POLITICS : Tinsel Strike
Fund, John H.
PolITIcs Tinsel Strike by John H. Fund T he hollywood strike that consumed the entertainment industry for three months as writers and producers battled it out is over. Ostensibly,...
...It had never been done before,” one writer told me...
...Today, Berg finds the very notion of a blacklist chilling given that it’s Hollywood that has “obsessed” about the evils of the McCarthy era’s blacklisting of Communist sympathizers...
...Many people—including myself—have continued those new habits since the strike ended...
...PolITIcs Tinsel Strike by John H. Fund T he hollywood strike that consumed the entertainment industry for three months as writers and producers battled it out is over...
...Berg noted, that conservatives are ostracized for their beliefs...
...Ostensibly, the fight was over how much of the revenue from New Media sources like the Internet would go to the writers instead of the producers...
...No one in the industry I spoke with believes that anyone fixed with those scarlet letters would “ever work in this town again...
...It’s so chilling it would make a great screenplay—but, of course, it would never be produced...
...Indeed, in a famous 1932 Oxford University speech given just a few months before Hitler took power, the influential socialist novelist and theorist H.G...
...Many of its leaders were playing out hoary class-warfare fantasies in which they were playing the roles of the suffering proletariat revolting against their overbearing masters...
...If you’ve seen Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of a greedy, sinister oilman in There Will Be Blood, it’s just another example of the Hollywood left’s contempt for capitalism...
...They’ve long been out of the closet...
...54 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 But in the minds of the Writers Guild leadership, the strike was about more than mere money...
...Actors would not cross the line...
...It naturally follows, Mr...
...The show’s ratings began to tick up even though the only guests who would cross the picket lines were NBC News anchors, performing animal acts, and presidential candidates such as Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul...
...Film after film has highlighted the horrors of excluding people from earning their living because of their beliefs, most recently George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck...
...At a conservative retreat held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as the strike finally ended in February, donors to the Republican National Committee got a similar battlefield report JoHn H. funD from the front lines of the strike from Dave Berg, a segment producer and “political director” for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show...
...We had to go back to work as the No...
...Any writers who dared to continue their craft or work on projects were subject to being branded as “traitors” and “scabs...
...Complicating a strike settlement was the presence of David Young, the Writers Guild executive director, who as a former organizer for the Teamsters and construction unions brought a radical perspective to the negotiations...
...I didn’t read this anywhere, but they were threatened with blackballing if they crossed the line to do our shows...
...Of the 12,000 members of the Writers Guild, only a few hundred are absolutely necessary to keep Hollywood working...
...It was between the occasionally employed writer and the regularly employed writer...
...David Ressner of Politico.com, who attended the donor meeting, noted that Berg generated much mirth as he peppered “his speech with references to Michael Moore, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and other Tinseltown lefties, and argued against the liberal mindset that he believes dominates the industry...
...The actions the radical leftists here condemn in others are the very ones they justify in their own behavior...
...But the battle was also a classic ideological struggle—at least in the fevered minds of the striking leadership of the Writers Guild of America...
...Berg says, the irony is that “the true threat of McCarthyism is coming from the left...
...Others believe the union’s leftist leadership hurt itself in the long run...
...So why did the writers do it, risking that a lot of people would realize they didn’t miss their work and move on to doing something more fulfilling...
...Wells even called for leftists to become “enlightened Nazis...
...They also brought in Jesse Jackson and John Edwards—a first for Hollywood unions that normally try to hide their leftist lamps under a bushel...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 55...
...During the strike he had time to read Jonah Goldberg’s new book Liberal Fascism (Doubleday), which argues that in practical terms contemporary liberalism has far more to do with historical fascism than does anything on the modern right...
...Berg, one of the few political dissidents in Hollywood, observed that conservatives were an endangered species in the entertainment industry...
...The truth is that the strike really wasn’t between the producers and the writers...
...The gays have been accepted in Hollywood for years...
...We [conservatives] believe capitalism isn’t a dirty word,” he told the GOP donors...
...In the end, all the producers had to do was wait for the competing factions within the Writers Guild membership to start tearing at each other...
...As for the strike, Berg ridiculed the Writers Guild’s “radical” negotiators portraying themselves as “poor, exploited, downtrodden” workers, “acting like it’s 1957” and they were auto workers yearning to return to the assembly line...
...I n the end, the strike began to fall apart when the Tonight Show went back on NBC without its writers in early January...
...What the hell did we have in common with janitors and the lady from the Motor Vehicle Bureau...
...Many viewers suddenly discovered they just didn’t need to watch as much TV...
...Wells, commenting on the already clear political success of the Nazis, believed that socialists could themselves better implement their own vision by adopting the methods of their National Socialist cousins...
...John H. fund, The American Spectator’s Politics columnist, is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...Both sides claim to be satisfied with the settlement they finally reached, but in reality they both lost...
...Rob Long, one of the scriptwriters on the TV classic Cheers, was amused that the Writers Guild—of which he is an 18-year member—was “marching its membership to glorious and pointless suicide...
...People have called Hollywood conservatives ‘the new gays,’ but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case,” he deadpanned...
...When the writers went on strike November 5, they entrusted their futures to a leadership that essentially believes Karl Marx is still relevant,” he said...
...In fact, they’re fixing up the closet, decorating it, and it looks nice, actually...
...Berg finds the very notion of a blacklist chilling given that it’s Hollywood that has “obsessed” about the evils of the McCarthy era’s blacklisting of Communist sympathizers...
...4 network with no writers and no stars...
...They thought they were finally manning the barricades to fight the capitalist pigs their lefty parents had told them about...
...The WGA cut a side deal with David Letterman but not with our show,” Berg recalled...
...Reading Goldberg, it made me realize that the leftinHollywoodisallaboutprojection,”aHollywood writer friend told me...
...It was beyond surreal,” one writer told me...
...Hypocrisy in Hollywood is nothing new, but the Writers Guild strike was an unusual manifestation of just how perverted it can become...
...He invited members from those unions and others to join the picket lines the writers had set up...
...This was a revolution against The Man...
...You would get these invitations to strike meetings and it was hilarious,” says one Hollywood writer, who for “career reasons” chooses to remain anonymous...
...An Entertainment Weekly survey found that four in ten people read more books during the strike and 27 percent decided simply to sleep more...
...He chuckles as he recalls seeing people in $300 sunglasses arriving with $800 leather briefcases and “acting as if they were subscribers to the Daily Worker...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
