On the WGA Strike Lines: Shawn Ryan Talks to Us

Today I decided to see what it was like picketing at Warner Brothers Studios. First thing I did, like always, is check in the strike captain's table where I put my name on the picketers' list. This is important because for WGA members, it proves they've done their shifts and also it gives the guild the numbers to report at each facility.

Then I was asked if I wanted a T-shirt. Of course, I wanted one, I had wanted one, ever since I first saw people on the picket line wearing them. I guess I just never came at the right time or place to get one.

So I now have my own gray Writers Strike T-shirt with its fist clenching a pen logo. And if this strike goes on long enough, you may even see a photo of me in it. Now at least I don't have to keep trying to find red things in my wardrobe -- a color I rarely buy because I don't look that great in it. I did notice that many writers have started wearing red shirts with the WGA logo on it. SAG wears deep navy blue with the logo Screenactors Guild on it.

In fact I ran into SAG actor, DON BALDERAMOS, http://pro.imdb.com/name/nm2414827/, who if you are a long time reader of this blog, you will recognize as one of the wonderful actors of the movie I'm producing and acting in. I wrote up a post about shooting Don's scene on Veteran's Day. Elissa and Don did a great scene, but apparently there was something wrong with the sound, so the scene has been reshot, in a different locale.

We also had an imposing Teamster with us from Local 399 and he would really get the supportive honks of passing cars and trucks. God love him he was an impressive addition.

One of the gates was manned by the writing team of Without A Trace, led by DAVID AMANN. I managed to meet him, but not really talk to him because he was mostly involved in talking to his writing team or on the phone. But I did get to briefly chat with one of his writers, AMANDA SEGEL. It gets boring walking back and forth for three hours in front of a gate, so being able to talk to the people around you keeps you sane. Especially for someone like me who always prefers to spend more time in the writers office than on set, which can get boring quickly.

As we walked back and forth, I spent most of my time chatting with writer LEE FLEMING who did mainly sitcoms like Friends, but who last did One Tree Hill, and whose pilot was caught up in the strike shutdown. I asked him how he managed to go from writing sitcoms to a drama like One Tree Hill and he told me that he had written a couple of movies about young people and that's how it was determined he might be a good fit for One Tree Hill. I thank him for the wonderful insights he shared with me, which not only made the day go faster, but taught me things as well.

And then, SHAWN RYAN appeared. He is the showrunner of The Shield and The Unit. And today more importantly, he is part of the WGA negotiating team. Early on in the work stoppage, he was the first showrunner to announce that he could no longer do his producing duties, even as it pained him to not be there for the last episode of The Shield, the show which made him. But he couldn't do his producing duties without rewriting, and the line between rewriting and producing was too blurred for him to walk. For this decision, the news media called him a 'hawk.'

He mentioned that the showrunner who had given him his start on Nash Bridges, CARLTON CUSE, was labeled by the press as a moderate, because Carlton made the opposite decision -- to fulfil his producing duties, even though that made him cross the picket lines of many of his peers, something which other striking writers did not take kindly to. And yet, while he and Carlton might have different ways of achieving their goals, they and all the rest of the negotiating team were on the same page in terms of what they needed to get.

Apparently, after the studios gave the same proposal to the new negotiations that they did before the strike started, Carlton realized that they were not negotiating seriously like he thought and he came to the conclusion that he needed to stop producing as well.

Anyway, Shawn said he was there to fill us in on what has transpired with the latest round of negotiations and to answer our questions. He said he would stay as long as it took and wanted to meet every one of us as well. I remember reading something about the negotiating team planning to talk to the strikers today because they were not resuming negotiations until tomorrow. And after that misleading post by Nikki Finke of the LA Weekly, who claimed to have been told there was a deal in the offing and the strike would be over soon... something had to be said.

Shawn explained that the reason the membership had not heard anything from the negotiating committee in response to the supposed 'close to resolution' claims was because the WGA was honoring the agreement it made to a news blackout. Obviously the studio side didn't honor the agreement when they leaked the deliberately biased and untrue information to Nikki. Shawn said that it was part of the strategy the studios were using -- to put the strikers on an emotional rollercoaster, to get their hopes up high, only to be dashed shortly after. The idea is that this will wear the strikers down and they will give up. Shawn asked everybody to not fall prey to this and to hang tough. That the supposedly new proposals were just a repackaging of the proposals given before the strike. And basically a rollback.

