The Real Deal
(AP)
Depending on what happens between now and the stroke of midnight on Halloween [cue the spooky organ music] we may be facing ... a winter of reality television.
The clock is running out on the current contract that the Writers Guild of America has with Hollywood. And the new media landscape is the battleground, as reported in Time magazine:
Screens may not dim, but first TV and then the movies will look different if the two parties can't come closer together. The deal-breaker in the negotiations between the WGA and AMPTP is new media content. Those pithy webisodes of The Office and Battlestar Galactica? Someone wrote them, and wants to get paid when you play them on your iPod. In order to avoid a strike, said WGA West President Patric M. Verrone in a statement, "What we must have is a contract that gives us the ability to keep up with the financial success of this ever-expanding global industry." AMPTP says new media is still too new, and revenue is too unpredictable to set up a compensation package that resembles the one used for TV shows, in which writers get paid every time their rerun of Golden Girls airs.So what happens if the writers and the studios can’t hammer out details? Yes. You guessed it. Reality shows, with their unofficial slogan of “We don’t need no stinkin’ writers!”
