And now it's later and I'm home. Here, as they say, is the lede: Yes, the Writers Guild of America is going on strike. When? They'll tell us tomorrow. The Board will vote tomorrow morning and we should have an announcement by mid-afternoon. The sense is that tomorrow is the last day there will be any non-scab writing of TV and movies for a while.
Obviously, a strike is not good news but I came away from the meeting feeling good about the situation. I already had confidence in our leadership and now I have a lot in the membership. We haven't had a strike since '88 and an astonishing percentage of the current WGA membership has joined since then and, some feared, might not understand the occasional necessity. That sure doesn't seem to be the case. The hall was packed with, all in all, a pretty youthful crowd. There seemed to be a solid grasp of what's at stake and what must be done to achieve it. There was also, I should add, a lot of joy at the gestures of support from the Screen Actors Guild and the Teamsters.
I've been going for more than half my life to WGA meetings where we were either already on strike or talking about it. This is the first where there was no dissent; no one outside passing out leaflets or taking the audience mike to make the case for accepting Management's latest offer. In this case, I don't believe we even have an offer that we could accept but even if we did, no one seemed to feel this was the time to grab at such a thing. (One group was passing out leaflets but I don't think they were against the strike. Matter of fact, I read the one I got and I'm still not sure what it was trying to say.)
A couple of folks at the microphones in the aisles did ask how long the strike might last. Our leaders couldn't exactly say this but I think the answer is "Nobody knows." A certain amount of this is out of our hands and out of sight…the internal squabbles of the AMPTP. One should never underestimate what can happen if all those powerful people are bickering among themselves, nor can you discount the idea that they'll stick with a rotten battle plan simply because they can't believe it's not working. For the most part, long strikes in this town occur because someone has drastically misestimated the opposition and is stuck without a Plan B. That was clearly what the long '88 Writers Guild Strike was all about. The Producers thought we'd take a crummy offer, we didn't — and they were left in a pretty impotent position with their negotiators mired in a strategy that hadn't worked as predicted. Are we in for this again? Sure looks that way.
Undoubtedly, you will hear some say, "The WGA could have played it smarter…done more to head this off." I don't think so. You can't really negotiate with an entity that believes its greatest strength is in its refusal to negotiate; that strives to avoid the concept that these things ever have to be a two-way street. They do, of course, and at some point this will probably be settled by some good, old-fashioned give-and-take. But we're still at the stage when the Producers are unprepared to abandon the idea that they hold all the cards and we can only win what they'll let us win. That works for them most of the time but I don't think it's going to work this time. Not based on what I saw tonight.