Lots of e-mails asking me about this situation where the WGA is saying that Jay Leno is not allowed under its rules to do his monologue and he's saying he got permission and they're saying he didn't and NBC is saying he doesn't need permission, yadda yadda yadda. Nikki Finke, your one-stop shopping link for Strike News, has all the back-and-forth. I don't know much about it that isn't there.
I do know that there can be a murky area in which it's hard to distinguish which words a performer speaks on air are "written." A lot of what is uttered on talk shows is arguable and some of the best hosts are quite facile at taking what someone writes and then paraphrasing or turning it into an approximate ad-lib. If a performer knows what he's going to say before he goes out on stage, is he writing for himself? If he actually writes it down, has someone put key words (or even the whole thing) on cue-cards and then he goes out and says roughly what he'd say if it wasn't on the cards…is that writing? Leno can write all he wants for his stand-up act. If he uses some of those jokes on The Tonight Show, is he writing?
Sort of, sometimes…but you can see where this can get messy. If I ever felt sorry for people in his income bracket, I'd feel sorry for the guy now. He's always been an honorable man and that seems to be the consensus of those who've had a lot more contact with him than I have. Because he's a writer-performer and only one of those professions is on strike, he's caught in an awkward position. He ought to do what the WGA says is Kosher but that may be at odds with what he feels he must do to keep his ratings up.
They weren't so wonderful last night. He beat Letterman but not by a wide margin…this, despite the fact that NBC had a powerhouse prime-time line-up with all new shows, whereas CBS had all reruns. Someone's got to be a little worried and it ain't Dave.
Ms. Finke has also posted the rumor that a bunch of "A-List" Screenwriters and possibly top TV Showrunners as well are going to press the WGA to accept whatever deal the DGA makes. I find it hard to believe that someone could become a wealthy writer in this town if they were willing to accept someone else's deal before it was even negotiated. You don't do that if you're writing a movie and the other guy is writing a similar movie. You especially don't do that when the other guy's deal may involve cash points (i.e., ways of figuring how much he gets paid) that don't apply to you.
The DGA has sometimes been very clever about agreeing to some deal that puts money in the pocket of the guy who directs a film or TV show but doesn't yield revenue to anyone else who takes those terms. It would be like if we were both negotiating to write comic books and you said, "I'll take whatever deal Evanier makes." And then I made a deal where the writer works for free but gets a huge cash bonus if he's had Gastric Bypass Surgery in the last two years, is Jewish but has a last name people think is French, and once got punched in the arm by Jack LaLanne. (I was going to add in "…keeps having his luggage lost by Southwest Airlines but that could apply to just about anybody.)
In any case, here's a general rule of thumb: Don't put much stock in any rumor that involved unnamed people. It may turn out to be true but most of them don't.
I'll write more when there's more.