IATSE President Sends Smackdown Letter To WGA President

Hollywood Reporter:

The head of IATSE said that WGA West president Patric Verrone always wanted a strike.

In a letter dated Tuesday and distributed Wednesday to the media, IATSE international president Tom Short recalls having cautioned Verrone that a failure to engage with the studios much earlier than the WGA planned would produce "devastation" and that the prediction has come true with the WGA's 10-day-old strike.

"It now seems that you were intending that there be a strike no matter what you were offered or what conditions the industry faced when your contract expired at the end of October," Short wrote.

Read the whole story: Hollywood Reporter

Comments

[wadenelson1]

Wow. Nothing like threatening your creative partners with "devastati­on."

You get the sense the studios decided a long time ago they were unwilling to share revenues from Internet revenues; that this is the core of their beliefs, that writers simply don't deserve a share, however small.

Why else wouldn't they agree to even a tiny amount of revenue sharing? They WANT to devastate the writers. They don't want a settlement that allows them to continue making money, even 1.5% less than what they could make if the got it all.

Damn, it sucks to be in America these days.