The Directors Guild sat down Saturday morn with representatives of the AMPTP to hammer out a renewal of the DGA contract, which expires at the end of July. An eager/nervous industry turns its eyes towards this bargaining, wondering what (if anything) it will mean to the ongoing Writers Strike. I can't imagine that it won't mean a lot and I think most of the possibilities are pretty good insofar as they might lead to a rapid settlement of the WGA dispute.
As I see it, there are four possible scenarios, one of which I'm going to rule out as extremely unlikely. That's the one in which the DGA goes in and just settles for an extremely rotten deal. If that happens, WGA and SAG will be royally screwed as that will be the precedent the AMPTP will argue is reasonable. Which is one of the reasons it's probably not going to happen. Many writer-directors and actor-directors would be furious (so would many director-directors), the DGA would be humiliated and, of course, that guild would have blown one of the best bargaining positions they've ever had. The WGA strike, with SAG marching bravely in lockstep, has empowered labor in this town, albeit for a little while, and put the studios on notice that they can't always get away with stonewalling on lowball offers, which is what they usually like to do.
The studios' wishdream — that they could establish the Internet marketplace without giving a decent share to those who create the material transmitted on the web — has failed. Not gonna happen. Whatever else happens in this strike, that much has been achieved.
So now the AMPTP has two concerns. They have to give up something significant in that area and they want to see how small a share that can be. That's Issue #1 for them. The second concern is that they want to do everything they can to not make the outcome of the Writers Strike look like a "win" for organized labor, thereby inspiring more unions to emulate what has happened. That bodes well for a decent DGA contract. The AMPTP's going to have make a deal with someone and they'd prefer it be the directors so they can say, "See? If you don't go on strike and make unreasonable demands of us, you get a fair deal!" (But of course, the DGA will get more than was offered to us before we went on strike…)
So Scenario #1 — the DGA takes a rotten deal — probably won't happen. Scenario #2 is that the DGA gets a decent deal and that becomes the template for a decent WGA deal. There'd be a lot of blame-shifting and credit-arguing as some tried to pretend the DGA got what it got just by being smarter but that still doesn't sound bad to me. What does sound bad is that the AMPTP would stonewall on all other points. Their position would be "We won't negotiate with the WGA but we will give them the same Internet and home video terms and raise minimums the same percentage." They would then presumably refuse to talk to us about the issues that concern the WGA but not the DGA, including matters like Animation and "Reality" Shows and maybe even the ethical issues such as late payments, free rewrites, the shopping of unacquired scripts and accounting practices. I don't know what kind of resolve there would be in the Guild to abandon all of those concerns if we were able to settle on New Media. I guess it would depend on how good that New Media deal was.
Scenario #2 is quite possible, perhaps even probable. Possible but less probable is what I'll call Scenario #3, which is that the DGA can't make a deal with the AMPTP and winds up either walking out of the talks or getting tossed out like we did. I don't think this would be a disaster either, but for a different reason. The DGA contract isn't up until the end of July so they'd still have plenty of time to come back and make a deal. We'd be back to the AMPTP versus the WGA again but with a key difference: It would be obvious that the WGA wasn't the problem. After all, the DGA — the guild that doesn't strike and which prides itself on speaking the language of Management — couldn't make a deal, either. Unless the studios are really willing to torch their businesses, they'd have to find a way to sit down with the WGA again and begin budging.
Lastly, we have Scenario #4. This is the one that scares me.
Scenario #4 is the one in which the DGA makes a deal that works for them but not for anyone else. As in Scenario #2, the AMPTP says, "Okay, we've made a New Media deal with the DGA and that's it. The WGA and SAG can take the same terms or they can walk picket lines until the world looks level…we ain't discussing any other formulas, any other numbers." But in this case, the deal is something like Internet Revenues based on how many shots you called or how much time you spent in editing. In other words, it's some set-up that would yield decent payments to directors but not to writers or actors. The first deal the DGA made for Pay TV was like that. It paid okay for directors but because of the differences in what we do, it would not have paid nearly as much to writers…and that strike became all about demanding a different formula when the studios insist we accept what the DGA accepted.
I'm not sure if it's possible to devise one of those formulas — works for directors but no one else — for New Media but I'd be very surprised if the AMPTP hasn't had accountants and lawyers trying to craft one. If they manage it and if the DGA takes it, this could be a much longer strike. Let's all think good thoughts that this won't happen.