Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (22 page)

Adam Goodman, the former president of DreamWorks, became president of production after Lesher was fired, and remains there to this day. Brad Weston, at lunch with me recently, credited Goodman with finding a new kind of inexpensive franchise for Paramount,
Paranormal Activity,
which, he pointed out, brings the sensibility of reality TV to movies. A handheld horror franchise on its fourth incarnation (at the time of writing), its “you are there as this is really happening to real people” conceit is as cheap to make as it is scary and fresh. (Or was.) Goodman was a nice good-bye present from the departing DreamWorks.

But an intervention was about to take place on a scale much grander than anything we moaned and groaned about when we smoked and gossiped on the quad. It would ultimately entail sweeping cuts to the studio’s overheads and practices that the most
ambitious deficit-hawk type would never have dreamed of suggesting. None of it was really planned. None of us saw it coming. When we heard the foreboding sound of tom-toms in the air, we never suspected that would be the onset of an ill-timed war that would interrupt and then change business as usual forever.

1.
Sumner M. Redstone, owner of the fifth-largest chain of movie theaters in the nation, says his greatest achievement was living through the Copley Plaza Hotel fire that burned 80 percent of his body. At age fifty-eight he was holding on to his third-floor windowsill, his right hand burning in the flames, counting to ten, as he watched the single ladder rising toward him from a fire truck late on the night of March 29, 1979 (Robert Lenzer, “True Grit,”
Boston Globe,
March 17, 1981).

2.
On September 12, 2001, it became the number-one DVD. My Orthodox rabbi friend woke me up on September 11, saying, “Turn on the TV, your movie is on.”

3.
Though he later left for Sirius Radio in 2004.

4.
George Clooney, Jennifer Connelly, Kelly Ripa, Mike Nichols, Scarlett Johansson, Todd Field, Tom Ford, Warren Beatty, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Robert Downey, Jr., Reese Witherspoon, etc.

5.
Since the 1940s, the trades have referred to wives (or husbands) who don’t work in the business as “nonpros” in wedding announcements, and the term has grown to apply to any situation.

6.
Now at Sony.

7.
He is now the immensely successful franchise producer of
Transformers
and
G.I. Joe
.

8.
Friedman went on to found Summit Entertainment, of the
Twilight
franchise, and is now cochairman of Lionsgate Studios.

9.
He went on to cochair Lionsgate, which produced
Twilight
and
The Hunger Games,
after it was bought by Summit.

10.
She is now president of worldwide marketing at Lionsgate under Rob Friedman.

11.
September 22, 2012.

12.
Abrams was recently hired by Disney to reboot
Star Wars
.

13.
Eventually his administration would lose the movie; he was forced to abandon it in what we call “turnaround.” But Paramount later picked it up for distribution after Relativity Media financed it.

14.
In the same year Vantage also released
Year of the Dog, Black Snake Moan, A Mighty Heart, Into the Wild
and
Margot at the Wedding.

The Writers’ Strike of 2007–8

I recall Halloween 2007 very clearly. My lunch date had to cancel because he had to evacuate his parents from their burning gated community in San Diego. The crazy Santa Ana winds were kicking carbon dust into my face from the thirteen fires that were raging out of control up and down the coast, and that’s not counting the one that was about to consume the entire town: the writers’ strike.

The 1988 strike was Vesuvian, lasting six months and costing the industry half a billion dollars. It is remembered as “the Bloodbath.” The financial consequences had been so dire that neither side had fought again until now. But the sides were redrawn as a new revenue frontier was opening up—the virtual one—and if the past was prelude to the future, the future was grim. The trace memory of that strike had the town shivering in the ninety-eight-degree heat nineteen years later. Both camps were entrenched as the Writers Guild of America (WGA) contract was expiring that night.

The ghetto was hyperventilating. In Hollywood at times of industry-wide stress, everyone is a ghetto Jew. The tens of thousands of Irish, blacks and WASP
_s
were all running around like
the pogrom was coming down from the hills into the hood. The prospect of future work ceasing if the writers went out on strike was terrifying.

