Hollywood is in trouble. Big Trouble. Although the writers strike is still on, it seems that The Directors Guild of America is set to start negotiations with the AMPTP for a better deal as well.
Slice of Sci-Fi gives us this:
DGA leaders said they’re willing to hold off negotiations until next month in order to give the majors and striking writers one last chance to make a deal — in a nod toward recent WGA lobbying to hold off negotiations, according to the entertainment trade paper Variety.
“The WGA-AMPTP impasse has cost the jobs of tens of thousands of entertainment-industry workers, including many of our own members, and more lose their jobs every day the strike continues,” they added. “With so much at stake and no end to the standoff in sight, we can no longer abdicate our responsibility to our own members. Because we want to give the WGA and the AMPTP more time to return to the negotiating table to conclude an agreement, the DGA will not schedule our negotiations to begin until after the new year and then, only if an appropriate basis for negotiations can be established.”
Although it’s good that the DGA is waiting until the New Year to negotiate a new agreement, it still is not good for Hollywood. The WGA-AMPTP feud has not shown any hope of ending anytime soon, and this is only going to foreshadow what is going to happen with the DGA. I feel that if the AMPTP is not going to budge for the WGA, they won’t do so for the DGA. (This is a very scary thought.)
Here’s also another thought. SAG’s contract also ends in June and needs to be discussed. Since the actors have been siding and supporters of The WGA strike, that could mean actors, writers, and directors will be out of a job come this summer. (Another scary thought.)
Should we be renaming Hollywood to ‘Ghost Town?’ What are your thoughts?
I am a WGA writer and I also work a lot in animation, which has no “real” union – or at least no “real” minimums – and as a result I, and other animation writers often negotiate our own contractual terms – and guess what? I do better when I have a strong union. And guess what else? Studios continually break the terms of the contracts they negotiate and there is next to nothing an individual can do. At least a union can do a little. Although the truth is they can’t do that much either. Studios often take 4 to 6 months to pay. Some (not all, many are very fair, to be fair) coerce more rewrites than contracted. They try to terminate deals early for clearly BS reasons just to get out of paying after an actor has said “no” or a genre is no longer “hot.” Litigation, while an option, is prohibitively expensive in most situations. And one might ask oneself, if unions are so awful, how is it that 8 moguls whoare supposed to be competing come to negotiate as an entity? Does that not strike anyone as odd – if not collusion? Hmmmmm?
It’s a shame that unions aren’t willing to understand that we live in a different age and the union model is no longer valid to promote workers or commerce. I wonder if in this day and age, individuals might be better off negotiating their own contractual terms and taking the union intermediaries out of the equation. But of course, hollywood is one of the many places that will require a nuclear holocaust for workers to reject the paradigm.
I think what they all fail to realize is that TV and film are no longer the only entertainment games in town and while they’re all squabbling, they’re going to be losing market share that won’t be easy to reclaim.