Strike TV is getting closer to its close-up.

The website devoted to showcasing original works from Hollywood union-repped folks is planning a private beta launch starting Monday. If you're curious, go sign up for updates and info about the venture at www.strike.tv and they'll be sending out log on and password info soon.

The plan is to let a 1,000 or so people into the site to help break it in and work out the bugs before they mount a full-blown launch. Until then, clips and trailers for some of the Strike TV fodder already produced can be found on this Strike TV blog.

It's an unscientific survey of three, but it seems telling about the mood of working thesps regarding the Screen Actors Guild contract stalemate.

Dennis Hopper, Don Cheadle and Shirley MacLaine, when asked during TCA seshes on Friday for their thoughts about situation, none of them raised a fist, literally or figuratively, in support of the guild's position. Can't help but notice how markedly different this is to the attitude among scribes last fall.

Hopper got a big laugh during his sesh for the Starz drama "Crash" in noting that taking a side would amount to him having "to get between Jack Nicholson and Tom Hanks...and I’d have to side with Jack." (After all, Hanks wasn't in "Easy Rider.")

"I think the unfortunate thing is that in there are 120,000 actors in SAG and only 7,000 make a living acting... I hope it doesn't come to vote for a strike because I'm afraid that we'll go out on strike," Hopper said.

Cheadle, also part of the "Crash" panel, evinced a little more concern about the contract terms at stake but was still way cautious on the strike front.

"Last time we gave up the farm on some things," Cheadle said of SAG's previous contract negotiation with the majors. "These residuals, that's our life blood for actors. I'm fortunate that I work pretty consistently. But a lot of people rely on (residuals) to get them through month to month. I agree with Dennis -- I hope we're able to come to some sort of agreement without calling for a strike. A great number of people in the city hope that it comes out that way as well. It's not just the actors that are going to be hurt if this happens -- caterers, cleaners, restaurants, valets -- everybody really takes a big hit," he said.

MacLaine, who was tubthumping her Lifetime biopic on Coco Chanel, volunteered her thoughts on the situation while answering a loaded question ("what's wrong with Hollywood?") from a journo. Her remarks reflected the feeling that in many respects there's already a de facto strike going on, and she noted its impact on showbiz workers other than actors.

"Let's settle this strike," she said. "Let's think about other people. Let's think about the problems and the people who will be very, very badly suffering if this strike occurs."

If you dream of becoming a television writer, buff up the resume and click here because applications are now being accepted for the 2009 Writing Fellowship Program run by the Disney-ABC Television Group, Walt Disney Studios and Writers Guild of America West.

The fellowship is an intense year-long paid program that gives a handful of promising scribes the chance to jumpstart their careers through seminars and workshop, one-on-one mentor assignments with Disney and ABC creative execs and the ability to observe first hand how the sausage is made on ABC, Disney Channel or ABC Family shows, among others.

Alumni of this program, heading into its 19th year, have famously done well for themselves. Success stories from this year's program, which isn't even over yet, include Erika Johnson, who landed on "Ugly Betty"; Leyani Diaz, who joined the staff of "Brothers and Sisters"; and Matthew Whitney, who can now be found in the writers' room on ABC Family's "Greek."

I've spoken with a number of fellowship alums over the years, and there is no doubt that it is an incredible experience for those who are lucky enough to land a slot. Disney deserves a tip of the pen for its commitment to the Writing Fellowship and similar program for helmers that the Mouse House runs with the Directors Guild of America.

Applications for the Writing Fellowship will be accepted via this website through Aug. 8. So get out that spec script you've been harboring on your hard drive and get cracking.

It was a surreal when-worlds-collide scene during the SAG solidarity rally today held outside the union's headquarters, which are conveniently located across the street from Variety.

The rally was designed to be a demonstration of SAG's resolve to fight for a "fair deal" and make it crystal clear how SAG feels about the primetime contract that its fellow actors union AFTRA just reached. The "vote no" chants and frequent cries of "AFTRA sucks" from the crowd left little doubt where SAG leaders come down on how the unions' 44,000 overlapping members should vote, as Variety's ever-laboring Dave McNary reports.

But as I made my way closer to the speakers platform where SAG's Alan Rosenberg and Doug Allen were speechifying, I was stopped dead by the presence of an Other. I started to hear the whispers. I ducked, scanned Wilshire Boulevard for signs of Smokey, and then looked up at the turquoise sky to make sure that a commercial airliner wasn't about to explode overhead.

