Writers go on strike

By Nuran Alteir, staff writer
Friday, December 7, 2007

Hollywood writers went on strike for the first time in twenty years on November 2. The strike is the first walkout by writers since 1988, which lasted 22 weeks and cost the industry more than $500 million.

At the Paramount Pictures lot on Melrose Avenue, about 50 writers dressed in red strike T-shirts carried signs reading, "Writers Guild of America on Strike." They also appeared outside the Today Show set at Rockefeller Center in New York.

The Today Show, like other news broadcasts, is not affected by the strike because news writers are part of a different union. Also, reality shows such as American Idol and Dancing with the Stars will not be affected by the strike. It is likely that shows like The Late Show with David Letterman and The Colbert Report will be affected by the strike and be forced to hold reruns for weeks because their writers are a part of WGA.

The main problem is that the producers and the writers are not able to come to any compromises for many of the issues that face them. Issues regarding fairness to the writers and comparison to other industries, such as book writing and songwriting, are a top priority.

The way the writers see it, authors and songwriters get paid for every book published or for every time a song is played, but writers are not paid for every time a show that they wrote is played on television, such as I Love Lucy reruns.
Writers believe that they should be paid for every rerun played. After a strike in 1988, they are now being paid 2.5 percent for every rerun.

Producers, on the other hand, believe that the writers are only being greedy with their expectations. The producers also believe that the writers aren’t asking for more money, but for more residuals.

Negotiators met Sunday, November 4, for nearly eleven hours before East Coast members of the writers union announced on their website that the strike had begun for all of their 4,000 members.

"They [The producers] claim that the new media is still too new to structure a model for compensation," said Jose Arroyo, a writer for The Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

"We say give us a percentage so if they make money, we make money," Arroyo said.

It seems that until the writers and the producers find a solution to this problem, reruns will be in the lineup of all major television networks.