Not a whole lot to talk about today. The Writers Guild has announced an informational meeting out at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Monday evening. This figures since I have another event I was looking forward to that evening and now must choose between them.
The Guild is about to try an end-run around the AMPTP, seeking to get companies to negotiate with us on an individual basis. I will be surprised if this yields anything in the way of results and I suspect we're doing it more for the p.r. value — hey, we're trying to make a deal here — than with any optimism than Universal or Sony or anyone will break ranks. This will probably be discussed at the Monday evening meeting but I wouldn't expect any real major announcements there. What I would expect is a couple of angry members (we always have angry members) getting up and arguing over what, if anything, we should do to get the negotiations going again. Personally, I think anything we give up to get the AMPTP back to the table is setting a suicidal precedent. It's telling them they can get us to give up things we care about just by refusing to negotiate if we don't.
I don't sense that there's a lot of sentiment in the Guild to go that route and start abandoning demands. But one thing I've learned about the WGA is that there's always dissent…about everything. It sometimes is very loud and it almost always gets publicity far in excess of its actual strength. The Guild has a tendency, because it's so firmly committed to Free Speech, to sometimes afford too much dignity and attention to complaints and contrary views. There's nothing wrong with fifty people expressing an opinion opposed to our leadership but they oughta be treated as fifty people, not as a meaningful faction in a union with 10,000+ members.
My pet peeve in the area of Member Complaints would best be described by example. All I have to do is re-create a conversation I witnessed during the 1988 strike between an angry WGA member and a man named Brian Walton, who was our Executive Director and chief negotiator. It was during a period when the AMPTP had walked away from the bargaining table (they like to do that) and was making noises like they were never coming back. The angry member told Walton that the strike was being egregiously mishandled and Walton asked him, "What would you do differently?" The exchange then went almost exactly like this…
MEMBER: I would get in there and negotiate with them.
WALTON: They're refusing to negotiate with us.
MEMBER: Well then, you have to make them negotiate with us.
WALTON: And just how are we supposed to do that?
MEMBER: You sit down with them. You establish a dialogue.
WALTON: Sit down with who? The people who are refusing to talk to us?
MEMBER: Whoever you have to talk to to get a dialogue going.
WALTON: We've been trying since Day One to have a dialogue with these people. They give us their terms and then they throw us out.
MEMBER: That's because you didn't get a dialogue going with them. My agent told me that if he'd been representing the Guild, he would have established a dialogue and that would have segued into a negotiation where he could have gotten us everything we want.
WALTON: When your agent negotiates for you, does he get you everything you want?
MEMBER: No, but then he doesn't have the clout of representing the whole Writers Guild.
As a general rule, you can't make even a great deal in this town without some agent telling you, "I could have gotten you more."
Meanwhile, the AMPTP is hammering our current Executive Director, David Young, selling the idea that he's the problem, especially because he's never negotiated this kind of deal before. It's more or less a fact of life that anyone we send into negotiations is either going to be attacked for inexperience or, if he has experience in this area, attacked for what he's done in the past. If the AMPTP weren't attacking our chief negotiator, I'd figure he wasn't doing a very good job for us.
I understand we're going to have the regular picketing schedule on Monday. Then Tuesday, whoever pickets is going to be waving signs outside AMPTP headquarters. Then after that, there'll be no picketing until 1/7/08. So I think I'll try to get some in Monday or Tuesday…and now that I'm in the mood, I'm leaning towards going to the meeting on Monday evening.