The WGA strike goes on and on with no early end in sight, as everyone sticks to their trenches. Patrick Goldstein at the LA Times has the very gloomy prognosis:

DESPITE what they say about global warming, it’s going to be a long, cold winter for the writers of Hollywood. The studios pretty much made it official Friday, when they walked away from the negotiating table after giving the Writers Guild an abrupt “put up or shut up” ultimatum. Considering that the studios were asking the writers to give up much of their core Internet residuals proposal, there was little left to negotiate. The studios’ message was obvious: They’re going to play hardball.

Believing they have comparatively little to lose by letting the strike drag on, the studios will try to weaken the guild by letting writers spend Christmas out of work while studio operatives sow seeds of discord among the membership, hoping to persuade some high-profile writers to cross the line and go back to work.

The TV industry itself is beginning to mutate, says Variety

As the writers strike hits the six-week mark on Monday, the ramifications for the TV biz are growing by the hour. Starting next week, the force majeure ax may begin to fall on various talent deals at the major studios. Industry insiders say some of the nonwriting producer deals and nonwriting “pod” deals that have proliferated during the past decade could be vulnerable, particularly for those with a mixed track record of delivering successes to their studio partners.

This is grim stuff indeed. If the 3rd season of THE VENTURE BROTHERS weren’t already in the can, we’d have almost nothing to look forward to. A few episodes of LOST will debut in February as planned, but it won’t be the 16-episode season everyone had been counting on.

Emmet Furey at CBR hits the Hollywood picket lines with a a very lengthy piece (well, everyone has a lot of free time) including comments from Joss Whedon and Ben Edlund (once of The Tick, and now of Supernatural.

To all appearances, the AMPTP’s recent actions have been carefully orchestrated to demoralize and divide the WGA membership. In a particularly telling move, the AMPTP recently retained a PR firm called Fabiani and Lehane, also known as “the Masters of Disaster.” And the AMPTP’s demoralizing tactics come as no surprise to Joss Whedon. “This is how you run a strike when you’re the bad guy,” Whedon said. “You bring them up, then you bring them down. You get their hopes up, and you say you made a good-faith offer. Their good-faith offer was nothing, it was a good-faith insult. I believe that’s what they do so they can send us to Christmas in fear for our jobs and in many cases for people’s futures and for their homes. And that’s what they want to do, they want to create fear. And they can create fear, but they can’t create the divisiveness that they’re counting on, it’s not going to happen.

Our guess? The writer’s won’t quit. They lasted nearly six months last time, and they’ll last six months this time.

This entry was posted on 12/13/07 at 8:02 am and is filed under Television, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.