Since the first Hollywood writers strike in almost 20 years started Monday, many television connoisseurs have noticed that their favorite late-night talk shows have gone off the air. "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and the "Late Show with David Letterman" have both stopped filming new episodes as a result of the Writers Guild of America strike.
Other popular shows, including, "Desperate Housewives" and "The New Adventures of Old Christine" find themselves in the same unfortunate situation, as stockpiled scripts run out. The movie industry may also be affected if the strike persist.
The last Hollywood writers strike in 1988 lasted 22 weeks. This one could cost studios and networks millions upon millions of dollars, depending on the duration. This week I spoke with Communications and Media Studies Program Director Julie Dobrow to better understand the strike.
Jamie Bologna: Why are the writers striking?
Julie Dobrow: They're striking because the studios have discovered that [they can move] some of these media products out of distribution channels that were covered by existing contracts, like reruns on networks or traditional home video. Putting these products into things like iTunes and the Internet, they can increase profits and exclude some of the people who actually create the product: the writers, the directors, the actors and the crews.
What you hear from the studios is that they're doing this because they actually don't have this huge profit margin and that they don't really understand fully the way that people are going to be viewing these media products.
They say they don't know yet what the full impact [will be] of things like DVD sales or when they show television programs on ABC.com or something. They're not fully sure yet how we the consumers are going to be packaging and consuming our media. That's what the studios are saying.
The writers are saying, "That's not fair because you the studios are getting profit from showing our work in these different venues. We're not getting any cut from it at all."
That's in a nutshell what's happening.
JB: If the money doesn't go to the writers, where is it spent?
JD: What the studios have offered the writers is four cents per download of material on the Internet, which is the so called DVD formula. What the writers are saying is that there's essentially no cost of electronic distribution to the studios, so that would increase the studios' profit margin on something like that.
I think the writers are trying to get a greater percentage of the profits from that sort of distribution. The writers are also trying to get some coverage for game shows or reality TV shows, all of which have writers. But many ... don't have pensions or health care coverage, because their shows are not covered by the Writers Guild of America agreement. Then, I think there are other small issues they're looking at, but those are some of the biggest ones. ...
[This is] going to affect the film industry. It's going to affect things like nighttime talk shows that are dependant upon contemporaneous material - that's going to happen first. ... Daytime television [is] going to be hit immediately. There are other shows where they've stockpiled episodes, and the impact won't be as apparent.
JB: The fallout from this, then, could be huge.
JD: It could be; it depends on what happens. The Directors Guild is the next one whose contract is set to expire, and I've heard news reports suggesting that directors might settle. And if they settle, that might push the writers into settling.
So it might not be as protracted and crippling a strike as it might be. Nobody really knows yet. It's a complicated issue, but it's certainly one that we're all going to be noticing, if we haven't already noticed it.
JB: You mentioned earlier that studio executives are unsure how new types of media will affect the market. Can't the studios track how many DVDs are sold or how many times someone clicks on a Webplayer?
JD: You would think that they could. I think what they don't understand - and I believe this - they don't know the full extent to it.
If you think about the way that you watch television in your own lifetime, it's probably shifted pretty dramatically from when you were a kid and television meant sitting down in front of the TV and watching it, to a time when you were in high school when you didn't have as much time to watch TV and you would start to watch things either on VHS or DVD when that came along or TiVo if you had it, to then college where people are consuming things more electronically through mp3s and then watching things on YouTube and on the Internet.
So within your lifetime, within the last two decades, there really has been a dramatic shift in the way people are watching television and movies. I think we still don't know, any of us; the studios or academics who study this sort of thing, we don't know yet how dramatic a shift that's going to be.
JB: So where do you see the future of television?
JD: I would say, based on what I do, what I know my students here do, I think that the future of television really is going more towards this individualized use of media. I think that is going to change the nature of [television] very much.
There are people who I know in the industry who say things like, "Network television is dead." I'm not sure that it's dead, but it certainly is not as healthy as it once was, and it's morphing.