The significant progress made in the DGA's tentative contract agreement with the majors stands as a hopeful sign that labor peace may soon be at hand. And it's also provides perfect examples of what's gone wrong to date in the fitful negotiations between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the WGA. The lack of communication between the studios and the scribes has been devastating to the creative community, below-the-liners included, and a failure of leadership on both sides of the picket lines.

The DGA rightfully touted on Thursday its victory in achieving big gains in residuals for electronic sell-through (aka paid downloads) based on a percentage of distributor's gross, not the despised producer's gross homevideo formula that took 80% of the distributor's revenue off the table, leaving 20% for the scribes and helmers to take a slim percentage of (1.5% or 1.8%, for sales after $1 million) as a residual. It's understood that the AMPTP wanted to base the deal on some definition "producer's gross" in the deal but the DGA held firm, on the rationale that it's too easy for the majors to move money around to make the producer's gross a lot punier than the distributor's haul.

The WGA pushed hard in its approach to the studios for a distributor's gross formula, but it was a non-starter, the AMPTP reps repeatedly told the WGA. How come? Because, according to execs from the AMPTP member congloms, they quite weren't sure what the WGA meant by the D- and G-words. AMPTP reps raised the specter of the WGA demanding a cut of advertising revenue from new media exhibition platforms (ABC.com, NBC.com, etc.) if they were owned by the same company that distribbed the program to the Internet (as is more often than not the case in post fin-syn Hollywood).

So why didn't the companies just ask for clarity? Why didn't they demand a simple, declarative sentence, a la the DGA's snappy "Distributor's gross is the amount received by the entity responsible for distributing the film or television program on the Internet." AMPTP says they did; WGA says it was the majors who refused to define their understanding of distributor's versus producer's gross. I can't imagine a first grade teacher accepting such a "did too/did not" explanation for why the entire class flunked the math test.

An astute friend who has been through more than one showbiz strike made the observation this evening that in the history of Hollywood labor negotiations, there's never been a situation quite like today, where the membership of DGA, WGA and SAG have as much information about the nitty-gritty details of a contract agreement at the same time as guild leaders. Membership of all three guilds were able to form their opinions in real time along with their respective leaders in the era of insta-communications, websites, blogs and email alerts. Guild leaders don't even have the time to put their spin on it. The devil is in the details, indeed.

The word that comes to mind to describe the mood among the scribes on the picket lines during the past week is: resolute.

Over and over, the attitude expressed on the lines was one of calm, cool determination to stick it out for a "fair deal." Despite the early predictions that the Writers Guild of America membership would be split along income-strata lines, there is no doubt that writers of all stripes, of all levels of experience and success are fired up by the feeling that the major congloms have been hosing them for years.

The WGA leadership has expertly built on that foundation of pent-up ire to help scribes gird for the strike that many rightly predicted was inevitable. On Friday (Nov. 9) at the mega-rally of at least 4,000 guild members and industry supporters held outside the Fox Plaza building in Century City, guild leaders and guest speakers including the Rev. Jesse Jackson very clearly drew a line between the WGA strike -- disparaged by some as a rich union's attempt to paint itself as blue-collar -- and the growing income disparity that has cleaved the nation into the super-haves, the haven't enoughs, the have-nots and the have nothings during the past 40 years.

"If they gave us everything that we're asking for, and then they went and did the same deal with the DGA and SAG, they would still be giving all of us less than each of their CEOs makes in a year," WGA West prexy Patric Verrone asserted to a receptive crowd on Friday.

(Can't absolutely vouch for Verrone's math, but we've all seen the studies on CEO pay gone wild and the widening gulf between the salaries of top execs and lowest-paid workers at many corporations.)  A picket sign in the crowd featured an unflattering picture of News Corp. prexy Peter Chernin, with "$34 million last year" scrawled underneath.

Seth MacFarlane, a wunderkind who scored his first multimillion payday before he was 30 with a hit animated Fox series "Family Guy," was a savvy choice by the guild to address the rally. His is a voice representing both the future of the guild and the promise that the biz holds to make (very lucky) people fabulously wealthy on the strength of a great idea. MacFarlane (pictured below) made a point of urging his fellow high-earners to keep paying their freshly laid off assistants for as long as possible. And he urged "the press" to get the message out to the general public that WGA members are, in the main, members of the five-figure annual income middle class, not the six-, seven-, eight-figure and above ultra-elite.

"Writers in this guild are not millionaires," MacFarlane stressed. "The royalties we're fighting for will make a big difference to them."

