The Wall Street Journal-20080213-Writers Vote to End 3-Month Walkout
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080213
Writers Vote to End 3-Month Walkout
Full Text (421 words)LOS ANGELES -- The striking members of the Writers Guild of America voted overwhelmingly late yesterday to end the three-month walkout that has crippled the entertainment industry.
The vote by 3,775 of the guild's 10,500 active members comes two days after the union said it had reached a tentative deal with the major Hollywood studios and broadcast networks for a three-year contract. The vote ends the guild's strike in advance of the expected formal ratification of the contract in the next few weeks. The union said 92.5% of the votes were in favor of ending the strike.
Writers are expected to be back at work today.
Union writers went on strike Nov. 5 after contract talks between the guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the studios, broke down. A stumbling block was how writers should be compensated for use of their work on the Internet and other new media, particularly when their content is replayed and downloaded on the Internet.
That issue was finally resolved Friday after two weeks of meetings between WGA leadership and top studio executives. The 14-week strike had far-reaching effects in Hollywood: It nearly destroyed the scripted TV season, crippled a number of feature film projects and threw into disarray the industry's annual awards season.
But with the end of the strike, Hollywood's biggest award ceremony, the Oscars, will be spared. The telecast will go on as planned, with its complement of writers on Feb. 24.
The television industry has already been gearing up for a return to work. Some so-called showrunners -- TV writers who also produce their shows -- went back to work Monday to prepare their productions for duty. The television networks have also been making plans with production studios so they can swing back into action.
CBS, for instance, expects to have comedies such as "Two and a Half Men" back on the air in mid-March and dramas such as "Criminal Minds" back around the first week of April.
The television industry's traditional development cycle for the fall season is expected to be considerably altered, however. Pilot season, when the networks pick their new shows for the fall schedule, will likely be much thinner than usual. And it is possible that some networks will abandon the upfront presentations, when they present their new shows to advertisers, in favor of one-on-one meetings with Madison Avenue.
Some networks executives have predicted that the strike will be a catalyst for reinventing the entire development cycle for shows.
