A sequel with the same ending

The writers guild keeps saying that its strike against the studios is about the future, but one need only look back to the 1988 strike to see that in key ways it is a repeat of the past. Nearly 20 years ago, when the writers asked for a bigger slice of the pie, the studios shrugged and Hollywood sank into a malaise. But out of that emerged new ways of doing business, a scenario that's happening again.

During the 1988 strike, writers worked independently on "spec scripts" (written on the speculation that they would eventually sell them) and a pipeline-dry studio system snapped them up. TV producers also sought alternatives to traditional, high-cost scripted series. The strike resulted in the 1990s' spec script boom and reality television -- two new business models.

It's not strikers' demands but the work stoppage itself that creates a new paradigm. By fighting the writers over the new-media issues today, the studios are effectively creating what they fear most: a major tectonic shift in the entertainment business that will reduce the role of the studios even further.

Generally speaking, before 1988, movie studios -- which then housed genuinely creative executives -- used to "develop" movies starting from source material such as a book, play, life story or pitch and hire a writer to nurture it into a screenplay. They would pay the writer usually a five-figure sum, maybe more, and both sides would see the project through to completion.

In the decade after the '88 strike, studios more often bought fully written "specs," and millions of dollars were thrown at ready-to-shoot scripts. The role of the executive was less creative and more business. The prices for specs escalated to obscene amounts even as studios, in essence, discovered that they were buying only "an idea" and then hiring even more writers to revise, rework and polish it. The process was often financially wasteful and ushered in concept-driven, amusement-park-ride movies. The money's been good, but studios largely relinquished the creation of heartfelt, character-driven films to the independent art-house world.

Flash forward to the current debate, in which studios claim that digital media are too new for them to commit to a particular payment structure. Their response is based on a fear that's haunted them since the arrival of the Internet: "disintermediation." This is cyber-speak for cutting out the middleman. In such an environment, the studios' role (as managers of content) is reduced to nonexistence. Sound a bit like what's been happening to the music industry?