Who Writes All Those Clever Slogans?

We are nearing the end of day one of the crisis we call The Writer's Strike. I confess that I feel just a twinge of guilt as I sit down to pound out these words, knowing that my fellow scribes are out there, somewhere in the dark with their signs and their chants. Reports from the picket lines this morning suggested that only about half of the picketers wore their official red strike T-shirts."Writers aren't the easiest cats to corral," said Don McGill, a writer for the CBS series "Numb3rs."
Not easy to corral indeed. I reflect on my struggle to be part of the union I belong to, and I understand the difficulty in being part of a herd. The thought of being out of work for days, weeks or months is almost paralyzing to me, and the idea that I would be asked to stay away from my job for the good of my profession as a whole is a tough one for me to swallow. I agree with the writers who say that it is ridiculous to continue a wait-and-see attitude when it comes to DVD sales, since this is still an "emerging technology". So emerging in fact that I have two of these machines in my home. As for residuals for Internet play, the two words that come to my mind are "You" and "Tube". Shouldn't there be some acknowledgement of the way that the world has begun to watch movies and television? Prime-time is over. It's a world of Tivo and on-demand video.
Back in 1988, the last time writers went on strike, the show biz industry lost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This may seem like a lot of money (because it is), but when one considers the box office receipts for last weekend, a non-holiday weekend in the Fall, amounted to just over one hundred and eighteen million dollars, it's hard to figure just how fretful that number truly is.
If you want to feel real fear, just remember that it was the last writer's strike that spawned "Hard Copy". Does anybody really want that on their conscience? Please, for everyone's sake, settle fast.