A good A.M. to you all but especially to those of you who've clicked on my little banner to donate any amount — small, big or damned generous. I'm going to hector you for a few more days and then not ask again 'til next September. Yesterday, you might have noticed that this blog had a brief outage. The reason it was brief was that the very expensive hosting company I pay to host this site of mine caught the tech problem and fixed it even as I was connecting on the phone to their support department.
That kind of super service is what I'm paying for and, by extension, what you lovely donors are paying for. If I was still with either of my first two hosting companies, you would not be reading this because this blog would still be offline and I'd be waiting for someone there to call me back. Longtime followers of this blog may remember those instances.
If you came here today seeking my "hot take" on the possible/maybe/looming progress in ending the Writers Guild strike, I'm sorry to disappoint you. In the immortal words of Sergeant-of-the-guard Hans Schultz…
Well, I do know enough to be cautious about what's being leaked to the press. I know this because — and I think it's okay to reveal this now — back in the even-longer-than-this-one Writers Guild Strike of 1988, one of my contributions to the WGA effort was planting stories in one of the two industry trade papers of the time. (They were Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety and they used to be on paper and come in the mail five days a week. They're now both websites with considerably less influence on the business.)
I never planted lies. I planted the truth spun the way the WGA hoped it would be spun. As negotiations dragged on — or didn't happen at all — the Guild's then-president George Kirgo would tell me what to plant. This was a tactic that surprised no one as we all knew the Producers were doing the same…and with more clout to get things reported the way they wanted them reported.
I would phone up a reporter whose name I do not recall and who I never met in person. He had phoned me a couple of times for help with pieces he was writing that touched on the comic book industry. That was how I knew him.
That was how I became his "Deep Throat" except that we never met at 1 o'clock in the morning in a parking garage and I would never be played by Hal Holbrook. But I'd phone him with a tip and while I never told him I was tipping at the request of a WGA official, I never dissuaded him from his assumption that I wasn't. He usually printed whatever we wanted printed pretty much the way we wanted it printed. At the very least, it balanced what the A.M.P.T.P. forces were planting.
I have no knowledge if that's going on now…but we also have no knowledge as to who (if anyone) is tipping various reporters off that a settlement is imminent. I hope it is but because of my little spy/snitch activities, I'm firmly in the "I'll believe it when there's a formal announcement" camp. If you don't like having your emotions feeling like they're on Space Mountain at Disneyland, it's a safer place to be.
There may still be time to have the '88 strike remain the longest Writers Strike ever but it's not likely. Even if they reach a settlement today, by the time the whole guild could vote to ratify, the current labor action may set the record. The '88 strike was 153 days and I think this one currently stands at 144.