(Above pic snapped by Michelle Sobrino-Stearns/Variety)

Multihyphenate Marshall Herskovitz has a thoughtful op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times looking at -- what else? -- WGA strike issues and how so many of the issues on the table are intertwined with the death 11 years ago of the FCC's financial interest and syndication rule. He also gets in a noticeable plug for his new online skein "quarterlife," which once tried to find life as an old-fashioned show on ABC.

(In the spirit of unabashed self-promotion, chapter one of a certain new book about the life of two now-defunct networks has a whole lotta info about fin-syn and its legacy, not that I'm plugging "Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB and UPN" or anything...)

As Herskovitz submits about the post-fin-syn world of network TV:

The most profound change resulting from that ruling is the way networks go about the business of creating programming. Networks today exert a level of creative control unprecedented in the history of the medium. The stories my friends tell me would make me laugh if the situation weren't so self-defeating. Network executives routinely tell producers to change the color of the walls on sets; routinely decide on the proper wardrobe for actors; routinely have "tone" meetings with directors on upcoming pilots; routinely give notes on every page of a script. (When we did "thirtysomething" in the late '80s, we never received network notes.) And by the way, they have every right to do these things. As owners, they have a responsibility to satisfy themselves that their product is competitive and successful.

Sadly, editing chores kept me in the office this a.m. For comprehensive coverage from Variety's Josef Adalian and Michael Schneider of the rally that brought out a who's-who of showrunners, check out Variety's Scribe Vibe strike blog.

Our cause is worth the fight. That's the message top showrunners plan to send to the nets and studios this morning (Wednesday) with a Very Special Episode of picketing outside of ABC's HQ in Burbank.

A strong turnout of high-powered types is expected to gather along West Alameda Avenue in an effort to demonstrate loud and clear that TV's ultimate multitaskers have thrown down their pencils and every other tool they use to deliver their segs under normal circumstances.

I've no doubt there'll be fists of fury in the air, lots of clever placards, quippy chanting and shouting into bullhorns. Showrunners have rallied with a surprising degree of solidarity around the belief that the contract talks with invariably be spurred along that much faster if production comes to a grinding halt this week.

Of course, there's been scoffs in many quarters about how some of the most successful folks in showbiz have suddenly gotten in touch with their inner blue-collar worker (and their scruffiest pair of jeans) to walk the picket lines that they drive to in Mercedes and BMWs from digs in Brentwood and Bel-Air.

But for others, the very fact that writers who are well off enough already to shrug their shoulders at a few pennies worth of residual hikes only proves that the picketing is more than money, (though it is surely about money). For the high-earners on the picket lines, it's about fairness, respect and recognition, something many feel they've had none of since the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers came to the table in July with a residuals revamp proposal that was instantly seen as an "attack" on the decades-old compensation formulas that keep film and TV scribes afloat between gigs.

Of all the strong convictions expressed by the hundreds of Writers Guild members who took to the streets on Monday, none was more pervasive among the strikers than the certainty that the television business as we know it today will soon be a distant memory.

Many scribes are convinced that soon all television program distribution, or at least the reruns that generate the stuff of mortgage and car payments for WGA members, are going the way of the Web. The advent of buy-to-own downloads, web streaming of full-length segs and DVD box sets by season will combine to put the knife in the kind of mammoth syndication deals that for decades have yielded the biggest windfalls for studios and profit participants.

The CEOs of the struck studios and networks undoubtedly share those fears/concerns -- on that point at least they can all agree. Warner Bros. did well with old-fashioned syndie sales to local broadcast stations of CBS' "Two and a Half Men," but is it the last one? How long will cablers keep paying $1 million-plus for rerun rights to an hourlong series that can be readily accessed on an on-demand basis?

"The media is changing. The way our product is getting out is changing," said writer David Fury as he stood outside the 20th Century Fox lot on Pico Boulevard holding up one end of a large homemade paper banner reading "Writers 4 a Fair Contract." Fury, who also gamely leaned into the street with a sign urging drivers to "Honk 4 Writers" (and they did, through the gamut of Toyotas, Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses, Prius, Hondas, etc.), said the fire this time stems from a desire to protect themselves in the future.

The hangover of the much-reviled formula writers agreed to in the mid-1980s on homevid compensation hovers like smog in Riverside on a windy day in L.A. over every move the scribes and studios try to make on new media. In the view of writers who took roles in Monday's picket street theater, the biggest problem is that the studios have refused to make any moves on the matter.

