Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (23 page)

I tried to figure out how this happened. After reading his book about the future of screenwriting,
What Happens Next,
I sought out Marc Norman, a WGA negotiating committee member. The reflective Papa Bear–like Norman, who cowrote the Oscar-winning film
Shakespeare in Love,
sat with me in my office for hours discussing union strategy.

“We didn’t really anticipate or plan it,” said Marc. “We saw no reason to wait for the—let’s call them unpredictable actors.”

I asked him if he thought the directors were too cozy with the Moguls. He smiled. “The timing wasn’t premeditated. It wasn’t highly debated. We thought, Why are we waiting for them? Why don’t we go on strike?”

This totally unexpected move left the network heads exposed without a new season, or sufficient episodes for the fall’s upcoming shows. It was the middle of pilot-writing season, and scripts could not be rushed. Big hit shows went unresolved. As for the studios, any unfinished and unsubmitted scripts had no chance of getting made that year. This placed the Writers in a better negotiating position than ever before. No leisurely wait until June. No orchestrated nice-nice negotiation.

Suddenly, I absorbed a new fact: The Writers had, for a moment, stumped the Moguls. I sat in my office and reevaluated everything.
This was good!
I was on the side of—
work
! Maybe the Writers playing hardball would make the Moguls cave!

Sure.

The Writers thought the studios would run out of material
for their summer and winter blockbusters, and they were counting on the failure of reality TV to fill the audience’s appetite for good television. In fact, on November 7, two days after the Writers hit the picket line, the town’s ace reporter and soon-to-become-much-more-than-that, Nikki Finke, warned otherwise. She had it from good sources that the TV brass was happy to trash the entire 2008–9 season, which was already looking like a stinker. Was that posturing or truth? We were falling down a rabbit hole and giving birth to an Alice.

THE MAKING OF A NARRATOR

One of the most fascinating things that happened during the strike was that it grew its own narrator, and then its own Norma Rae. Nikki Finke was already something of a phenomenon: the town’s top columnist, breaking news reporter and
terrorista
if you got on her wrong side. Her Web site, then self-owned and called DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com (now
deadline.com
), was a must-read well before the strike, but it became much, much more during the strike (and even more afterward; its popularity forced the perennial trade journal
Variety
onto the block by 2012 and into a weekly by 2013). It became the town square, our industry bulletin board, our way of communicating, slugging it out. It has remained so ever since. But it was a remarkable social and political phenomenon during the strike. At its peak in January and February, there were 90–105 comments per update, and often 10–20 updates per day on every side. Everyone was leaking there. The longer the strike went on, the more vital (and ultimately valuable) Nikki’s Web site became.

In the tradition of the great Hollywood reporters from Hedda Hopper to Walter Winchell, Nikki inspired fear, respect and devotion among her sources and readers. Some sample entries:

Comments

You are the bomb, Nikki. Hope you’re feeling better—glad you’re back . . .

Rock on, Nikki.

I know this is so last week, but I have to say it anyway: You go Girl!

Do they give Pulitzers for online writing? You rock!

Nikki’s news was inside and up-to-the-minute. She had the detailed reports from every secret or public meeting and official or off-the-record negotiation. And she had a point of view. Nikki’s readers tagged the
Los Angeles Times
and
Variety
as shills for the Moguls, while Nikki was their fearless, populist leader. When she got sick, people were virtually apoplectic over the absence of information.

The most riveting aspect of the Web site were the comments. The town fought it out on the comment board: exhorting fellow strikers, criticizing each other for not picketing enough hours, calling out names of potential scabs, accusing posters of being Mogul imposters who undermined the will of the masses by slipping in antiunion economic information about new media. Ultimately, an ugly class war broke out between the trade unions and some overly frenzied Writers about what a union was and the value of each other’s work, though some less drenched in ideology chimed in on the crew’s behalf.

The politics got baffling. It was much like the Stalinist-vs.-Trotskyite years, as my grandfather explained them to me: the narcissism of small differences. Years later it makes for an astonishing social history, and Nikki Finke’s Web site and her fans will guide us through the wild Mr. Toad–like roller-coaster ride Hollywood took for a while, crash-landing only in time for the Oscars.

