New Contract Proposal By Striking Writers

Striking Hollywood writers on Wednesday called for a formula for the thorny issue of online compensation that's different from the one studios proposed last week in an effort to end the five-week walkout.

The Writers Guild of America said it accepted the idea of a fixed residual for TV shows in the first year of online use, but the payment should be adjusted upward for each 100,000 streams per quarter.

"We believe these formulas will protect the writer even if all television reuse migrates to new media," the guild said in a statement.

After the first year, the union wants 2.5 percent of a distributor's gross receipts for TV shows and movies streamed over the Internet.

Studios had proposed a flat $250 payment for a year's use of an hourlong TV show on the Web. That contrasts with the $20,000 or more that writers now earn for a single network rerun of a TV episode.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest union proposal.

The strike, which began Nov. 5, has shut down production on dozens of prime-time and late-night shows, sending a number of programs into reruns. Several new media issues are at the heart of negotiations that continued Wednesday.

A writers strike in 1988 that lasted 22 weeks was said to have cost the industry $500 million. Estimates of damage to the Los Angeles region's economy from the current walkout, if it lasts as long, have hit $1 billion.

But the quarterly Anderson Forecast by the University of California at Los Angeles said a close examination of this year's strike suggests a more "modest and transitory impact" on the local economy that would be one-third of the billion-dollar predictions or less.
By Lynn Elber