"The younger writers -- the kids who are now in college -- are not protected" for the new media world order, said Fury, whose credits include "24," "Lost" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."If we don't do it now, a lot of writers are going to wonder why we let them down."

And so it begins, the shutdown scenario no one wanted to see. Sunday's marathon talks between writers and producers couldn't move the sides close enough together to prevent the pickets from going up all over town and key sites in Gotham (click here for the WGA's list of L.A. picket sites).

No new talks are on the horizon, as Variety's Dave McNary reports, but here's to hoping that will change soon. The local weather report forecasts a cooling trend during the next few days for the L.A. area, but we all know the temperature is going to rise several degrees as those pickets hit the street at 9 a.m. Of course, the big question now is how the Teamsters-repped showbiz workers react to pickets, and how showrunners and the multihyphenates a la "The Office" writer-thesps respond to a professional dilemma, as Variety's Josef Adalian and Michael Schneider report.

For a flavor of how workaday scribes are feeling during this season of discontent, check out United Hollywood, a blog maintained by several WGA members. And check Variety.com all day for updates.

Godspeed to John Wells and all of those who have been engaging in shuttle diplomacy during the past 48 hours in the effort to bring about a cease fire agreement between the WGA and the producers.

I sensed a shift in sentiment in the room Saturday night at Hollywood's Cabana Club during the ironically-timed 300th seg celebration of the Wells-produced "ER" -- a shining example of the kind of high-end scripted TV that is at risk in the WGA-Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers contract talks. (I confess to wondering if I wasn't being hopelessly Pollyanna-ish with my post-party post below, but I also felt it couldn't hurt to put some hopeful vibrations out there.)

If Wells, given his background and experience, is the one who can get the sides to build a bridge, or even some temporary scaffolding, to prevent the pickets from going up all over town on Monday, he really will be "the Eisenhower of all showrunners," as Warner Bros. TV boss Peter Roth intro'd him on Saturday night. Fingers crossed...

It was a celebration of a mighty impressive achievement -- "ER's" 300th seg -- but the talk of the party thrown by Warner Bros. Television Saturday night at the Cabana Club in Hollywood was all about what may transpire on Sunday and Monday.

Any gathering of TV industry insiders would have been abuzz with talk of the writers strike called for 12: 01 a.m. Monday and the Hail Mary meeting set for Sunday between the scribes and producers. But with "ER" in particular, it had to be the dominant theme given "ER" exec producer John Wells' background as a former WGA West prexy, one who skillfully helped avert a Defcon 4 scenario in 2001 when contract talks got heated (though not nearly as scalding as they are this time around).

In his brief remarks saluting the show and the people who make it, Warner Bros. TV prexy Peter Roth called Wells "the Eisenhower of all showrunners," and his use of a militaristic comparison was not lost on the crowd, unconscious as it may have been on Roth's part. NBC U Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman was more pointed, saying that Wells was going "fix all of it" in relation to the strike.

During his turn at the mike, Wells didn't use the S-word (except to sheepishly scoff at Ben's remark), but he did note that he'd done the math, and in the 14 seasons since "ER" dawned, skein has produced some 24,682 pages of scripts.

Neal Baer, a WGA negotiating committee member and an "ER" alum (who now shepherds NBC's "Law & Order: SVU" and does the work of angels as a licensed physician in his spare time), was on hand and inundated by "what's gonna happen?" queries. It was intriguing to see Baer and Wells and former "ER" showrunner Lydia Woodward huddled in a heavy-duty discussion toward the end of the evening.

As befitting the spirit of "ER," there was a define touch of optimism to all the strike talk among partygoers. The fact that a meeting was called for Sunday on Friday afternoon, hours after the WGA formally announced its plan to walk out on Monday, was widely dissected and discussed as a flicker of hope. There was also a feeling among the card-carrying types in the room that after Friday's strike announcement, some of the CEOs were starting to get more personally engaged and realize the serious-as-a-heart-attack-ness of the threat at hand.

Maybe, just maybe, there'll be enough of a give-and-take on Sunday for the scribes to hold their fire, even if it's 12- or 24 hour increments. Or in "ER" parlance, let's hope Sunday's meet turns out to be the final act of a two-parter, packed with guest stars and exotic location shoots, with a cliffhanger in the middle...and an uplifting ending by 11:59 p.m. Sunday.

Best quote to come from today's 1:30 p.m. newser at the Writers Guild HQ:

“We have 48 hours. What we really want to do isn’t to strike. What we want to do is negotiate. There still is time.” -- WGA Negotiating Committee head John Bowman.

