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Stars among the placards

Thursday, November 15, 2007

DATELINE: Hollywood, California – True to form, Hollywood is bringing out its oldest tried-and-tested tricks even as it deals with that most current of concerns - digital rights.

The Writers’ Guild of America strike, over what share humble scribes should get from the proceeds of big studios’ ever-expanding digital modes of distribution, has inevitably gotten less and less media and public attention as the first flush of the strike’s opening has faded day by day (now reaching its eleventh). Clear evidence for this came earlier this week when local newspaper, radio and TV coverage here was way down from its initial blanketing, and indeed the picket lines themselves had severely dwindled in size.

Then, on Tuesday, up shot the visibility factor. That century-old tool in the publicists’ box - Tinseltown’s own media creation, The Star - was produced. And I use “produced” advisedly. That day more than 2,000 strikers suddenly turned out at just one studio, NBC Universal, and – all naturally fully pre-briefed - news crews were tripping over themselves and their cables to follow those pickets as closely as they all could.

Why, you might (just about) naively ask? Because the pickets were formed around a new phalanx of familiar faces freshly provided by the fraternally-motivated Screen Actors’ Guild. They included Ben Stiller, Felicity Huffman (pictured above left), Lisa Kudrow and Minnie Driver. Energized maybe after lately enjoying a professional resurgence with the FX network's The Riches, Driver explained her presence thus: "One would hope that solidarity among artists means that you all support one another".

She also was contemptuously dismissive of the studios’ claim that they have no sure sense of whether the new distribution modes will provide big paydays in the future. "It's so hideously glib and revolting," she said. "All you have to do is read the paper to know that it's untrue."

ASIDE FROM PLODDING THE SIDEWALK WITH PLACARDS (including a large and distinctive “End the Strike – I’m sick of Pizza” held plaintively aloft by Josh Schwartz, one of the CW network’s highly creative team on Gossip Girl) the strike has also developed its inevitable New Media dimension. There are (at my time of writing) almost a thousand “Friends” who’ve enrolled in support of the virtual picket-line that exists at MySpace.com, with a profile page under the euphemistic (optimistic?) title, Hollywood Interrupted.

It’s not formally part of the WGA’s informational effort, but it might as well be, so closely do the organizers, including screenwriter Kristen Stavola (from 1991’s The Rocketeer) hew to the union line. The site’s equivalent of a plaintive placard is the not-so-rousing chorus in a campaign song that plays inescapably the moment a visitor clicks in:

“No more poor apologies

No more getting screwed by new technologies”

One sweet little irony. MySpace, from where this anti-studios song pumps out, is owned, we all know, by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which also owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studios.

BACK IN MY HOMETOWN, HOME TOO TO THAT (ostensibly at least) less electronic medium, the theater of Old Broadway, strikers have pressed their cause now for just five days, and the public relations battle is being played out similarly to Hollywood’s.

In New York’s case, with stagehands pitted against owners of the means of production, there’s little dispute about what kind of effect the strike is having (unlike here in California). It’s economically disastrous, both sides in New York agree – and each side’s publicity is currently geared simply to blaming the other for having caused the stoppage. “The people” of New York are being appealed to, as in almost all industrial conflicts, through the news outlets.

And on both coasts representatives of “the people” are positioning themselves to break the deadlock in the disputes. Staffs of both California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (caricatured above right, by multi-talented reporter Jake Tapper for ABC News) have been busy working out how their bosses’ public office could be employed to get the disputants around a table again.

Not for the first time, these two very different political figures (especially in their physical size, a contrast reminiscent of one the ex-actor Governor’s best, funniest movies, Twins (1988) where he played opposite Danny DeVito) have been looking remarkably similar again.

On environmental matters and on some public spending issues the two nominal Republicans have displayed very Democrat tendencies in their chosen actions, and recently Bloomberg, for one, took up formally an “Independent” label. And do you remember that back in June Time magazine paired them on its cover, highlighting them as joint stars of a new drive for "post-partisan" politics?

Right now, regarding the strikes that affect important elements of their territories’ economies, they are each holding themselves in, once again, similar poses of readiness. Bloomberg says: “Both groups [union and employers] know that the City is there to facilitate if at all possible, and I think we should look to the things they have in common”.

For his part, Schwarzenegger held “a private meeting” this week with union officials and promptly scheduled an “informal sit-down” with some unidentified studio executives, his spokesman Aaron McLear has confirmed. McLear chose careful language rather like the Mayor’s 2,400 miles away, to explain that the Governator “can talk to both sides and see what they are after, and try to see how the State can be helpful".

In fact, though, it looks like someone has been helpful, in New York - but it’s not so much the Mayor; more the Mouse, the mouse who has muscle on both coasts. I mean of course the Walt Disney Company, now very much a producer on stage as well as in movies and theme parks (though not - significantly - a member of the Broadway employers' League) which behind the scenes strong-armed the union and theater-owners back into talks together, maybe as soon as Saturday.

But over here, in Lankershim Boulevard's sparse palm-tree shade alongside Universal Studios, where the plaintive placards get determinedly paraded, chances of similar talks anytime soon don’t look too promising.