Happy ending for writers

By the end of October, the lumps had been withdrawn, but not replaced with anything substantial. The Alliance didn't want to deal with the writers at all, preferring to wait until the end of the year, when talks could begin with the DGA, a traditionally more tractable group. The town assumed the writers would keep working after their contract expired on Oct. 31 and wait eight months to strike until the Screen Actors Guild's contract expired in June 2008.

But the Guild's back was up -- it voted to strike Nov. 1 and thousands of well-organized picketers hit the streets. That was the first surprise, a militant WGA -- and a flurry of them followed. For the first time in Hollywood history, SAG backed the writers with their feet, actors refusing to cross picket lines, with prominent stars like Tom Hanks and George Clooney publicly arguing the writers deserved what they wanted. The Alliance pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy, blackening Verrone and Young in their press releases as "upstarts," "outsiders," but the slanders never gained traction. There were factions within the Guild, mistrustful of the leadership, desperate to get back to work, and while they threatened division in e-mails and phone calls, they held themselves back from going public and splitting the Guild. Miraculous to say, even the general public, usually yawning at Hollywood labor issues, backed the writers by 60 percent, according to a November poll. There was a sense that the writers had caught a lucky tailwind courtesy of a Republican administration that had condoned the dissolution of corporate pension funds and the elimination of health plans -- in some loopy way, the writers were seen as taking on Enron. But the Guild's greatest good fortune was having a bottom line that could be expressed in simple language, patently fair and easily understood -- if and when the studios and networks made money off the Internet, the writers would make money too.

Desultory negotiations occupied November; in December, talks collapsed, and Counter and crew turned to the DGA. In the high school of Hollywood, the directors are the big men on campus -- their contracts always go down easy; outside of a five-minute misunderstanding back in the day, they've never gone on strike. But 2007 was new ground and the DGA dragged its heels, postponing its turn into January of this year. The directors had commissioned a study on future Internet earnings that concluded that revenues would be small and take years to appear -- they in fact were prepared to ask for little, but the presence of the WGA, with its industry and public support, peering over their shoulders changed all that. The directors' contract was announced on Jan. 17. Happily, it contained Internet jurisdiction and fixed residual fees for directors when their shows were streamed.

The deal had come about through a change in negotiating format. Instead of facing Counter et al. across the table, the DGA brass had gone around them and sat down for informal talks with the men who hired them, with Peter Chernin of Fox and Bob Iger of Disney. Deal points had been hammered out, then brought to the Alliance for conversion into contract language. Felt but only whispered about town was the sense that the AMPTP had been the problem all along, that it had been inflexible in the face of a changing industry. The format's success brought the same CEOs into informal talks with Young and Verrone the following week.

Much of Hollywood thought it was time for the WGA to cut its losses. The strike was taking its toll: not only writers going broke, but networks' ratings sinking, advertisers demanding their money back, the loss of a television season, viewers drifting away, and with the threat of a SAG strike in June, features shutting down as early as March. The Golden Globes, seen as slightly cheesy but a great party, had been canceled, and the Oscars themselves were threatened. But the writers remained unsatisfied with the flat fees of the DGA deal. Those were buyouts, not participation -- the Guild negotiators, sensing their point of maximum leverage, held out for a percentage, something that grew when revenue grew.

Two weeks ago, they obtained it. Writers carped at some of the provisions, but reading the final contract, most were relieved -- the strike had been worth it. Long-standing legends of the WGA had been revived, the sacrifices of past members had been renewed, the ghosts of the '80s had been vanquished. Yesterday, Guild members voted overwhelmingly to lift the strike -- contract ratification is expected within a couple of weeks. It's all over.

Oh, and Guild folklore will record that Nick Counter never got his bookend.