He mentioned that it was unlikely that the WGA would agree to another press blackout which made it impossible for the negotiating committee to talk to the members -- not unless they were in the final couple of days haggling out a really serious agreement. Shawn also said he thought that Nikki was duped by the studios as part of a pre-planned PR push and that she usually is a lot fairer to writers in her reporting. [From what I can see on her site, Shawn was being diplomatic and generous to her.]

If I understood correctly what he said the terms were, the studio wanted to pay just a flat $250 for a year run of content... in other words, they could run it over and over until it is so dead that nobody will want to see it again, and not pay a single cent for reuse, like they have to do now if it is rerun on television... and they would be able to run it wherever they want because they are refusing to give writers any jurisdiction over where and how their work will be used on the internet. Plus, when it's new, they want the first six weeks of use to be free, and they can run it over and over, wherever they want during that six weeks window, and if at the end of six weeks, they don't want to continue, because they have run it to death and nobody wants to see it anymore, then they don't have to pay the flat $250 at all.

Compare that to the initial payment of $20,000 for the first rerun of a typical network hour long show (payments for each rerun on television decreases percentage wise, to a few dollars eventually.) Do you like Desperate Housewives? Well, it was the residuals from Golden Girls that Marc Cherry lived on so he could remain a writer and create Desperate Housewives until he could convince a studio to buy it. [Aside: if anyone has ever heard Marc Cherry talk, he tells of how desperate his situation was, that he was at the point of needing to leave Hollywood and go back to living with his mom when the greenlight came for Desperate Housewives -- a few days later and we wouldn't have had this show.]

Shawn let us know that the negotiating team understood our hardships, but stressed we needed to hang tough longer and not let them wear us down or divide us. He said that the AMPTP is using this new media, with its deals yet to be made, to get rid of the residuals system. He brought up the case of the new show Chuck, which against the desire of the showrunner, had its pilot aired first online and then on television. If the studios are successful in their proposals, they will be in a position to say that a show like Chuck was an internet show, not network show, and hence pay everybody, actors, directors, writers, and crew as an Internet show, not television.

Hence, the WGA leadership will not back down until it gets a deal that writers can live and work under. Shawn said that ultimately the studios will have to deal. The writers want to make a deal and get back to work... the studios will have to make a deal soon, but right now they feel they have some wiggle room and want to break the writers down as much as possible.

But soon -- mid December -- the advertisers' piper will need to be paid. The advertisers who have paid a premium for their commercials to be run during brand new episodes will not be happy with reruns and will be looking for refunds. Also, if a deal isn't made soon, then the strike will take out this season and next, at least in terms of the advertisers. In January and February, they hand over billions of dollars for the spots on the upcoming season, and if there is no season to be had, the studios will be hurting from that loss of revenue and will need to make a deal.

Shawn said that even though the DVD residual payments were back on the table, the reason they went off in the first place is that that battle was lost 20 years ago. That it is very difficult to get a model corrected once it's been put in place for that length of time... because there are so many deals that become attached to the original one. First whatever deal the writers get, the directors have to get too, and then three times that amount goes to the actors to be divided among all of them. That in itself is a hefty amount, but the studios can well-afford it, so he wouldn't cry about getting it from them.

However, those aren't the only deals tied into this one. IATSE, which is the union that most of the crew belongs to, gets a percentage off the residuals fee for their own health insurance and pension plans... the crew may not get direct residual payments, like the above the line talent does, but this residual fight is very much theirs as well, because no residuals means no money into their health and pension coffers either.

Then if that isn't enough to weigh down the DVD calculation, the WGA found out when they started looking into this that the studios have done even more fancy footwork and tied various producers' deals into it -- once more proving how creative their accounting can get.

