Bill Maher came back on the air last evening and closed his broadcast with a brief criticism of the leadership and mood of the Writers Guild strike. I've received a number of e-mails asking me to explain what he was talking about and I'm not being coy or cute when I say I haven't the foggiest. I'm guessing he had a private conversation or perhaps more than one with someone in the WGA leadership that displeased him, and perhaps rightly so. I don't know.
He was complaining about dissent within the Guild being suppressed or treated like treason and I have to say that would be news to me. I've been out on the picket lines and I've been at the public meetings. I haven't seen Bill Maher in any of those places but I've been there. The criticisms I've heard have been pretty mild or vague…nothing really worth stifling if you were on a mission to close down dissident points of view. Even with hindsight at their disposal, the folks who usually leap to say "We should have done something else" seem hard-pressed to say what that something else might have been. At least, that's my sense of it.
But this is the Age of the Internet. It's hard to shut people up, especially if they're writers. If there were a lot of members unhappy with the WGA leadership, there'd be hundreds of weblogs up that expressed that sentiment. Have you seen many? I haven't. I see a few forums here and there laden with anonymous messages, some from people who claim to be WGA members…and — who knows? — some of them may actually be WGA members. But I can't point you to an article or website where a lot of prominent writers are expressing any kind of unhappiness with how the strike has been waged. Members are unhappy but they're unhappy with Nick Counter and the CEOs who have been standing firm on about half an offer than no union could accept. At the same time, they're refusing to meet with us to discuss the other half and maybe improve the part we said wasn't good enough, the part about Internet Moola.
So that's what I have to say about Maher's comments; that I haven't heard whatever he's heard. Before the weekend is out, I'm going to try to write a little piece here about the DGA negotiations and where they might take us. It'll be guardedly optimistic but with a few big ifs in there.