Movies, writers on strike, world labor markets

Variety, the daily entertainment journal, has as it lead story for today, "Will producers turn to U.K. writers?". With the Writers Guild of America on strike and t.v. production slogging to a close (this is the kind of infelicitious phrase Variety writers love), producers in Hollywood are about to remind us that Karl Marx was on to something when he said "workers of the world unite".

But hold on, before Hollywood goes hiring Brits there is a Writers Guild of Great Britain to think about. What does the WGGB have to say? Variety reports: "We are contacting the major U.K. broadcasters and producers, and the U.K. Film Council, asking them not to dump U.K. material into the U.S. market and not to dress up American projects to look as though they are British," said general secretary Bernie Corbett. "Strike-breaking would at best be a short-term payday but would have a devastating long-term effect on a writer's U.S. career."

Sounds easy enough. Respect the rules, and the writers will win the day. Well not so fast. Sony, Universal, etc. have production subsidiaries in England, and their productions are non-WGA, even though the projects may be written by British members of the U.S. WGA. This, and a dozen other loopholes in union contracts mean that projects can go ahead in London and other parts of the world.

We ought not to be surprised about messy rules. The World Trade Organization's "Doha Round" trade talks are entering into its 7th year of futility, mostly because buying and selling of intellectual property is not like trading soy beans. If we can't figure out patent protection for pharmaceuticals, what makes anyone think we can figure out movie and television production?

Does this mean that we are all going to be watching movies and television shows written by witty Brits?

'Fraid not, mate. While the WGA strike may turn out to be the opportunity some British fellow has been waiting for years, frankly I am not too worried for the WGA. Few of the Brit blokes have the slightest chance of even writing for the U.S. version of the British hit "Office". The calculus is not difficult. You can sell "Made in China" rag dolls, but topical t.v. comedy, like town politics, needs to be made locally, even if later on its sells globablly. "The Office", which shut down production this week in the U.S. will stay shut down unless the "scabs" the studios find over in London are some very talented American expatriates.

Thought we can expect to find a few more big budget movies produced via G.B. and other global film centers, the biggest employer of writers, television, can not go abroad. In Hollywood and New York, they are stuck with the American idiom. Our language was invented on the other side of the Atlantic, but the buck long ago washed onto the New England shores and made its road-movie journey out to L.A.

The drama on the Hollywood studio lots may go on for some time yet, providing fun and anecdotes -- stories of Teamsters, the famous out at 5 am on picket lines, and so on. And in the mayhem, Hollywood will lose several hundred million before the town's social structure is back in place.

But this little psycho-drama is nothing compared to what is coming from across two oceans to L.A.'s west. Within a decade, we can expect Bollywood to compete in the mega-project Blockbuster market. Bollywood may even start buying Hollywood stars. Just imagine. Tom Cruise gets dumped by Sumner Redstone, and instead of killing his resuscitated United Artists by making serious movies, he goes off to India to find enlightenment.