Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien have announced that their respective late night talk shows for NBC will resume live scheduling on Wednesday, January 2, according to The Hollywood Reporter and other sources. Other chatters’ shows, like those of CBS hosts David
Letterman and Colin Ferguson, and Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and
Stephen Colbert, remain out in solidarity with their writing staffs
that have been on the front lines of the strike.
In one sense, it’s an understandable decision in support of Leno and O’Brien’s 80-100 respective non-writing staffers, and their need to get a paycheck or move on to other work. At the same time, this is just another reminder of why the expiring SAG contract is really the only one that matters to studios. No matter how much talk there is about respect for the written word, writers have been and always will be regarded as the most susceptible to pressure, one of the easiest groups to break.
The problem with the WGA strike or the forthcoming DGA and SAG strikes, lies in the failure to recognize that the studios form part of the equation — money to produce and money to distribute the art. Independent filmmakers have been pounding the pavement for what seems like eons to make their movies. Only now am I hearing writers considering going to the internet directly to market their wares (a la FUNNY OR DIE or ASK A NINJA or whatever pseudo-viral thing of the week). Unless the writers are willing take it on the chin, give up their production deals or staff salary, and effectively go out and do it themselves with their own money, then the studios also have a right to fight for their share of profits for the risk in putting up the millions to make the writers’ words come to life. But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s one thing to shoot a two-person restaurant scene mocking THE HILLS. It’s another to make New York City look deserted (and even with I AM LEGEND kind of cash, I hear the creatures look like Playstation 1 era Resident Evil). You got the money, you got the power. You want the money, you make your own power. And for the record, I’d pre-pay $40 right now to finance 22 episodes of anything Aaron Sorkin or Rob Thomas wanted to write — you get a fraction of the people who watched a single episode of WEST WING or VERONICA MARS to do the same and you’d be looking at a 40 million dollar production budget. The writers should look to exploit that — get your financing from your fans. There are no Medicis, only transnational corporations who exist to make money. But there are fans willing to pony up. If writers aren’t willing to risk themselves and only want to risk the studios’ money, then I guess I’m a company man through and through. These comments will no doubt engulf your comment board in flames but so be it.
I don’t know that anyone necessarily thinks studios aren’t part of the artistic/mechanistic equation when it comes to moviemaking. I think they’re just fighting for a bigger piece of the pie, right?
I guess the problem is that the writers union has traditionally been the weakest link, and so while there’s a lot of waste in other, union-protected areas with regards to physical production, that can’t be addressed politely. Writers toiling for studios on big, mainstream fare are much easier to keep at bay, b/c they don’t actually “make” (just create, vision-wise) the featured product. They can be circumvented, in other words, b/c you always have other writers (and directors and actors) that will make projects independent of studio financing, that can then be purchased and plugged into hte distribution pipeline. This means the studio gigs (in TV and film) are more cut-throat in the competition, and the union can be coopted and persuaded.