Struck

I’ve met some striking writers in this town, but these are easily the best so far:

Writers on strike in Hollywood at the Sunset Gower Studios. (This is the Sunset Blvd entrance to parking. Remarkably, it was reported that earlier today at one of these entrances, someone on the production/editing staff deliberately ran over one of the striking writers in his car to gain access to the building.)

I’m sorry. It is a poor opening pun but I could not resist. I was rather excited this morning as I got an email from someone who’s working on a science documentary show I was reading a script for and the subject was “HELP!”. I was wondering if it had something to do with the strike. The show will air not too long from now and I began to wonder if somehow the script needed to be finished immediately so as to not be done during the strike, along with your nightly digest of Jay Leno and Jon Stewart monologues that will cease all of a sudden. But no, it turned out that the strike was not relevant at all.

Anyway, I thought you’d like to see some footage of those people who bring you the material you excitedly go home at night to watch. Let’s hear it for the writers!

It’s going to be an odd period for a while. A Hollywood version of what happens every Summer in Europe when so many things are affected by strikes. Here it is writers instead of train drivers, factory workers, and so forth. It might sound silly, if you’re not from here, but it is actually pretty real. This really is the local Industry. It is not just the television schedules that get messed up – lots of businesses get affected, and there are interesting reverberations in unexpected places. One of the latter is (apparently) lots of cafes and restaurants that rely so much on writers and producers “doing lunch” over business deals and so forth. They’re preparing for slow difficult times, apparently. Hmmm… maybe I’ll be able to get a table in some of those places now, without a one hour wait. Got to see the positives in these things…

-cvj