I believe Hollywood is heading, much in the manner of a runaway train, towards a big, crippling strike over how residuals will be paid and revenue streams divided for the new marketplace of DVD, digital delivery, Internet podcasts, etc. There are many possible scenarios over when the strike could come…and even which labor organization(s) will lead the way, though the smart money is on the Writers Guild with the Screen Actors Guild tagging along if it can get its leadership squabbles in check. In any case, the issue is out there and it seems unlikely that it can be resolved by the producers being reasonable.
Strikes have not been settled or prevented through sheer reasonableness for a long time in this town. Some of the labor actions of the fifties and sixties were but that was before the main entertainment companies were international conglomerates. The legendary Lew Wasserman, the super-agent who used to run MCA and Universal, ended or headed off several strikes by getting on the phone to the heads of MGM, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount and others and working out a deal. But there is no more Lew Wasserman, nor do Time-Warner, Sony, the current Disney and the rest operate on that kind of personal level nowadays.
I hope I'm wrong but the only way I can imagine there not being a major conflagration is if the Writers Guild and SAG both experience internal collapses and their memberships decide not to fight for a fair share in these new revenues. That doesn't seem likely. In fact, if it does happen, we will probably see all-out war, anyway. We'll just see the members of those unions firing at one another, rather than at Management.
The other day, a group of studio and network heads announced a proposal that their side and the unions jointly fund — and I quote — "a showbiz version of the report from the Iraq Study Group" to study and propose new formulas. I suspect this will be about as effective as the real report from the Iraq Study Group and I wonder why they would liken their idea to that. Here are some details on the proposed report.