The atmosphere at the guild's HQ was tight-lipped and fairly grim. This was not a coffee-and-pastry kind of affair.

There wasn't much rhetorical grandstanding by guild brass, and both WGA West prexy Patric Verrone and his WGA East counterpart Michael Winship seemed earnest in expressing that they are more than willing to go back to the bargaining table, so long as the producers ease up on the stance that the home video residual formula be applied to the new media realm as well -- at least "electronic sell-through," or digital downloads, of existing films and TV programs.

“There is still time and a deal to be made before this strike begins. We urge the studios and the networks to come back and bargain fairly,” Winship said.

During the wait for the newser to begin, there was some clucking among the journos and camera folks that the WGA had already gone to the trouble of getting a camera-ready screen backdrop reading "Writers Guild of America Contract 2007."

But after hearing them out, I'm convinced that none of the guild leadership wanted it to get that far -- despite the many accusations to the contrary. When asked whether there was any peacemaker who might step forward to avert this disaster, Verrone sounded firm in his resolve that "what we are seeking is fair," but not damn-the-torpedos defiant, either.

“No one was able to prevent us coming to this moment. There is still a chance that someone or someones will and that’s what we look forward to,” Verrone said.

For updates throughout the weekend, check out Variety.com and the United Hollywood blog maintained by numerous WGA members.

Among the many immediate concerns for WGA members on this dark Friday is what to do with those scripts they've been furiously writing up until the Pencils Down moment arrives. The WGA is asking scribes to turn in copies of their eleventh-hour scripts to the guild so that they can see where the pages stand at the time they were turned in -- and compare them to produced work down the road should things get that far. Studios, of course, are wigging out about this WGA strike rule, and some of them have even dispatched formal letters to scribes under contract expressly stating that they'll be in breach of their agreements contracts if they ship their scripts to the guild.

So what's a working writer to do? I'm told by a veteran talent rep who has vivid memories of the Five Months War of 1988 that scribes would be well-advised to turn in their scripts to their commissioning bodies, and then head to the post office to drop a copy in the mail to themselves, and then stick that package unopened in a drawer. That way they'll have a postmark time stamp to prove, should guild brass inquire later, when they stopped working on it and what shape the script was in when it was turned in.

A writers strike could ruin your whole day. Or night.

My hard-working Variety colleagues spent all day Tuesday turning over rocks and looking into every aspect of what a scribe work stoppage would mean for this town, and none of it is good. TV editors Joe Adalian and Michael Schneider did a fine job of explaining how quickly a strike would KO our favorite latenight companions -- read their reportage by clicking here, and check out the rest of Variety's team coverage by clicking here.

Speaking of our fave latenight companions, here's a look at what David Letterman looked like the last time the WGA went out. While some part of Letterman might want to turn back the clock to those lazy-hazy days of July 1988 when this pic was snapped (actually, he seems so happy these days as little Harry's proud papa I'll be he wouldn't go back for nothin'), fans of quality television do not want to be deprived of our daily and weekly fixes of our fave primetime raves. (No more visits to "The Office," a dimming of "Friday Night Lights," a busted "Big Bang Theory," losing "Lost" in midstream, uprooted "Pushing Daisies," etc.)

So here's to hoping the federal mediator or somebody can bring about a meeting of the minds in the ultimate writers' room this week.

(Letterman pic by Ron Galella/WireImage)

Now this is beach reading.

TV and film director John Rich tells tales of his adventures behind the camera in his recently published memoir "Warm Up the Snake: A Hollywood Memoir" (University of Michigan Press). With a career that stretches from "Our Miss Brooks" (Rich is flanked above by "Brooks" stars Eve Arden and Gale Gordon) to "The Dick Van Dyke Show" to "The Brady Bunch" to "All in the Family" to "MacGyver," he's got the stranger-than-fiction stories to make this a delightful and easy read for anyone with an interest in the biz. There are stories of bad (really bad) or curious behavior by actors, producers, executives, writers and the like that fall into the category of the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same-in-this-town. And there are plenty of once-in-a-lifetime anecdotes like the time Rich had the high-class problem of having to choose between directing the pilot for "All in the Family" and the pilot for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." (The calls from Norman Lear and Moore came on the same day.) "Snake" also offers Rich's personal perspective on how TV directors came into their own at once was once known as the Screen Directors Guild, in no small way thanks to Rich's rabble rousing, and other milestones in DGA history during the past half-century.