Strike Talks Come To Screeching Halt

The talks between the WGA and AMPTP have caved in on themselves with no indication of when or if negotiations will continue.

Writers have been walking the picket lines for 5 weeks now and it looks like they will have to carry on for some time to come after representatives from both sides of the table walked out in bitterness.

The AMPTP says that it will flatly not make the kind of deal that the WGA wants concerning the guild’s demands on new media compensation. The whole walk-out happened because the networks and studios refused to change a compensation method that was issued over 20 years ago. The method hasn’t been adjusted to reflect changes in the way content created by the writers and the revenue gained on media such as the Internet and from DVD releases is dispersed, giving networks and studios the lion’s share and writers a minimal 4 cents per item.

The WGA is requesting that amount be raised to at least 8 cents per item but the AMPTP says they need to that extra 4 cents to stay afloat, a line of reasoning that the WGA and others in the entertainment industry find hard to swallow. However, the AMPTP refuses to budge on this issue and so does the WGA. There are other issues that need to be worked out but the compensation package is the main sticking point.

Yesterday evening’s bitter end to the talks came as no surprise to WGA negotiating committee chief John Bowman.

“They [the AMPTP] had drumrolled this all week,” he added. “We wound up being engaged in fake negotiations. I suspect they’re trying to do this so that writers will suffer during the holiday season.”

In a separate statement from the AMPTP, a spokesperson blames the stall in the talks on the WGA stating that, “Their Quixotic pursuit of radical demands led them to begin this strike, and now has caused this breakdown in negotiations. We hope that the WGA will come back to this table with a rational plan that can lead us to a fair and equitable resolution to a strike that is causing so much distress for so many people in our industry and community.”

It could be well into January 2008 before talks start back up, just the thing that many were hoping could be thwarted. The failure of both sides to come to any kind of resolution has already cost both the television and movie industry uncounted millions of dollars, not to mention all the ancillary businesses that depend on the industry for its livelihood.