[Marxism] A political strike in Tinseltown?

[Louis Proyect]

(Thanks to "B" who posted this on Doug Henwood's list. *Very* 
interesting stuff.)

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/business/la-et-scriptland19dec19,0,1689399.story

SCRIPTLAND: Strike plucks a political nerve
In this six-week-old strike, the writers and producers have increasingly 
taken on the surgical rhetoric and hardball strategies of rival 
political campaigns.
By Jay A. Fernandez

December 19, 2007

The personal is political, as they say, and at times of labor unrest, 
the professional becomes even more so. In this roiling tempest of 
competing interests that is the 6-week-old writers strike, the 
combatants have increasingly taken on the surgical rhetoric and hardball 
strategies of rival political campaigns.

"For them, this is not a writers strike. It's about changing society," 
one unnamed executive griped about the striking Hollywood film and TV 
writers in Variety last Sunday. "We are so frustrated. We're dealing 
with people who don't care about this community. They care about making 
social change in America."

Leaving aside the nonsensical logic that the Writers Guild of America's 
efforts to "change society" would somehow exclude its own creative 
community, this declamation does call attention to a theory that's been 
floating around parts of town. In interviews over the last month or so, 
producers, writers and managers have been musing that the debilitating 
battle between the writers and their corporate employers mirrors the 
liberal citizenry's frustration with what they perceive as the 
condescending paternalism of the Bush administration.

In this model, what the writers object to is a business and political 
culture that increasingly seeks to disenfranchise them from having a say 
in huge decisions about their industry's future, and thus a measure of 
control over their own professional identities and livelihoods. "Trust 
us," the companies seem to be saying in a dismissive echo of Bush 
policy, "we know what's best for you."

As such, the strike's potency may be gaining a boost from a kind of 
displaced revolutionary zeal. While it's not the motivation for their 
protest, subconsciously at least, a lot of picketing writers may be 
energized by the opportunity to fight back in a public way that, unlike 
with government protests of the last four years, has an immediate, 
noticeable effect. Of course, this implies a sizable overlap between 
Bush critics and the Hollywood writers, which, anecdotally anyway, seems 
a fair assumption.

Dana Fox ("The Wedding Date") admits that when she found herself on the 
picket line the first day, she experienced a sense of shame that she had 
never picked up a sign to protest the Iraq war. She notes that when her 
father accompanied her to the Hollywood solidarity march a few weeks 
ago, he marveled that he hadn't done anything like this since protesting 
the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

"Up until now I've never had a sense that I can actually do anything 
about any of this," said Fox, alluding to the feelings of helplessness 
attached to her displeasure with the Bush administration. "This [strike] 
has really invigorated me. To that end, it is consciousness-raising. And 
it does make me feel like it's about something bigger than just this 
strike. It's about all of the injustices. It's about the little guy 
against a bigger machine."

And it may not be just the writers playing out this dynamic -- their 
corporate opposition is playing into its role too.

"I wouldn't be surprised if on [the studios'] end there's a certain 
amount of paranoia, feeling that they got really fat on the Bush years," 
said Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jose Rivera ("The Motorcycle 
Diaries"). "This administration has obviously been so pro-business, 
pro-corporation that [the studios] may be feeling like, 'Oh, my God, 
they're storming the barricades!' And that this is just the tip of the 
iceberg."

As one producer with a studio deal joked, Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn 
famously treated the writers like bothersome children too, but at least 
they were children from the same family. These days, vertical 
integration has forced a mercenary corporate culture down through the 
very human ranks of studios and networks that used to be filled with 
actual movie and TV lovers. Now it's as if the top executive ranks are a 
different race -- brutal bean counters, not simpatico cinema dreamers -- 
who don't even know how to speak to their creative personnel, let alone 
make decisions based on their sense of fairness.

And the political parallels suddenly became literal in early December 
when the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the 
studios' and networks' negotiating lobby, hired three public relations 
wizards to manage the press war against the guild. Mark Fabiani and 
Chris Lehane, who worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and Steve 
Schmidt, who worked for the Bush White House on Supreme Court 
confirmation hearings, have now joined the fray.

But not everyone sees a connection. "When you feel in a powerless 
situation, there is something to being able to make yourself heard and 
seen," said Oscar-nominated writer Josh Olson ("A History of Violence"). 
"[But] I wouldn't say that that relates specifically to current events. 
I think that's pretty common."

Jon Lucas ("Four Christmases") worked in Washington, D.C., briefly 
before moving to L.A. and marched in Hollywood against the Iraq war in 
2003. He says those experiences made him question the value of public 
protest. Yet he notes that the picketing WGA, unlike the occasional 
left-wing political crowd, has no lunatic fringe element that confuses 
the message with ludicrous conspiracy theories.

"There are no nut jobs here," as Lucas put it on the line last week, 
while acknowledging that the new studio PR brigade will now likely paint 
them as just those types of radicals. But then, maybe that's not a bad 
thing.

"Every time I go out, my 15-year-old son says, 'Dad, are you gonna go 
stick it to the Man today?' " Rivera said with a laugh. "So it's like, 
'All right, I guess I am sticking it to the Man.' "

He's got an eye for the invisible

"In the big city, the story of the taxi driver is a more interesting 
story than the passengers," says screenwriter Steven Knight. "But it 
never gets told."

Knight is quietly building an enviable career out of rectifying that 
oversight with his taut, excavating screenplays. In "Dirty Pretty 
Things," which earned him a 2003 original screenplay Oscar nomination, 
Knight built his grim mystery around London's immigrant service 
subculture -- a Nigerian hotel porter, a Turkish chambermaid, a Russian 
doorman.

For the bruising "Eastern Promises," Knight's creative eye remained 
attuned to the foreign, the exploited, the invisible. He spent time in 
New York City with the FBI's organized crime division as well as with 
the Russian desk of Scotland Yard ("a very underfunded group of people," 
he says dryly) to help nail the details of the London crime family 
depicted in "Promises," including Nikolai, the ruthless Russian driver 
inhabited by Viggo Mortensen.

But Knight's most fascinating and random discovery became the 
inspiration for Semyon, the sinister patriarch played by Armin 
Mueller-Stahl with such sugary menace. One evening, Knight was enjoying 
a cigar in a London restaurant when the Russian, cigar-chomping owner 
wandered over and started up a conversation. Knight was quickly struck 
by the man's discomforting contradictions -- he was clearly connected to 
shady dealings but took time to read Pushkin to institutionalized 
countrymen.

"He was this really hospitable, intelligent, well-read person who was 
also involved in this business . . . ," says Knight. "As a writer, when 
you come across that, I think that gives you permission to then create a 
world around him. Because if reality is that bizarre, then you can start 
working with it."

Indeed, writing the scene when the naïf Anna, played by Naomi Watts, 
first enters Sem- yon's restaurant was the exhilarating moment when the 
script's story clicked into place for him. From that spark, Knight began 
wondering who this man's family might be, so he kept returning to that 
world to chat and smoke with the owner, quietly filing away details, 
like the peculiar rhythms of the owner's speech.

"That's exactly the point, which hopefully was the same in 'Dirty Pretty 
Things,' " Knight says. "In a hotel, if you walk through a door marked 
'Staff Only,' you enter a whole different world. It's like Narnia. With 
'Eastern Promises,' the idea is that when you walk into that restaurant 
the rules have changed. When Anna wanders in, the story begins."

Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of 
screenwriters. Please e-mail any tips or comments to 
fernandez_jay at hotmail.com.