How I Almost Had to Picket My Own Company

Editor's note: A prolific writer and producer responsible for such shows as "The Rockford Files" and "The A-Team," Stephen J. Cannell ran his own company and was producing several prime-time series--including "Wiseguy," "Hunter" and "Sonny Spoon"--when the last Writers Guild of America strike occurred in 1988. In the last five years, he has become a novelist, writing a half-dozen books, his latest being "The Tin Collectors."

Calendar asked Cannell to reminisce about the 1988 strike and the two others he experienced. It's worth noting that Cannell also has a dog in the current fight, having just completed a pilot script for NBC.

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I always viewed myself as a bit of an anomaly. I was a pure writer and am a pure writer first and foremost. I was also running my own production company, so I found myself with a foot in each boat.

My sympathies were with the writers, and my fiscal problems were as a producer, because I was covering all my own deficits on production, and to shut my company down and carry 1,500 people on a payroll for months and months was a crippling idea for an individual.

When the writers went out on strike in 1988, I was struggling with this, and I didn't want to pink-slip people. So I get a call from my picket captain, and the guy goes, "Well, we've got your picket assignment for you." I said let me have it. And he says, "I don't know how to put this, but you're picketing your studio."

I said, "Are you kidding me?" I told him I certainly didn't mind picketing, but you can't make me picket my own company, because I'd feel like a complete fool. In the back of my mind, I had the feeling there was going to be a news camera there when I showed up. Finally, they relented and let me go picket at CBS. It was the beginning of what I considered a pretty frustrating strike.

One of the things I saw happening in all the strikes I've witnessed is that the leadership of the guild pumps the writers up to get them angry enough to go out, and in order to do this there's a lot of invective that's hurled around about how the studios are stealing from writers and making all the dough while we're being hammered.

That gets the temperature up, and then the guild is kind of stuck with that rhetoric. As the negotiation proceeds, they really can't accept what would be a compromise proposal in the face of what they've just said to their membership to get them to go out on strike, so now the lines begin to harden.