..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

18 Weeks To Go
Wicked Wicked Season Picket

This is the nightmare month of the Oscar season on both the publicity and the media side of the aisle.  Los Angeles’ AFI Film Festival launches tonight with Lions for Lambs, which has a pretty strong consensus for it being dead on arrival in terms of award season.  But off we go, Cruise and Streep and Redford, oh my!  (And of course, it can surely ascend initial media resistance if the film connects to the more important people… the Academy and other guild voters.)

Friday night, it’s Eddie Vedder & Sean Penn vs Beowulf.  Sunday, Angelina Jolie goes up against No Country For Old Men… etc, etc, etc. The stars are out and demurely fighting for their place at the table.. not the negotiating table.

But perhaps the most interesting next question for award season will be whether journalists and others, like SAG Nominating Committee, not mention Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder, are willing to cross picket lines – should a WGA strike launch this weekend – in front of Paramount Studios and others who are doing these events on their studio lots.

Really, consideration of how studios and other awards players, like the trades and MCN, want to be perceived if/when a strike happens is quite a complex issue.  It’s easy to roll your eyes and argue about how unimportant the awards season is but, like all forms of publicity, it is an integral part of the film industry and doesn’t just disappear when something like a strike – or war in Iraq or fires in Saugus – happens.  Do we all need to stop, bow to the strike (or threat thereof), and stop doing business, lest we be accused of profiteering at a time when union members are suffering? 

In a season that features the kinds of films that get people who hate the Oscar game excited, suddenly the process of trying to promote films that have mostly achieved a pretty equal level of support as they have been screened is getting much more challenging.  How do you walk the line if you are a writer and new director like Tony Gilroy… or a newcomer like Diablo Cody… or an artist like Julian Schnabel… or a politically-minded movie star turned director like Sean Penn, whose film is in a fight for its awards life, which can be turned, but only with a lot of effort? 

And let’s not mistake reality… film unions and producers may be the rich battling the rich for a bigger slice of the riches, but it is political and it is the employees being smacked around by the bosses.

If the WGA does go out this month, don’t expect a quick return either.  At the negotiating table, the very first signs of either side getting serious in the negotiations are just now showing up.  And the public battle has barely begun.  But it is already causing grief for a Los Angeles Times that seems to be taking the side of the studios and at Variety, which is looking slow and easy to manipulate, while gossip blogger Nikki Finke has become the leading journalist covering these events… and she’s being played most of the time as well, but at least she’s getting played by both sides, embodying the old saw about color, that it’s not black or white, but green.  For Nikki, it’s not truth or morality… it’s the scent of a scoop and an “atta' girl” that drives her efforts.  Still, she is leading the way right now in a battle that is mostly about whose gossip is nastier than whose.

The sad thing for all involved is that for all not directly involved, these strikes end up being like US Magazine covers as well.  Outsiders lose their sense of rage pretty quickly.  And now, in the era of TMZ, you have to wonder whether it is going to be even worse.  With WGA picket lines become like the hotel union picket lines that people notice then walk right past, assuming it will get worked out by someone at some time? 

Above and beyond awards season, tomorrow is the start of the “holiday” movie season with at least a half dozen films with budgets over $80 million and a bunch more that studios are building their quarterly estimates upon.  What will shopping at the Grove be like with picketers a block away at CBS?  A month into a strike, how happy a Christmas will it be? 

And ponder this…will studios send WGA members screeners?  What will invites to awards screenings look like?  We just set up a screening for MCN that I am thrilled about… a Sunday double feature featuring Q&As with the two woman screenwriters behind the films.  It’s a chance to promote good films and women screenwriters who are thriving and really, to celebrate the work.  But are writers going to be questioned for promoting their studio-owned films on a studio lot in the middle of a strike?  Will the WGA send pickets to the lot on a weekend just to force the issue?  I don’t know.  But the moral issues can pull you into a pretzel.

Sundance is just a couple of months away and if you think there was a feeding frenzy last year, just wait for this year if the strike is happening.  And what is the irony for writers there?  Selling movies to studios and studio Dependents?  Is that the job of a writer during a guild strike?  Should anyone have the right to question the motives of people trying to survive and build a career?

I don’t know which is more disturbing – the idea of the awards season rolling along as though nothing was going on with the WGA or the awards season being slowed to a dead crawl as studios and talent alike become aggressively precious with every move and the subtext that angry players on either side of the fight – not too many people really ready to publicly support the studios… about as many as there are public Republicans in Hollywood – will assuredly foist on anyone who is vulnerable to any attack, unfair or fair, of not supporting the brethren body and soul. 

Ah, November…

The Charts

October 18, 2007
The Post-Toronto Chart - September 21, 2007
The Pre-Toronto Chart - September 6, 2007
The First Chart - June 21, 2007

- Email David Poland