Hollywood seeks to avert strike with late talks
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - With Hollywood braced for the possibility of an imminent strike, screenwriters and studio bosses met on Wednesday for one last bargaining session before the midnight expiration of their current contract.
A U.S. federal mediator joined the talks for a second day as the film and television industry hoped for a settlement that would avert what many fear would be its most devastating labor confrontation in 20 years.
Writers Guild of America leaders won approval two weeks ago from their rank and file to call a strike if no deal is reached on a new contract once the existing labor pact covering the union's 12,000 members runs out.
The writers could continue working under terms of their old contract if both sides decide to keep negotiating, and union chiefs have all but ruled out declaring a walkout at the stroke of midnight on Wednesday.
But studios and TV networks have treated the end of the month as a de facto deadline as they scramble to stockpile scripts and fast-track various productions in anticipation of a work stoppage.
The last major film and television strike was a WGA walkout in 1988 that lasted 22 weeks, delayed the start of the fall TV season and cost the industry a reported $500 million.
Hollywood has been gripped in recent weeks by a sense that renewed labor strife is inevitable, and the latest bargaining sessions have done little to dispel the air of gloom.
At the end of a nearly nine-hour round of talks on Tuesday, the Writers Guild of America issued a statement saying, "No significant progress was made," but the union promised to present a new "comprehensive" set of proposals.
The guild said its team wanted to press ahead with talks on
Tuesday night, but "management negotiators responded by saying they preferred to leave for the day and hear our proposal tomorrow, the expiration date of our contract."
"We've moved off of our positions, and now it's going to be incumbent upon the studios in turn, in that spirit of give and take, to move closer to some place where we can find an agreement," Carlton Cuse, a WGA negotiating committee member and executive producer of the ABC TV hit "Lost," told Reuters.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the industry, issued a statement that studios "are committed to a fair, reasonable and sensible agreement."
But it added: "We will not agree to any proposals that impose unreasonable restrictions and unjustified costs."
A key stumbling block in the talks, which began in July, has been the union demand for higher "residual" fees earned by writers when their TV and film work gets reused in such formats as cable TV reruns, DVDs and Internet downloads.
Studios say those demands would stifle growth at a time of rising production costs, tighter profit margins, piracy threats and growing competition from the Web. They insist that digital distribution of movies and TV remains largely experimental or promotional and new-media business models are just developing.
The union accuses the studios of pleading poverty and argues that writers have never gotten a fair deal on the lucrative DVD industry.
