Hollywood sans Writers
Thoughts on the WGA Strike
By Jess Skinner
Posted January 18th, 2008.
The chilling, pathetic grasp at relevance that is the Golden Globes has been tossed into the can this year — which does not bother me, as award ceremonies were getting close to being culturally disruptive. The only one who should be upset is 90-year-old Ernest Borgnine, nominated in something called Grandpa for Christmas. What a crappy gift that would be. Borgnine and his ilk will have to stay home Sunday night, or perhaps create their own awards ceremony to fill the void. That is, I think, how all these things get started.
The cause of this cancellation (or the cause of the cause) would be the ongoing strike by the Writer’s Guild of America, divided into East and West. This strike means that all union members are barred from creating new written material for television and film. After having reached the beginning of a new cycle of contracts with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, a stalemate has arisen. The increasing profit from home video sales being received (gained almost entirely from DVDs) is ostensibly archaic, recalling a time when the market was dominated by VHS tapes. DVDs and a similar residual conflict in Internet content signal the desire for a movement into a time where what is outdated is no longer practiced. I am glad we are starting with award shows. Patrick Verrone, the President of the Writer’s Guild West, has said that the issue is primarily one of pay, in which residuals given to producers should also apply to writers.
What constitutes new written material remains to be seen. Outside of award shows, causalities of the strike still seem to be grappling: late-night personalities like Jay Leno have come under fire for writing their own monologues. Some, like Stephen Colbert, have resorted to scraping through material written just prior to the strike. In Hollywood, Da Vinci Code prequel Angels and Demons has already been postponed.
What would a long-term strike mean for the viewer? I imagine possible scenarios in this fallout. The first I imagine, and something that has been seen already, is a steadily increasing repetition of content circulating in our multiplexes and on our television screens. What should be realized is that something akin to experiencing this repetition is practiced by many of us. It’s called going to the movies, or watching TV. Truth is, they do not really need writers to make money. What makes money is more a cobbling together of old ideas, abuses of technology, and spastic energy. Do we think it reasonable that a cultural niche like film could survive if its authors are shoved out of the equation? To see ourselves further entrenched into display, that is, drawn into spectacle in content, would be to see our arts devolve into sideshows.
This leads to my second imagined scenario, in which new filmed content is created by its producers. Imagine the process, through which a television show would be created based entirely on what is believed to be most desired by the viewer. Would it compare to someone trying desperately to be liked but never succeeding, or would it be capable of influencing and dominating the tastes of the masses? The relationship between Hollywood and its audiences is often bait-and-switch, in that the former offers new content but reveals something substituted — but who is really in power? The reality of this content-and-material void has nothing to do with the general audience, the people who have — through some kind of will — decided what stays and what goes, what is canonized and what isn’t. It is possible that producers would learn to satisfy an audience’s unquenchable thirst for new ideas, or else wither and die like Ernest Borgnine.
The third possible scenario is that entertainment could become completely improvised. Imagine it: movies that are thought up on the spot, and based entirely on the subconscious reactions of their creators. Eliminate the entire process of writing, and give us something that is in complete defiance of narrative logic.
Something has to break first, is all I am saying here, and maybe once content backlog will run dry, going to the movies or watching television will become baffling ordeals. I myself am curious as to what kind of material can be produced under these conditions. Whether repetitious or incomprehensible, it sheds a lot of light on how the business side of Hollywood views its product, as well as its audience. Movies that fall under its heavy influence tend to follow a slow trend of stylisation, in that nothing aggressively alienates the audience in its presentation; tastes change too slowly for it to work any other way. In the end, content may be disposable but the audience is not… it stays in the seats or the industry collapses.