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Future uncertain – laughs grim

Thursday, January 17, 2008

IT’S NEARLY THREE MONTHS NOW - AND ALL THE WAY it’s been gritted determination, and no movement. The film and TV writers’ strike has surely dug in for as long and bitter a struggle as the pessimists (like me) predicted.

Network television may have looked like the most vulnerable target in Big Media’s corporate underbelly, but in fact it has been able to keep its airwaves filled with material that needs no creative touch from Writers Guild of America members. And that material has for the most part won its viewers, or at least not lost them as might have been feared.

Showbiz commentators shouldn’t have been surprised as some have claimed to be that the new crop of so-called (and so wrongly called) “reality” shows has done pretty well. More genuinely surprising, perhaps, is how the presidential electoral process has built substantial viewership. Both political parties are serving up engaging, soap opera-like internecine dramas (as with Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, above left) … but then the really cute political observers among us knew that all along, didn’t they?

But consider one seriously under-reported dimension to this protracted face-off between organized writing labor and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers - with the other performing and producing Guilds ever watchful on the sidelines. There’s a new but blunt economic truth at work. And it’s one that doesn’t favor the workers at all … and maybe doesn’t much favor the big studios, either.

The battle over what share of revenues should go to writers in future digital exploitation of their work, requires the studios to say they don’t know what future revenue is going to be, suggesting blithely that it won’t necessarily be all that big. And the union of course says: – Yeah, you claimed that about home-video back in 1988, and screwed us royally.

But a recent trade conference under the auspices of Bernstein Research, analysts rightly noted for their thorough “blackbook” financial reports, indicated that uncertainty about future digital income is not merely (or at least not only) a bargaining position from the employers.

Evidence, too, from the many web-based practitioners at the conference bore out the notion that online video economics will simply not benefit the industry’s established businesses.

Even those of us who support the striking writers might have to acknowledge that they could end up cutting their own throats in the not-very-long run.

**AN AUDIO VERSION OF THIS COLUMN IS AIRED BY ROBIN HOOD RADIO**

PODCAST available here:

THAT GENUINE REALITY-SHOW, THE PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES campaign, provides an apt backdrop to tonight’s Broadway opening of the new David Mamet play November, which entwines the two inescapable events of that month, Thanksgiving and the general election.

If it weren’t for Mamet’s trademark proliferation of profanity, the F-word especially, this piece could be a topical Saturday Night Live sketch, extended - though not at all unbearably - to one hour and fifty minutes.

What the plot has that our current real-life political drama does not have (mercifully) is a sitting President running for another term. He’s played - rollickingly - by Nathan Lane (above right) and much of the humor relies heavily on our having lived through the current occupation of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The recognition-factor gets hammered in immediately with curtain-up, when this affable apparent buffoon asks why his public approval “numbers” are so abysmally low. His counsel, sharply portrayed by Dylan Baker, reminds him that it’s purely “because you’ve f***ed up the whole country, into a cocked hat!”

But the fictional President Charles (Chuck) Smith has something that George W Bush so infamously doesn’t have – a joyous facility with words. I don’t think David Mamet would be capable of writing real Bush-speak, not even in vicious parody form – this playwright is just too poetic (often, by the by, making poetry out of crudity).

But as ever with Mamet, the climate we’re invited to step into is one that my wife Melissa Bellinelli described simply and dead-on as “a bleak vision of life”.

Yes, we all know that politics can be a self-interested world of quid pro quos – ruled by what President Smith here calls “the power to trade this for that”. But in sham even-handedness, Mamet uses his undoubtedly funny (and yet still morally probing) farce to develop a dramatic tension between two basic human drives – one to grab selfishly for what each individual needs … the other to help each other, for our species’ overall survival, if nothing more. The trouble is, given the way it all plays out under Joe Mantello’s fast-paced direction, I can’t help but feel that altruism is here receiving just token nods.

And certainly, it is outrageous,feckless cruelty that gets the best chuckles. I laughed when jokes were cracked in this fittingly tacky-looking Oval Office (created by the reliable designer Scott Pask) about a borrowed corporate jet flying victims off to a distant secret prison (specifically in Bulgaria, Mamet’s none-too-fanciful version of the CIA’s true-life “black sites” in Poland and Romania), but it was hard not to shudder too.

And the thigh-slapping one-liners can sometimes get decidedly discomforting for those of us concerned with how a US Administration relates to the media. The Commander-in-Chief’s demand, “Tell us the reporter’s name, and we’ll have him killed” is a real scream.