The first Strike Survival Workshop that IATSE’s hard-hit Local 728 in Hollywood ran late last year was standing-room-only, which suggests the impact that the strike by the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) was having on those who literally do set the stage for filmed and televised entertainment. The second one, held Feb. 8, a clinic for financial help and counseling from the Motion Picture Trust Fund, was just as packed.
That was the scene just before an end to the strike was announced that very weekend. The fact that the three-month-old strike had finally come to a dramatic conclusion, while a huge relief for the entire entertainment industry, doesn’t change the fact that it has left the labor infrastructure of that industry in disarray, and worse.
The WGA strike wreaked financial havoc on the broadcast and film entertainment industry, both in New York and Los Angeles, particularly in the latter, where entertainment production makes up a significant amount of the city’s revenues. Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., estimates that the strike resulted in a $1.5 billion hit to the local economy. Some forecasts suggest that the impact isn’t nearly as severe; the UCLA Anderson School of Management asserts an estimated loss of $380 million or less.
Either of those numbers is staggering, putting the impact of the 2007/2008 writer’s strike in the same league as the 1988 writers’ strike, which cost the L.A. economy alone $500 million. But the big numbers don’t tell the full story. According to Mark Deo, executive director of consulting firm the Small Business Advisory Network, it’s the small businesses and individual technicians who will hurt the most on a percentage basis. Speaking in an interview in Business Week, he said, “A mid-budget film costs about $17 million to produce, generates $1.2 million in state and local taxes, and employs more than 300 contractors and subcontractors to support it. A big-budget film costs an average of $70 million and employs an estimated 928 direct and indirect contractors. The bulk of those are independent, small contractors doing lighting, sound, set construction and teardown, leasing out props, and many other niche jobs.” Furthermore, he added, it’s estimated that entrepreneurial firms supply 70 to 80 percent of the services provided to production companies with less than 100 employees. Some of them may not have made it past the strike.
The human and career costs became visceral, and the situation illustrated how the absence of scripted material directly impacted the amount of work a stage technician can get. “NBC re-assigned studio department heads to news productions, and the number of work calls for steady extras and others was reduced by many dozens each week,” says one IATSE member who worked on The Conan O’Brien Show and who prefers not to be identified. “The resumption of Conan O’Brien [along with the other late-night talk shows that came back on the air in early January] resulted in a small number of calls for daily hires, but the lack of sketch comedy kept that number from returning to pre-strike levels.”
Saturday Night Live has always loomed large for stage technicians in New York. It’s nearly a full week of setting the stage for what is mostly sketch comedy, with a complete 90-minute dress rehearsal followed by the actual show on Saturday nights, a regular worker on the show said.
Even with the end of the strike, the impact will continue for some time. Like national employment reports in the news lately, small drops in the unemployment numbers do not so much suggest that people are finding work as they have simply stopped looking. “You could easily find many individuals who have been fired as soon as the strike entered its second week and others who have stopped looking for work,” said one of NBC’s regulars. “The WGA strike had a very detrimental effect on my income and work schedule. I failed to make the hours of employment required for full-time status at NBC in New York.”
WGA members appeared grudgingly satisfied with what they got from the strike: for content streamed free over the web, writers will get a fixed payment of $1,200 per year for one-hour webcasts over the first two years, followed by two percent of any revenues earned by the distributor in the third year.
Lighting and staging technicians get a less-immediate benefit. Ending the strike in February saved at least some of the awards show season that is to stagehands what the Christmas sales season is to retailers. The Golden Globes had already been reduced to the production equivalent of a teleprompter and a desk. The Oscars, the big moneymaker ($1.6 million per 30-second commercial spot), which is also celebrating its 80th anniversary, got saved, as did a few others, like the Grammy Awards.
Production of television and films resumed quickly, with many strike-bound workers getting rushed callbacks. But some sectors won’t get back to pre-strike levels. Top executives from the corporate parents of NBC, ABC and Fox had already made clear that they planned to order far fewer pilots this year. Instead, networks will choose more new shows from scripts or video presentations, and that is one change that may carry into future years as networks search for ways to curb costs.
