With television and film writers still on strike the outlook for entertainment in 2008 might be grim.
On October 31, 2007, the Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) expired for the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which applies to approximately 10,500 current members of the unions WGA West and WGA East, according to its Web site.
Negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) over the MBA had been ongoing since July and earlier. The negotiations stalled largely over WGA demands for compensation in New Media (Internet streaming, downloads, etc.) as well some union jurisdictional demands.
The strike began on November 7, 2007, and thousands have been out of work since. In the first five days of the strike, they took out of production popular TV shows such as ABC's "Desperate Housewives," "Rules of Engagement," and "The Big Bang Theory" from CBS, and NBC's "The Office."
Immediately, late night talk shows lost their writers, and went into reruns. Now David Letterman's production company has reached an independent agreement with WGA to bring their writers back to work and get the show on the air again.
Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Carson Daly, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert also plan to return to the evening line up in January; however they will not have writers, and they have all openly stated that the shows will suffer without their full teams.
While shows that require daily writing and producing were hit immediately, many of the effects of the strike have not been felt yet. The Golden Globe and Oscar ceremonies rely on WGA writers, so there is a big question mark looming over what will happen with them.
Nearly every production in Hollywood is falling behind schedule, so there will be delayed impacts throughout the year.
Several movie projects with big-name stars including Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, and Bruce Willis remain on the backburner until the dispute between major film studios and the striking screenwriters is resolved.
California's Governor Schwarzenegger assumed a broker role to end the strike, which put thousands of productions workers out of work, according to Reuters, "from hairstylists and makeup artists to camera operators and carpenters," and is having a ripple effect throughout the economy.
WGA spokesperson John Bowman said at a Los Angeles city council meeting on Dec. 19 that the economic impact to the city of Los Angeles at that point had been somewhere between $400 million to $2.5 billion.
The WGA-AMPTP negotiations have far-reaching influence on how revenue streams from the Internet will be treated for years to come. Both sides view the stakes as being extremely high since both know that more and more entertainment is moving to the Internet.
"Corporate revenue from video downloading is estimated to be $1 billion for the next three years; proceeds from video streaming will be $3 billion during the next two years," states the WGA Web site.
The writers are trying to stake their claim on this frontier media, but AMPTP is also trying to protect their interests in the area. The problem is that neither side knows what the future will hold with the Internet or how to best structure the industry around it.
Additional reporting by Yvonne Marcotte
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