Erica Harrell
Producer

At my work for the past month all we have been focused on is the impending Writers Guild of America strike. The strike could happen as early as tomorrow as the WGA contract is up at 11:59pm PST tonight. For those of you who do not know anything about this strike, the WGA members are in negotiations with the American Motion Picture and Television Producers over various issues. Mainly that the Writers Guild members are not receiving any residuals off of sales from iTunes or the free programing that is now available on most major network television websites. For instance anytime someone watches Ugly Betty or Greys Anatomy online, the writers are not compensated anything unlike when those episodes air on TV. This also occurs when someone downloads a film from iTunes. The AMPTP and the WGA have been going through some pretty interesting negotiations in Los Angeles over the past month. Silly arguments have broken out and little progress has been made.

If a strike does occur tomorrow, all WGA members must cease writing, meaning that if a script is not complete it cannot go into production. This is particularly bad for the television industry in which I work (see Entourage). The last WGA strike occurred in the late 1980s and lasted for 10 weeks. As a result of this strike, network televisions turned more towards reality programming, Dateline, 60 Minutes and other news programs flourished which paved the way for the majority of the reality programming that encompasses television today. As these shows do no employ WGA writers as they are non scripted. For the sake of not having to endure more programming like The Hills or Survivor 25 Cincinnati, I hope the strike is resolved quickly.

While my job could be affected in a negative way if the strike lasts for a long time, our film A Monster in the Attic could benefit from a strike. In yesterdays Variety a very interesting article was posted entitled Indies See Edge in Possible Strike. The article states:

“While the market for finished films has been wobbly in recent years, the presence of new buyers like Overture and Summit has propped up prices. “There is no shortage of completed films,” he said. “While a strike is awful for morale and for the business as a whole, the impact for a lot of us is minimal, at least at this point.”

Tom Quinn at Magnolia Pictures goes on to say: “…Because if you can’t fill your slate with enough production titles, you’ve got to go out and get finished films.”

Read the full article here.

Given the uncertainty of a strike all we can do is wait and see.

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