VFXhack

In case you haven’t heard, things seem to be looking up on the WGA negotiations lately. An extremely rosey picture was painted on the LA Times front page yesterday. Since then the story has been picked up all over the place and the mood seems to be very positive. Deadline Hollywood reported that Peter Chernin told to good old boys in the sky box at the Super Bowl that ” the strike is over “. But before we pop open the bubbly and start giving non-ironic high-fives left and right, it wouldn’t be a real Hollywood cock-up without a coupla turds in the proverbial punch bowl.

Michael Russnow throws up this gem on The Huffington Post called The WGA Strike For Dummies: It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over. He describes his woes thusly

I’d like the Writers Guild strike to end. I’m tired of getting up earlier than I prefer to every morning to go picketing at CBS Television City in Hollywood most days of every week. Even though I don’t have a job to immediately go back to, like most other unemployed or underemployed writers I have a stake in the strike’s conclusion, because I have several projects which I’d like to pursue, and I can’t until we cross the finish line.

We in the VFX industry would also like the strike to end, more than that, we need it to end. We would all get up earlier than we prefer every morning to pursue the several projects that we have going on namely paying our bills and supporting our families.

Larry Gelbart, longtime tinsel-town writer and WGA member, has lent his voice to this automated phone message sent out members on Sunday urging fellow members to

set aside all the rumors, all the second-guessing, I ask you to set these aside and pick up a picket sign instead.

I get it. I mean it would be a terrible negotiating tactic for the WGA to simply roll up the picket lines and go home when their leardship is trying to finalize a deal. But please guys. We in the VFX community are all for a fair deal for creative folks but we need both parties to sit down without the theatrics and hammer this thing out. There was great piece in Friday’s LA Times about the trickle-down effect of the strike on other people working in the industry. It centers around the thought of set dress Michael O’Donnel a set dresser for TV shows. He sums up the situation nicely, claiming to

understand the principle behind the WGA strike, the need to fight for a fair share of whatever revenue streams emerge from new media. “The sons and daughters of the idle rich,” was what O’Donnell called the people who run the studios. Mostly, though, they just want to get back to work

I think we can all agree with Michael on that last bit.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 12:30 am and is filed under news, opinion, visual effects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.