Hence, because of all this deal integration, the studios feel that they can't budge and the WGA feels that it would take at least a year of striking to get the deal changed on DVDs, and even then they might not. Hence, the reason, the WGA is so adamant that the Internet will not fall into this same kind of abyss for future writers.

Shawn also made it clear that residuals were not gifts, were not freebies. A playwright or a novelist never gives up his/her copyright. But due to the very collaborative nature of television, it isn't easy to quantitate how much of the copyright on the finished product is due to writer, actor, director and producer. Hence, they all traded in their copyrights to the studio in return for the residuals agreements. Hence, residuals are due to them because it's the other half of their payments for giving up the copyright. [So it sounds to be like what the US Government did with Native Americans: make treaties, and then once you had them, turn around and unilaterally abolish them.]

Shawn said to hang tough for the next few weeks and if things are still at a stalemate by the first of the year, the negotiating team will come back to the membership to see what options they wanted to pursue. But they were fighting for the future of all writers. For people like him, his future was set... there's no question about his health insurance or pension being funded... the fight was for the average writer to whom residuals can mean the difference between health care and pension or none.

Shawn mentioned that Patric Verrone, the president of WGAW, had dinner with a retired AMPTP negotiator who gave him insights into how the studios thought. Shawn shared some of those revelations with us as well. Apparently these first few weeks of negotiation are never about a number -- it's about who blinks first and who gets whom to reveal their bottom line first. Once a side reveals its bottom line -- which is the least amount the side will take -- then you can negotiate 80% of that number, or even a lesser fraction of that number, and it's surprising how many times that even lower offer will be accepted.

One of the first questions to Shawn was about force majeure -- whether the studios were going to use that to get rid of writers with expensive deals and was he worried about it. He reminded us that all his payments had been suspended because he wasn't doing his producing bits as well. His new pilot was sitting ready to be made, but they weren't making it yet, because there are no other scripts to have a series with.

Shawn admitted that the studios might use force majeure to get rid of some of the deals that weren't working, but there weren't many of those deals left anyway. Studios hadn't been handing out housekeeping deals like they used to in the nineties. And as for people like him, when the strike was over, they were still going to need Marc Cherry to run Desperate Housewives so they weren't going to negate his deal and they still needed him to run The Shield, The Unit, and the new Oaks.

The most important question I had for Shawn was that from the beginning my IATSE buddies were really upset that they had to cross the picket lines to go to work (because they still had a viable contract with a no strike clause) and even felt somewhat dirty about it. Thus they were totally dismayed and confused when their president came out and attacked the WGA leadership with really dreadful accusations. I showed them where their president had deliberately misquoted the LA Times to present the WGA leadership like he did, but I told Shawn I was also perturbed that the WGA had not countered him. Shawn said that they did, in emails to the membership.

I also asked what I could tell my IATSE buddies when they asked about the strike. Shawn said to remind them that this was a fight for residuals from the Internet for everybody... that IATSE's health and pensions funds were funded off the same residual deals that the writers got. And that the writers were heading this strike only because their contract was the first to come due. That this could have easily have been a DGA or SAG or IATSE fight -- the issue is important to all of the unions, it's just that the WGA contract expired first.

Another concern I expressed was that the studios planned to hire Canadian and British writers to step into all the American shows, since there are a good number already being written off-shore... what's to stop them from sending the rest out of country? Shawn didn't see that happening because filmmakers were always coming to our country to learn how we do it. Shawn said that the writers here are very good at what they do.

I also brought up the Pencils For Media Mogul program that allowed fans to buy boxes of pencils to show their support for their shows. I particularly care about that program because whatever's left over goes into a fund for non-WGA people hurt by the strike. I mentioned that Smallville was running a raffle/contest to encourage more people to support the program -- the winner would get a five-minute phone conversation with Michael Rosenbaum, one of their main stars. I wondered if other shows might not be willing to follow suit and participate in a similar endeavor. Shawn said he hadn't heard of it but thought it was a great idea and would bring it up to the negotiating committee.

Before Shawn Ryan left our gate to talk to other strikers at another gate, one of the stars of his show, The Shield, appeared to lend him support, an always smiling and affable, KENNY JOHNSON.

So that's about it, unless I can think of anything I missed.