NYT: In Movie Labor Talks, Past Issues Cloud Future

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/movies/13guil.html?ref=business

By MICHAEL CIEPLY
Published: October 13, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 12 — A funny thing happened when Hollywood’s writers and producers sat down a few months ago to begin negotiating about the future: They wound up fighting about the past.

And an entertainment industry that was supposed to be fretting over next-wave technology finds itself on the verge of a shutdown over issues that have mostly been off the bargaining table since home video came on clunky cassettes and the movie mogul Lew Wasserman was brokering labor deals.

A mail-in strike authorization vote is set to conclude on Thursday. Some 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West are widely expected to give their leaders authority to call a strike at any time after the Oct. 31 expiration of their contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

Meanwhile, both sides — with back-channel help from lawyers, agents and other players who want to keep Hollywood working — are struggling to reboot a bargaining dynamic gone awry.

“The producers’ playbook has been ‘Let’s scare the bejesus out of everyone,’” said Peter Dekom, a lawyer with the Hollywood firm Weissmann Wolff Bergman Coleman Grodin & Evall. The writers, Mr. Dekom added, have already effectively gotten themselves locked out by one of their bargaining tactics. As the unions sent a message to the studios and networks that any script due beginning in November would probably not be delivered in advance of a strike, the studios stopped making new assignments.

What began as a dispute over compensation for future use of programming on the Internet, over cellphones or in media yet to be invented has unexpectedly turned into a brawl over a decades-old residuals system. That formula pays writers and others when movies and television shows are sold on DVD or on cable television.

FULL story at link.