Timeline of Hollywood labor dispute

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The following is a chronology of major developments in the labor dispute between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the major film and television studios.

The WGA said on Saturday it had reached a "tentative deal" with the studios and will meet members later in the day. The three-month walkout has crippled TV production and overshadowed Hollywood's awards season.

* The Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television, the bargaining arm of the studios, opened formal negotiations on July 16 on a new contract for 10,500 screenwriters.

* Four days after their contract expired, talks with studios broke off and WGA members went on strike on November 5, shattering nearly 20 years of Hollywood labor peace. Late-night TV talk shows were immediately thrown into reruns.

* Contract talks resumed on November 26 after the strike was blamed for delaying several major film productions.

* Negotiations collapsed again on December 7 when the studios demanded that the writers withdraw several of proposals as a condition for continued bargaining, and the writers refused.

* By mid-December, six weeks into the strike, production ground to a halt on most prime-time comedies and dramas as studios' stockpiles of fresh scripts ran dry.

* Late-night TV comics returned to the major networks on January 2, two months into the strike, but only David Letterman and fellow CBS host Craig Ferguson brought their writing teams with them, thanks to a special "interim" deal Letterman's production company reached with the WGA.

* United Artists, the boutique film studio co-owned by actor Tom Cruise, broke with corporate parent Metro Goldwyn-Mayer to reach an interim agreement on January 7 that allowed writers to resume work on his company's movies. A string of deals with other independent producers followed.

* People's Choice Awards and Golden Globes were presented in January without stars or gala ceremonies after actors threatened to boycott the events rather than cross writers' picket lines. WGA later granted a waiver to the music industry's Grammy Awards but threatened to picket the Oscars in February.

* The Directors Guild of America swiftly reached a contract deal on January 17 with major studios, leading the studios and writers to reopen talks six days later. Characterized initially as "informal discussions," those talks turned substantive and produced a breakthrough on February 1 on the key issue of Internet residuals and the outlines of an overall deal.

* WGA leaders e-mailed a memo to guild members in the early morning of February 9, saying they reached a tentative deal with the studios. "While this agreement is neither perfect nor perhaps all that we deserve for the countless hours of hard work and sacrifice, our strike has been a success," WGA West president Patric Verrone and WGA East president Michael Winship said in the memo.

* WGA leaders were to brief union rank-and-file members on the terms of the deal at meetings in New York and Los Angeles on February 9.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and John O'Callaghan)