Interesting interview of at TAP with officials from the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild that gets at some of the strategy behind the strike:
I think they thought [the writers] were going to work without a contract after the expiration on Nov. 1, to line up with [the actors], because historically writers can't shut down the business. The writing staff might go out, but producers will continue to finish the shows with just the scripts. So it became clear to them that they could stockpile feature films and television pilots and potentially even television series, starting in November, getting the scripts ready to go through January and February, and then producing up to 150 feature films that would be in the can on June 30 when [the actors] went out.
If we did go out [in June], their strategy dictated, big deal. They've got their TV shows, they've got the pilots, they've got the movies. Of course, they couldn't do that without telling our members to write those scripts and paying them to do it. All of a sudden we saw [the writers] were all being overworked and being told we need these scripts. That's when we said Nov. 1 is a real date for us. So now we've shut down the accelerated portion of that production, and we've absolutely shut down television. The alliance has dictated a strategy to [the studios] that really kind of cut them off at the pass. Now if they think they can go to another union [for a contract more to their liking], or if they think they can make a deal just by starving us out, they still don't have the product, and they still don't have us.
TAP: So what do you think is their plan then?
PV: The strategy of the other side was to respond to our proposals by putting 30-plus pages of rollbacks on the table, including a recruitment proposal, profit-based residuals, a proposal saying that everything on the internet would be considered promotional and [therefore they] wouldn't pay any form of residual even if they made revenue off it. The list went on and on. They sat there and camped at that point, waiting for us to bargain against ourselves and come back with "Please, sir, may I have another?" which is the way our bargaining had gone on for 20 years, when both our unions had chief negotiators that were much more simpatico with the other side and were willing to make a behind-the-scenes deal and make the process a lot less contentious. This time we have a union organizer in charge of our union [David Young, formerly of the Garment Workers, the Carpenters and other unions], they (SAG) have a linebacker [Doug Allen, a onetime member of the Buffalo Bills]. We've got a militancy that we didn't have previously, and that has made for a refusal to play by rules that don't help us win and don't help us get what we think is fair.
The whole interview is pretty interesting.
