Deal Or No Deal?

SO OVER AT United Hollywood there's the first reaction I've seen to the content of the DGA settlement with the AMPTP.

The big question is whether there's enough here to get the WGA to end the strike.

There are a lot of caveats attached up front. People are trying to take the temperature a bit. And anybody who's ever negotiated a contract, or heard stories of a period that cost ten million dollars knows that when a summary raises questions, the only thing you can do is wait for the long form contract and see what the thing actually says.

What seems to be the emerging consensus, at least from the few reacts I've read and the WGA members I've talked to: there's some good stuff in here, and there's a lot of bad stuff in here.

The AMPTP was never very serious about negotiating with the writers. They never did table a full, serious offer, and when they walked out of the negotiations 42 days ago, it was with six poison pill conditions -- one of which they just unceremoniously dropped in making the deal with the DGA.

There's already posts you can read being all impressed that the DGA did in six days what the WGA hasn't been able to do with a three month strike. Suffice it to say that I have my doubts that anyone making this point could ever exist for five minutes in a writing room, since they clearly don't have the sort of intellectual vigor needed to parse labor strategy. What concessions the DGA have gotten from the AMPTP in their deal -- and there were some -- was only possible on the back of that three month stoppage. They can spin it however they want -- they talked to the adults, whatever...but the reality is that the scuttlebut says that the AMPTP only realized that they had to talk about some of these serious issues when the DGA got a backbone and said they wouldn't make a deal without them. That resolve was bought on the backs of three months worth of writer pickets.

The New York Times gives its take on the deal here. The boil-down: the DGA did make inroads, but also punted -- they think that online revenues won't amount to a lot before 2011.

The problem? Repeats. Writers can definitely see the possibility that repeats will shift entirely from broadcast, to the internet. Which means that a payment for reuse that used to be 20K will now be $1200. Not good. That doesn't affect Directors the same way.

Some of the formulas are things that I didn't think they would ever get. I didn't think anybody was going to give up compensation based on ad dollars derived from streaming.

That being said, the length of promotional windows feels long to me; the 100 000 threshold for downloads before a better rate kicks in seems high, and there does seem to be quite a few outs and figures that don't really gibe to me.

In short, it's a start. But I think it's only a start. My only hope is that it's enough to get "informal talks" restarted with the AMPTP.