Writers' strike: Day 1

Thousands of TV and movie script writers put down their keyboards and picked up signs Monday, as the Writers Guild of America staged its first strike since 1988.

Casualties followed swiftly: “The Tonight Show” and other late-night talk shows went into repeats, with daytime TV shows, which usually tape a few days in advance, expected to join them shortly. Reports of shows stopping production -- “The Office,” “The Shield,” “Two and a Half Men” -- cheered protesters on the picket lines throughout the day.

If, as many people fear, the work stoppage drags on, the entire 2007-08 television season will be in jeopardy.

Observers agreed that the impasse is over a single key demand by the writers: that they be fairly compensated when their work is repurposed on other platforms, including mobile phones and the Internet. The new-media issue has united the 12,000-member union, whose membership recently authorized a strike with 90 percent of the vote.

That was a stark contrast to 2001, when tensions between well-off TV writers and middle-class WGA members fractured the union and led to a last-minute, strike-averting deal that left the residuals on home video where they had been since the 1980s. According to the formula, writers are paid 4 cents on a DVD that retails for $19.99. The WGA wanted that doubled, to 8 cents.

Patric Verrone, an animator whose credits include “Futuruma” and “The Simpsons,” was elected to the WGA presidency in 2005 vowing to amend “the hated DVD formula” and win a better deal on newer technologies.

The producers argued that Internet downloads don't make a profit yet, and being forced to share revenues now would hurt their ability to bring new content online. It is an argument, the writers say, that they have heard before.

“No one foresaw the kind of business DVDs would do,” said screenwriter, film professor and WGA member Mitch Brian last week. “We cannot depend on creative accounting of the studios to depend on whether something made money or not.”

Little progress was made in the weeks leading up to the expiration of the current contract Oct. 31. Talks finally started up in earnest last weekend, but ended abruptly Sunday night, with each side blaming the other.

“We made an attempt at meeting them in a number of their key areas,” read a terse statement by Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the major studios. “Ultimately, the guild was unwilling to compromise on most of their major demands.”

Shawn Ryan, the creator of “The Shield” and producer of “The Unit,” and a member of the WGA negotiating committee, circulated an email on Monday saying that the producers “walked out on us at 9:30 … claiming we had broken off negotiations.”

The acrimony spilled over into Monday's strike, which began on the East Coast outside the “Today” studios on 49th Street in New York. Raucous demonstrators played brass instruments, encouraged passing limos to honk their horns and hoisted signs that said “On Strike” and “Pens Down.”

On the West Coast, WGA members manned entrance gates at the major studios. They used bullhorns outside the CBS lot in Studio City, Calif., forcing the producers of “Cane” to move their shooting further away from the protests. Leno stopped by to lend support to strikers, as did Julia Louis-Dreyfus, star of the CBS comedy “Old Christine.”

Mike Royce, executive producer of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Lucky Louie,” was one of them. He stopped work on his next project -- a comedy starring Ray Romano for HBO -- to picket Fox studios on Pico Boulevard on Monday. The guild is asking its members to serve 20 hours a week on the picket line. “It's not in the writer's nature to walk around in red shirts saying loud chants, but we're doing it,” Royce said by cell phone.

Royce, who adamantly supports the union's position, said he was surprised at how little internal dissent bubbled up at a membership meeting on Thursday, where Verrone and the rest of the WGA leadership explained that a strike was imminent. “At any writers' guild meeting, there are people who stand up and decry what the leadership is doing,” Royce said. “This is the first meeting where I didn't see protests of any sort.”

The producers remained mum on Monday, but at least one non-producer was loudly lamenting the strike. Nikki Finke, the L.A.-based entertainment reporter whose Deadline Hollywood blog broke stories throughout the hectic talks on Sunday, said a prolonged strike would be a “disaster” for the local economy. Thousands of businesses, from caterers to video duplicators to dry cleaners, would be left high and dry by their showbiz clients.

“If this strike doesn't get settled quickly it goes on until June,” Finke said.

One industry observer, John Rash of the Campbell Mithun ad agency in Minneapolis, isn't betting on a short strike.

“While there's a chance it could be solved quickly, the stakes are so high short and long term that it's unlikely to be easily papered over,” Rash said.

It will also affect writers like John Scott Shepherd, who parlayed fame as a Kansas City based novelist into a career writing and directing television in L.A. Shepherd said the strike will directly impact his work, including a show of his that is in development.

Fair pay for the Internet is “definitely a long-term issue, and a valid one,” he said. “That said, it sucks when you have so many things going and all you really want to do is write.”

(Below: Jon Stewart explains the strike succinctly.)