By Gary Levin, USA TODAY
A writers' strike that has slowed the flow of new TV shows is threatening to linger well into next year — and force more lasting changes in Hollywood that determine what we watch and when, at home and in theaters.
The 5-week-old walkout by 10,500 members of the Writers Guild of America took a turn for the worse last week, when talks between writers and industry executives collapsed amid harsh words. Now both sides are bracing for a long standoff.
If the strike isn't settled by early in the new year, the absence of new scripts will narrow the pipeline of movies headed to theaters starting in late 2008. For the top broadcast networks, the impact would be more immediate: The rest of this TV season could be a virtual washout, cluttered with reality shows and repeats as the networks run out of fresh episodes of sitcoms and dramas.
The development of new shows for next season already has come to a standstill, jeopardizing the calendars for networks' lucrative ad-selling ritual in the spring and their traditional rollout of new shows in September. Meanwhile, a wide swath of the entertainment business in Hollywood and beyond is — or soon will be — unemployed, with tens of thousands of makeup artists, truck drivers and others caught in the strike's crossfire.
"It'll hurt us all," Oscar-winning writer/director Paul Haggis (Crash), who was on the picket line Monday at Sony Studios, says of the strike's impact. He says studios are repeating their playbook from the last writers' strike, which lasted 22 weeks in 1988 until they "broke us and we took a huge rollback" in pay for syndicated series.
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1 comment:
Ugh. I really hope this doesn't turn into me saying "Man, I moved to LA four months before the writer's strike, can you believe that?!"
(That's if you want the "me me me" perspective.)
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