THE BIG PICTURE | PATRICK GOLDSTEIN - Strike reveals a future feared
As the strike enters its second week with the two sides as far apart as ever, it's hard not to take the writers' side. I'm not sure I'd go as far as Paul Haggis, who called the dispute "another example of massive corporate greed." But he's on the right track. When Tom Freston was fired from Viacom in 2006 he received $60 million in severance pay, more than all of the DVD residuals paid to WGA members that year. I spent much of last week talking to studio executives, eager to hear a good explanation for months of one-sided negotiations, where the studios essentially presented a series of rollback offers and then bashed the writers for not embracing them. None of the studio chiefs would talk on the record, but if I were to sum up their views, I'd put it this way: The future is too uncertain for us to give anything away.
It's somehow fitting that the best piece of agitprop from the writers strike can be found on YouTube, the kind of new technology that's helped inspire much of the industry-wide jitters behind this bitter work stoppage. The clip, titled "The Office Is Closed," features the program's show runner, Greg Daniels, and his writing staff on the picket lines, mocking NBC's parsimonious exploitation of their online labors. (You can also see it at UnitedHollywood.com.)
"The Office" has been a big online hit, attracting 7 million iTunes downloads. NBC.com also streams full-length episodes with ads that, according to Daniels, sell for twice the rate of regular broadcast ads, since you can't fast-forward through them. What do the show's writers get? Peanuts.
One of the big sticking points of the work stoppage that has sent shock waves through Hollywood involves what writers will get paid for films and TV shows streamed on the Internet. The studios have defined the streaming of films and TV shows as promotion, not programming. That also goes for 10 "Office" "webisodes" (or web-based episodes) that Daniels and his staff wrote.
Even though the webisodes were such a hit that the staff won a Daytime Emmy for them earlier this year, the writers didn't get paid, since they were defined as promotional material. As Daniels put it on YouTube, if NBC's lawyers are creative enough to call streamed "Office" episodes promotional material, maybe NBC should "send the lawyers in to write our episodes."
