Strike yields mixed results for Hollywood writers

By Carl DiOrio

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Figuring the winners and losers in the aftermath of the writers' tentative contract deal is a complex calculation.

Writers themselves fall in both categories.

Having missed paychecks for more than three months means many scribes will see their pay raises and residual gains as mere means of playing catch-up in their household income. But those who found themselves between projects when the strike began November 5 are sitting pretty going forward, as first-time residual gains in new media will put them on a better track to compensate for any loss of income caused by diminishing revenue from TV reruns and DVD.

Similarly, though management seems to have avoided giving away the store, the studios clearly have taken a hit. Many strike-halted TV shows were money losers anyway, but the cancellation of pilot production is a huge headache for studio producers and broadcast networks.

Elsewhere, the scores of production crews and others put out of work by the strike will be hard-pressed to find a silver lining in the scribes' contract gains. And many nonentertainment businesses in the region -- from caterers to limo firms -- have had their bottom lines tugged a bit by the protracted labor strife.

After a proposed contract settlement was endorsed on Sunday by the governing bodies of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), rank-and-file members will vote on Tuesday whether to end the strike. Formal approval of the contract, which hinged on new payments to writers for work distributed over the Internet, is being conducted through a lengthier ratification process that normally takes up to two weeks.

REPUTATIONS ON LINE

As for individual personalities in the WGA negotiations, many notched points in both the win and loss columns, and history will fill in their ultimate scorecards. Yet short-term reputations clearly have been either burnished or tarnished by the torturous talks, fairly or otherwise.

To wit:

WGA West president Patric Verrone took it on the chin when he had to back off demands for first-time jurisdiction over reality TV and animation, pet issues he refused to take off the table on December 7, when contract talks broke down for a second time. Citing the refusal, the studios' bargaining arm instead turned its attention to launching early negotiations on the Directors Guild of America's next contract.

WGA West executive director David Young, was the chief architect of the guild's questionable strategy of negotiating brinkmanship. So though some say the WGA would never have won its contract gains without a strike, others will ask how anyone can know that since guild negotiators stayed away from the bargaining table for long stretches of time between the start of talks July 16 and the expiration of the guild's last contract October 31.

More positively, WGA negotiating committee chair John Bowman comes away from the difficult negotiations with a reputation as the guy who ultimately hammered out a final deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP). Previously, Bowman had deferred in large part to Young -- the guild's chief negotiator for most of the talks -- and Verrone, who effectively stepped aside in the final weeks of talks.

And WGA East president Michael Winship, though a lesser player in the talks, is a first-term head of the smaller WGAE who seems quickly to have won the confidence and backing of his constituency.

On the management side, AMPTP president Nick Counter presided over perhaps the most controversial set of contract talks in his decades-long career -- possibly his final WGA negotiations before retirement. But in the end, it was a couple of media moguls who hammered out final terms of the WGA deal and a prior DGA agreement, thus winning points in the arena of public perception.

News Corp. president Peter Chernin and Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger have been praised for taking direct charge of negotiations with the WGA and DGA to forge all-important deal points on new-media residuals. CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves also was clearly a moderating influence behind the scenes.