For weeks before the strike deadline, the two sides had barely spoken, each viewing the other as something akin to aliens. The writers were still reeling from the battle of 1988, when they fought mightily for a fraction of DVD profits and lost. The writers still wanted a piece of that pie, but it was gone, baby, gone. At least the writers wanted some payback for the slice of DVD revenue they missed in ’88 by taking an aggressive posture toward “new media”—i.e., the Internet, in the form of online streaming. In truth, the value of the revenue stream had not been definitively evaluated by either TV or films at that point. There were guesses, estimates, based on models pulled out of models. It was 2008, and deals of consequence are just now, in 2012, being made—and they are still not predictable enough to be projected onto any profit-and-loss statement. But who believed this then? Not the writers.

The AMPTP, or Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers—by which we mean the studios’ and networks’ negotiating body, also known as the Moguls—was hostile to these fundamental incursions into barely existing profit streams. They saw one on the way out—DVDs—and one just barely on the way in—the Internet. So they began the negotiations with “rollbacks,” a common and (in my humble opinion) repugnant management negotiating strategy. To me, Malcolm in the Middle, it seemed like a gigantic pissing contest: Whose industry phallus, if you will, was bigger—the Moguls’ or the Writers’? This may sound like a Polish joke, but this is the only season when the Writers, usually at the bottom of the industry totem pole, can take on the Moguls and slap them silly. Potential work stoppages are deadly.

The $64,000 (not modified for inflation) question was, were the Writers willing to go out for months on end, losing millions for
many, for what might turn out to be a few dollars per year? Or was there really a pot of gold at the end of the Internet rainbow worth holding out for, as they suspected?

For days on end leading up to the strike, the Moguls stonewalled. Some decried it as a tactic—perhaps they were waiting for the DGA (Directors Guild of America) contract to expire in June. The DGA was always considered a more “mature” (i.e., less hotheaded) negotiating partner by the Moguls, which, needless to say, infuriated the Writers. When the two sides did communicate via the media or other intermediaries, their numbers were so far apart on the so-called new media that they hardly seemed to be in the same industry. The Moguls were dying to talk to someone they thought understood what they were saying (like directors). The Writers wanted a piece of this gigantic frontier.

The Moguls said, “What frontier?”

The Writers snorted, “We
know
you are making forty billion dollars now! Give us a piece!”

The Moguls sneered, “These numbers are from where?! Who
are
you people?”

They were talking moon rocks and refrigerators. Everyone was going batty.

This is how crazy it was.

OCTOBER 2007

Right before the strike deadline, when movie people were dashing to finish scripts and turn them in to the studios (thousands of hastily completed scripts dated October 31 were simultaneously submitted to the Writers Guild and the studios’ production and legal/labor departments), I was standing in the parking lot at Disney after a development meeting with a Barbie of a writer, discussing the issues of the potential strike. Suddenly I found myself
practically shouting, “It’s really true! They have no money! Their DVD library is gone! They are living from movie to movie!”

She shouted back, “They have zillions of dollars! They make all these blockbusters! Don’t you read what they tell Wall Street?”

“What are they going to tell Wall Street when they need financiers? That they’re broke and have no future?”

She yelled, “The Internet is the future!”

I yelled back: “There are no Internet profits yet! Everything is downloaded for free! Because of piracy we are all going to go broke! There will be no more movies!”

And then we burst out laughing, realizing that neither of us had any idea whatsoever what we were talking about, that we were both simulacra of our side’s positions, repeating unadulterated propaganda.

•  •  •

We all turned in our scripts as commanded by the studios, just ahead of the strike deadline. There we were, writers, producers and agents, all complicit with the Moguls’ intention to stockpile material to get through the strike. But we all had to try to survive and get our movies made, right? The actors’ and directors’ contracts didn’t expire until June, and the plan was that everything that made it into inventory could shoot up until that final date. The networks claimed they could live without the crucial showrunners through reality programming, “unscripted television” that was cheap to produce. Showrunners, the writer-producers of television, guarantee the scripts will be ready on time and that the show will be delivered in time to air. As television goes, they are invaluable. Reality TV wasn’t taken seriously at the time, and the creative community pooh-poohed the networks’ strategy.