THE FOUR SEASONS OF THE STRIKE: THE ARDENT FALL

The Writers walked out onto the picket lines that formed in front and in back of all the studios and networks on November 5, 2007. They were having the most wonderful time on the line (as opposed to online). They were having romances. Bromances. They were making alliances, forming writing partnerships and spawning webisodes and fresh concepts for movies and series by the thousands. One girlfriend, a talented screenwriter, was having the best social life of her career. Imagine a bunch of isolated people who usually stay home all day long staring at their computers suddenly coming together at the studio with scores of cute, like-minded people and being fed pizzas by their agents, all with a single purpose: Defeating the Man! They had a cause! And they were getting fed for free and they had to be there and they couldn’t write. Nobody could make them write. And there’s nothing a writer loves more than being forced
not
to write.

I remember driving past Kiwi Smith (you remember Kiwi from the
Bridesmaids
premiere) and Marc Klein (
Serendipity, Mirror Mirror
) in the line in front of Paramount, two great friends and collaborators, as they yelled, “Lynnie! Lynnie! Wave and honk!” As the granddaughter of a beloved labor-organizer, crossing my first picket line was pure agony. I had to honk and wave to Marc and Kiwi and all my friends, and then I’d drive through their line to my office. I thought the world was coming to an end.

But for WGA leaders Patric Verrone and David Young, who had been elected on a “get ready for a strike” platform, the world was an opening oyster. They had an enthusiastic, untapped labor force in a new generation that had never picketed before, and the public was on their side. Verrone was in full command of morale all the way through the rank and file.

“It’s like we were catching a tailwind from Enron,” Marc
Norman, of the WGA strike leadership committee, told me. “One of the things that was interesting about this strike—and I mentioned it in a piece I wrote at the time—was that for the first time, we had a sense that the public was kind of on our side. If there was any public interest at all in the Writers Guild—which there never is—it was on our side. We were the beneficiaries of luck. There was an antiestablishment, anticorporate mood in the country. And we could portray ourselves as Clifford Odets’s peace workers going against the owners.”

They had all the people power.

Celebrities were joining the Writers on the picket line, creating juicy, national publicity, public relations you can’t buy and general whoop-de-doo, while the Moguls hired PR agencies to help them build a counteroffensive and put out viral videos, all to no avail. They accused the union of using scare tactics, and then leaked to the newspapers terrifying things about what the strike would do to the economy. The more they tried to look like the good guys, the more they looked like the bad guys.

Deadline Comments Board

I’ll explain . . . It’s the AMPTP accusing us of using tactics that they themselves have employed.

The AMPTP is refusing to negotiate.

The AMPTP leaks rumors of a nine-month strike to local news outlets, who then report the rumors as news, so as to create financial fear among writers and all the other unions as well . . .

Comment by Writer who earned 60K in ’07—Tuesday, November 13, 2007, 3:00 p.m. PST

Soccer moms drove by the studios after picking up their kids to honk and wave at the Writers, and the Moguls were the butt of jokes on late-night comedy shows. If you liked artists, you were
for the WGA. Hillary and Barack both supported the Writers. The Writers’ agencies sent Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the picket line even as their expense accounts were canceled and their bottom lines began to cave. This didn’t stop the anger directed at agents as a group from being vehemently expressed on the comment board as if they were the source of the Writers’ anguish. Those striking Writers who didn’t have agents took the opportunity to hate agents even more. It was a pointless diversion of fury that nevertheless flourished on the board for days.

In the midst of it, in the absence of any negotiations whatsoever in November, people searched for a hero, a glamorous Superman.

Deadline Comments Board

Where’s Hollywood’s favorite son? No, not Tom Hanks—the Governator! He’s the only one with the clout, the pro-business and pro-talent reputation, and the power to solve this.

His office said today they don’t want to get involved. Tell him to get off his butt and back to Hollywood so all his old friends can get back to work.

