Hallelujah! Christmas has come early.
There’s a strike in Hollywood. The mighty pens that script Hollywood’s cacophony of trash have run dry because the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers are at a contractual deadlock.
They say it’s about money. About justice. But it could be about the strange-colored Kool-Aid they keep drinking for all I care. The bottom line is that this is an early Christmas present for culture warriors.
For years, we’ve been saying that Hollywood represents a huge part of the problem. It is one of the major battlefronts in the culture war. Hollywood exports more filth, left-wing nonsense, and treasonous propaganda into the culture than any other entity in society. So I’m begging your pardon if I’m not shedding any tears over this strike.
Frankly, I’m celebrating. Finally, we’ll all have that Christmas vacation from Hollywood we’ve been dreaming about. Who knows – the culture just might recuperate in time for Christmas, too.
I know. Most of you don’t care what happens because you don’t watch TV. As such, I can appreciate your indifference to this strike. But would you at least agree that America is a whole lot better off if Hollywood stays in lock-down mode?
It’s no different than what Rush Limbaugh says about the U.S. Congress – “America is better off when Congress isn’t in session” – except that Hollywood’s reach impacts the whole world, so I guess the whole world is better off.
“What about the reruns?” you ask.
OK. They might still pose a problem. But as you know, every year Hollywood continues to push the envelope, introducing some brand new perversion. So even though we’ll still have that steady diet of last year’s crap, at least we’ll have a moratorium from any of those so-called “ground-breaking” episodes that would showcase yet another level of the twisted psychosis that apparently resides in the mind of almost every Hollywood writer.
The other nice thing about this strike is that it may actually last for a very long time. The writers want a new contract that gives them a bigger cut of the profits from DVD sales and other digital media, like the release of TV shows on the Web. But the producers are telling them that the market can’t sustain that level of profit sharing, especially when the writers didn’t invest a single dime in the new technology.
Right now, writers get a small residual on DVD sales and virtually nothing from the other new-media ventures, although their production compatriots do.
The experts are telling us that the two sides in the dispute are so far apart that this strike could last a very long time.
But wait! There’s even more good news. There are immediate benefits to the strike as well.
Late-night talk shows are going into reruns. These include “The Late Show with David Letterman,” “The Daily Show with John Stewart” and “Saturday Night Live.”
And other so-called “mainstream” shows like Ellen Degenerate and “Desperate Whorewives,” uh … Housewives, will also be affected, not to mention a host of other shows and made-for-TV movies.
But all of that is just the icing on the cake. The best news of all is the economic impact this strike could have.
The experts say the last time the writers walked out in 1988, Hollywood and related industries lost a half billion dollars in 22 weeks. The projection is that the economic impact of the strike this time could top a billion dollars, crippling the television industry and impacting more than 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America.
And if that isn’t enough of a Christmas gift, the Screen Actors and Directors Guilds are facing their own set of contract talks next summer.
Pamm Fair, the Screen Actors Guild’s deputy national executive director, told a major Canadian news agency that the new media is a frontier that actors and directors can’t afford to be left out of. Fair says they’re “watching carefully and working very closely in a strategic alliance with the writers as they come forward trying to get these new technologies addressed, and try to find solutions so that their members can be paid fairly for their creative work on these many new formats.”
In other words, this is just the first in what could be a protracted set of battles that could shut the entertainment industry down for a very long time. And management knows it’ll have to remain resolute in this battle with the writers, because not doing so could set a very bad precedent when they start talks with the actors and directors next summer.
For those of us on the frontline of the culture war, what this means is that there might be a glimmer of hope that the Hollywood we have come to know could literally disappear.
An industry that’s about to take a billion dollar hit, with potentially even more losses on the horizon, won’t be in much of a position to be turning out any kind of product, including the trash for which Hollywood has become famous.
And that means it could be Christmas in June, too.
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