The pickets were thick around Warner Bros. today.
WGA directed all of its feet on the street to beautiful downtown Burbank, to the house that Sam, Jack, Harry and Albert built and to NBC. Best surreal-world juxtaposition of the day was seeing Josh Friedman, showrunner and exec producer of Fox/Warner Bros. TV's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," picketing outside the studio while taking what appeared to be congratulatory calls on his cell phone for "Sarah Connor's" super-strong preem on Sunday night (18.3 million viewers and 7.6 rating/18 share in the adults 18-49, boffo by any definition.)
Warner Bros. was the prime target for today's pickets as the scribes tried to show some support for the more than 1,000 studio facilities and maintenance workers that may get pinkslipped at any time, now that so many of the studio's stages are dark.
Guild was distributing a flier around the studio grounds alerting the newly unemployed that they may be eligible for some financial support from the WGA Foundation. "YOU have worked hard for this company. WE have worked hard for this company. NONE OF US deserve to be treated like this."
Numerous picket signs featured Xerox images of Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes and Time Warner chairman Richard Parsons with their eight-figure annual salaries listed ($18.65 million and $22.47 million, respectively.) Warner Bros.' direct bosses didn't escape derision either: "Alan Horn deserves your scorn" and "Barry Meyer is a liar" were also seen on a few picket signs.
A large homemade banner propped up at the corner of Gate 2 and Olive Avenue proclaimed: "1000-plus fired because Warner won't deal."
Despite the pall cast by the threatened layoffs, there was a fair amount of optimism expressed by pickets about the apparent progress in the DGA's talks with the majors during the past 72 hours. The hope is that a DGA deal, if it comes together soon, can serve as a basis for the resumption of talks with the WGA.
"I hope they get some concessions. Anybody getting concessions is a good thing," said "House" exec producer David Shore. "Having a fresh face for (AMPTP) to sit down with is good -- someone they don't already hate."
Some are suspicious of what they see as the AMPTP's divide-and-conquer strategy in juggling its contract talks with the guilds.
"They think they can break this union. You can see that's not happening," said Allison Interieri, a TV scribe who pointed to the sea of red shirts and picket signs that ringed the studio grounds.
"The CEOs strategy is divide and conquer (the WGA). But they still have to put a deal on the table that's good enough to divide people," said scribe Sivert Glarum. "There's still no talk out here that the strike was the wrong thing to do."
-- Cynthia Littleton
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