Comment by Mr. Wants a Good Deal—Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 4:32 p.m. PST

The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, still thought of as the Terminator in his former (and now current) Hollywood home, stayed far away, apparently too busy for a legacy. In the Old Abnormal, this impasse would never have happened. As in Washington, where, prior to the congressional debt-ceiling debate of 2011, the process had been pro forma for years, labor relations here had been pro forma for years, and everyone knew how to get along. This degree of labor strife is a semirecent phenomenon. For decades, labor negotiations were handled by the guy at the top and his Fixer. They had “everyone’s” interests at heart—that is, making
movies. There was a Big Man (in the African sense) who ruled the town, Lew Wasserman; he founded MCA and eventually merged it with Universal. He had a Fixer named Sidney Korshak, who was a labor lawyer (and much, much more) with ties to the teamsters. Korshak had even represented Jimmy Hoffa.

According to former Paramount head Bob Evans in his book
The Kid Stays in the Picture,
“A nod from Korshak and the Teamsters change management. A nod from Korshak and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak and the Dodgers can suddenly play night baseball.” For the purpose of labor relations in Hollywood, he was a strike fixer. Between Wasserman and Korshak, they kept the negotiations on track for decades. They set the parameters for the studios’ and the union’s expectations, and things went swimmingly for a long time.

Pre-Wasserman, the glory of the WGA, founded by pioneering screenwriter Frances Marion, was earned repeatedly, notably in the famously arduous 1959–60 six-month strike, when writers first won residuals and a basic health and pension plan. Then, through the relatively harmonious seventies when Wasserman and Korshak ruled, they added significantly and rather painlessly to those gains. Until, that is, the Bloodbath of ’88, when the Fixer and the Big Man were no longer in power and the Writers’ DVD demands struck at the bone marrow of the studios’ profit margin.

There was no fixer like Sidney Korshak for this strike. Early on, Jeffrey Katzenberg tried and failed, and no one else arrived thereafter. That is, until Nikki exhorted the agents to come to the rescue.

Nikki realized that agents were professional mediators, and in the absence of Superman, we needed the top-seed agents to step in. They were obviously already talking among themselves, as they had everything at stake. Someone needed to rise up and fill the vacuum.

Deadline Comments Board

Excellent idea, Nikki. I was having this exact same conversation today on the picket line. The only problem is . . . it makes way too much sense. They’ll never go for it.

Comment by A-Dub—Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 4:45 p.m. PST

I am a TV agent. I would be happy to work on this. If empowered, I am sure a deal could be made. Remember, artists pay agents 10% to provide a buffer between talent and studios . . . now we see why that’s important.

Comment by tvagent72—Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 4:49 p.m. PST

Although I agree that the Moguls hate agents more than they do the talent, the suggestion has a lot of merit simply because it would show the extent of the economic disaster that this strike is about to inflict, if it hasn’t already . . . Agents and the agencies are a very large part of this economy. Theirs is as vested an interest in resolving this fight as any of ours. They are part of the economy.

Comment by JimBo—Wednesday, November 7, 2007, 5:16 p.m. PST

The agents’ businesses were in jeopardy, and they decided they had to give it a try. They selected CAA’s smooth Bryan Lourd to step into the fray, and on November 21 he began weeklong round-the-clock secret negotiations at his beautiful home in Benedict Canyon. They couldn’t have been in better hands. The Bayou-born Lourd is as cool under pressure as anyone in any town. I have never seen him lose his temper or his resolve, and I’ve known him for almost three decades. He gets along equally well with lords and cooks and is strategic, tactical and relaxed. His house has so much room—it hosts the best Oscar party every year—there is space to
cool off and to conspire. Nikki quoted an insider on how he was playing it, mid-talks: “He keeps asking what everybody needs. This is what Lew Wasserman used to do during these things. Wasserman would say, ‘I want to know what you each need. I don’t want to know what you want. Tell me what you need.’ There’s no arbitrary end to this. Everyone only leaves if Bryan gives up and goes home.”

I can assume nothing about Bryan going home (since that’s where he already was), but his private discussions coincided with the resumption of formal negotiations on November 26. To the great relief of the entire ghetto, the two sides met almost every day up to December 8, during which the town read Deadline Hollywood as though it were the Talmud. In the morning, we davened (prayed like the Orthodox, rocking back and forth) to the column (even if we had no idea what that meant). All day long we compulsively checked in, and in the evening we searched for meaning in the crumbs of information Nikki gleaned from the gods.