distracted,” he said.

Having writers like these march side by side on the picket lines has thrown some of the industry’s class differences into sharp relief. (Ms. Bargiel admitted feeling “a little embarrassed” about her recent career turn, though she added that everyone picketing, from a Farrelly brother on down, has been welcoming; she also emphasized that she considered having day jobs par for the course for a writer.)

And there is a sense that complaining about the fine print on a job that many would jump at is whiny or elitist. So despite the malaise that comes from being in a professional limbo — and the increased opportunity for procrastination that a life without deadlines affords — some writers have seen a silver lining.

Mr. Tucker, from “Saturday Night Live,” is actually able to spend more time with his family. “It’s nice to have the kind of life that most people have, where everyone is home and we have dinner together,” he said. Mr. Solomon, the game show writer, just formed a new band, Super Duper, which includes a percussionist and reality-show writer (employed), and a horn player and sound editor (unemployed). “On the upside we have more time to rehearse,” said Mr. Solomon, who plays bass and does some songwriting.

Ms. Mulroney has gone back to writing a play and said many friends had picked up “passion projects,” like unfinished novels, children’s books and developing screenplays. After the strike “the town will be flooded with new material,” she said.

As Mr. Bleyer of “The Daily Show” put it: “I believe it was Lisa Simpson, on ‘The Simpsons,’ who said, ‘This is a crisatunity.’ It’s a small crisis and I’m looking for an opportunity.” He thought a minute and added: “Are you offering? You need a ghostwriter? I could be a ghostwriter for a journalist. I could punch it up.”

[dragonflies]

Saw this at Daytime Confidential, of course taking with a grain of salt, unless Toups knows if it might be true or not

Blind Item: Who's Jumping Networks?

Who's Jumping Networks? The Internet Rumor Mill is all abuzz that one Head Scribe may be jumping to anther network when the strike ends. Who could it be? We're hearing this Head Writer may have already been in talks pre-strike. Any guesses?

Bookmark/Search this post with:

http://daytimeconfidential.com./tags/all-my-children

[Sylph]

Lynn or Hogan?

[Khan]

Let's see ...

James Harmon Brown and Barbara Esensten just went Fi-Core to continue writing AMC.

Jean Passanante (ATWT) could jump ship to GH, since her stints at AMC and OLTL were beyond terrible; but ... likely won't happen. (Jeannie also could rejoin Hogan Sheffer, this time at DAYS, but w/ Dena Higley now installed as scab co-head ... and you know, we're not even sure Hogan himself will be coming back once the strike ends.)

Bradley Bell (B& would have to be barred from CBS Television City before he stops working for his father's show in any capacity.

Hogan Sheffer (DAYS) could go to GH (how safe is Guza?) or even OLTL (maybe Ron Carlivati was just an interim HW to clean up Dena's messes?).

Robert Guza Jr. (GH) to ATWT (or even GL). Okay, who can spot the humor in that statement? Anyone?

David Kreizman (GL) to ... oh, hell, who'd want him!?

Ron Carlivati (OLTL), I think, would be reluctant to leave a show he loves so much and has worked at for so long. Well, unless, the money was good.

James E. Reilly (PASSIONS) will have an amazing amount of free time on his hands shortly. Perhaps he's angling to return to GL, or take over ATWT from JP?

Lynn Marie Latham (Y&R) is a strong possibility. (Although, DAYS seems pretty set; and with the possible exception of GH, which ABCD show could she go to?) OTOH, it seems odd for her to bail after Sony gave her as much power as she had before the strike (executive producer and head writer). While I do think she has been canned, I don't think it's b/c she found a deal more to her liking elsewhere.

[dragonflies]

Maybe Hogan is gonna jump to AMC?

[Sylph]

Anyway, we will find this out when the strike is over. And let me remind all the interested people that as Zucker said it will be over in two weeks. Yeah, right.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Watch Latham end up going to AMC.

You know, since Frons likes hiring hack after hack for that poor show...

[Toups]

Hmm.....I haven't heard anything, so this is purely and educated guess: LML to AMC.

1. There were rumours that B&E were going to get the axe and that B&E went Fi-Core because they knew if they didn't, their jobs would be in danger

2. Michael Logan and SOW both reported, before the strike happened, that LML could be gone from Y&R

Coincidence? Maybe.

[Sylph]

I don't think a deal can be made while the strike is on.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Well, talks allegedly occurred "pre-strike."

I expect an announcement once the strike is officially over...

[Sylph]

Yeah...

Oh, the mighty Paradigm!

[Y&RWorldTurner]

It pays to be a hack represented by a powerful management agency...