US News
Bad Hollywood Christmas forecast: Writers strike talks collapse
By M&C US news
Dec 8, 2007, 4:48 GMT

The dispute between Hollywood’s striking writers and producers is about to become more complicated as the Directors Guild of America, whose own contract is up next June, insert themselves in the fray.

Gilbert Cates, who heads the directors’ negotiating team, said his union was carefully monitoring progress in the writers’ talks.

The directors introduce their own different take on nitpicky issues like the payments for the distribution of movies and television shows on the Web and through other new-media outlets.

For weeks, the directors guild has been on the brink of opening negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, even as they continue nasty negotiations with both the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West.

Those discussions broke down Friday night.

Trade paper Below the Line reports that in a letter to members on Friday morning, the presidents of the two writers’ guilds lashed out at the producers for holding back proposals and challenged them to negotiate with them “day and night, through the Christmas and New Years holidays” to end the strike.

Representatives for producers accused them of spending more time during the negotiating sessions talking among themselves than to their bargaining counterparts.

On Friday, Gilbert Cates, who heads the directors’ negotiating team, said his union had not yet decided when to open negotiations and was carefully monitoring progress in the writers talks. “If they can come to an agreement, we’ll all have a party,” Mr. Cates said.

If the directors push for less than their screenwriting peers on some points, the writers can be undermined and made to choose a lesser deal for their union members. Spokesmen for the producers alliance and the writers declined to discuss possible talks with the directors.

The directors have seen advantage in early settlement of their contracts. (The current contract expires June 30, on the same day as that of the much larger Screen Actors Guild.)

In both 2001 and 2004, for instance, the guild reached agreements with producers months before existing three-year deals expired, winning what leaders described as gains from work in new technologies and funds to protect a buckling health plan.

“We’re not going to be unreasonable, but we’re tough,” Mr. Cates said of his guild’s approach. “That’s how movies get made.”

To date, however, relations between the unions have been cool, at best. Leaders of the writers’ guild have been straining to break a cycle under which directors have often reached agreements that became a pattern for the industry on central issues. (The directors have struck only once in their history, during a 1987 walkout that lasted for three hours on the East Coast and only minutes in the West.)