The night before the deadline, after stonewalling the Writers Guild until the final moment, the Moguls met the Writers’ leadership to make their so-called generous offer. They took the “rollbacks” off the table. This is the way Moguls negotiate: They
start from less than zero, so that getting to zero is a triumph. This is business as usual for Moguls in Hollywood. The Writers could have their residual payments back—the checks they receive for the reairing of their shows. But they could not have what they wanted in DVD and Internet profits. The Moguls thought they were being beneficent. This was a concession of sorts: The residual issue is fundamental to writers; it had been brutally fought for in the two longest strikes in movie industry history, in 1960 and again in 1988. Eliminating residuals had been called a nonstarter by the guild. Now the nonstarter had been removed, so maybe negotiations could start. For a day, everyone in the ghetto was saying there wouldn’t be a strike.

Luckily for me, I have a brother, Rick, on the inside, and as the head of television at the huge agency WME,
¹
he repped many of the showrunners at the crux of this strike. They would likely be the first to see some Internet ad revenue if they won concessions, as their shows were already replaying on the Net. So they keenly watched the new media issues.

During this critical juncture, Rick and I sat on his Bel Air porch. It was a gorgeous day; the wind was kicking up, and I commented on the lovely, bonfirelike smell permeating the air. It reminded me of Texas in the fall. Little did we know that it was the odor of people’s kitchens on fire.

After some beating around the bush, I asked the big Q. “Will there be a strike?”

“They [the Writers] have to give something up,” Rick said. “The producers did”—referring to the Moguls—“and now they have to. That’s how negotiations work.” So much for inside information.

The WGA had thus far dismissed the Moguls’ offer. The ghetto was now holding its collective breath. Some were choking on ashes
(the fancy Westsiders, who live west of La Cienega), and the rest of us were just choking.

The Writers met the next day, November 1, and took a vote to authorize a strike should negotiations come to an impasse. The Writers Guild had elected a militant leadership headed by Patric Verrone, an animation writer who had been on the WGA board. But everyone believed (hoped?) there would still be serious negotiating to avoid a work stoppage and picket lines at all the networks and studios. Was this still possible?

The Moguls thought the WGA negotiators were provincial and naïve, and the WGA negotiators saw the Moguls as immoral liars, much like progressives view the Tea Party and vice versa. These views of one another solidified early. Verrone was elected to avenge the losses of 1988. The Moguls’ rollback of residuals inflamed an already incendiary situation. The Moguls felt that the expectations of the Writers were numerically way out of line and emotionally biased. The Writers had been lied to in the past about DVD revenues and believed that they were being lied to again.

The stage was set for . . . well, let’s say,
not
a party. The Moguls waited for a counteroffer. And waited.

Days later, everything changed. For a year, everyone had been planning production schedules around a “worst-case scenario”: a June walkout of all the unions (WGA, DGA or, more likely, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), who, according to the Moguls, were the Taliban of the unions). If they could keep talking through June, the network showrunners—even if they couldn’t write—could keep up their producing duties, and the studios could shoot the scripts they had stockpiled. The Moguls were confident they could eventually reach an agreement with the DGA, which would “grandfather” everyone else into the best deal they could get. The DGA had the best relationship with the Moguls, and there was a history of pleasant negotiations between the two. This gave the
DGA confidence that they could get the WGA and SAG the best terms, and perhaps avert a walkout altogether.

But the Writers were not so sure they were going to go along with the strategy. There were suspicious mutterings questioning whether the more powerful (in film) Directors had the Writers’ interests at heart. (Do they on set?) Then suddenly, on November 4, the Writers exploded a nuclear device. They walked out.