Writers, studios to revive negotiations
Spurred by the day-old employment contract signed by the Directors Guild of America, Hollywood's writers and the major studios agreed Friday to resume talks, hoping to reach an agreement that would end the nearly 11-week-old strike, according to several people close to the matter.
Writers Guild of America leaders plan to meet as early as Tuesday with News Corp. President Peter Chernin and possibly other top executives, reviving talks that studios broke off early last month, the people said. Representatives of the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios, declined to comment on the meeting.
But in an interview Friday, Patric M. Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America, West, said the union welcomed an offer made by the studios Thursday to resume bargaining. "Everyone wants us to get back into negotiations, and that's what we intend to do," Verrone said.
Verrone declined to give his assessment of the tentative DGA deal, saying guild officials were still studying its contents. The guild's negotiating committee will meet today to discuss the directors deal and make recommendations to Verrone and Executive Director David Young on how to proceed in their upcoming talks.
Guild leaders face mounting pressure from show runners and screenwriters to use the DGA agreement as a basis for a new three-year contract of their own. The guild has scheduled outreach meetings with members in the next two weeks to brief them on the DGA agreement.
Though the directors deal falls short of what the writers were seeking, it generally received positive reviews by several negotiating-committee members and top writers.
"I'm really impressed with how mindful the DGA was [in striking a] deal good enough to put the whole town back to work," said Scott Frank ("Minority Report," "The Interpreter"), who is a DGA member and a former Writers Guild board member.
"They were under enormous pressure, and they seem to have delivered."
Writer-producer John Wells ("ER," "West Wing"), who has close ties to the studios, went further. "This is a precedent-setting deal," the former guild president said, "much better than any deal negotiated for the creative guilds in several decades." Wells expressed his support of the DGA deal in an e-mail Friday morning to hundreds of writer colleagues.
