This week in striking began with United Artists breaking ranks from Hollywood’s producers and signing a deal with the Writer’s Guild of America to get their writers back to work. Their deal came with a rumor that Lionsgate and The Weinstein Company might follow suit. As of this morning, Weinstein has made a deal.
Variety says the interim agreement between the WGA and TWC also covers Dimension Films, and it’ll let them all get back to work as normal. Unfortunatley, TWC, much like UA, is a fairly minor player on the Holllywood scene. Neither movie is a major distributor, the UA has only released one film and TWC has been struggling financially for awhile now, and unless you count Clerks II has yet to distribute anything even remotely resembling a hit.
What I’m saying here is that little studios like these have everything to gain and nothing to lose by breaking ranks. The fact that they’ve signed deals may not do much to push the rest of the producers to start breaking ranks and do the same. It’s be nice if it did, but TWC and UA are pretty insignificant players. Rumor is that a lot of other smaller studios may do the same. It makes sense, since it gives them a rare opportunity to have a leg up on their bigger brothers, since they’ll actually have writers. Right now Overture Films and Nu Image/Millenium are rumored to be next in line for a similar WGA pact. Again, insignificant players. I was really hoping the Lionsgate rumor might come true. They’re still regarded as an indie studio, but they’ve become a fairly major money maker in the past couple of years. Having Lionsgate settle with the WGA might actually mean something, but for now it looks like we’ll have to settle for bit players.
Personally, I’m getting to a place where I no longer care who wins. I guess at some point I sort of supported the writers, but right now at 2AM in Dallas Texas I’m having hard time remembering why I care how much Akiva Goldsman will make when Warner Brothers makes I Am Legend available for download on the internet. Didn’t he get paid for writing the script right off the bat? Shouldn’t that be it? If I go out and dig a ditch, I get paid for digging the ditch. I don’t also get paid for every time thereafter when someone walks by and drops something in the ditch. That was a horrible analogy. This thing really needs to be over.
