Here, Alan Greenspan, help us out here: In Ayn Rand's defining work, Atlas Shrugged, the world's defining original thinkers and innovators band together and go on strike, preferring to remove their gifts from the world rather than have them exploited and abused by the cheap, venal, mercenary second-handers and followers who failed to appreciate their brilliance. The strikers all retreated, leaving a crumbling infrastructure behind them, to follow their leader, the mysterious John Galt, into his unfortunately-named lair (I'm sorry, but could "Galt's Gulch" sound any less lofty and inspiring?). Eventually, after many pages, John Galt gave one of those interminably long speeches that were Ayn Rand's signature (that and strong heroines who liked passionate-slash-rough sex, usually in the outdoors), where she simply couldn't help herself from expounding on her Objectivist philosophy for pages and pages and pages. If you haven't read Atlas Shrugged (or The Fountainhead, for that matter), don't worry, I'm not ruining it for you.
My point — and I do have one, other than invoking images of Howard Roark naked on a cliff — is that I have kept coming back to that analogy during the course of this writers' strike. Somehow, the writers have managed to cast themselves as the ultimate John Galts — the mysterious, shadowy figures behind the shows that are our TV lifeblood, the people who make Jim love Pam and keep Carlos and Gabby running around Wisteria Lane half-naked and alone know the full reach of power concentrated in one single blonde auto-regenerating teenager — never mind keeping Ellen funny. In one of the many highly-effective YouTube videos mounted in the recent strike-inspired creative explosion , Lost exec producer Carlton Cuse holds a sign that says, "Do you want to know what the island is?" The message is clear: The studios may have the money, but the writers have the power. They know. Power is information, and the writers have it all locked upstairs, where it can't never be downloaded. As Gawker's Josh Stein so delicately put it, the writers' strike has "gripped the nation by its creative balls." And, yes, Nation, that includes Colbert.
On the flip side, there hasn't exactly been all that much sympathy for the AMPTP (starting with the name — "Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers" has all the charm of "Galt's Gulch"). The moguls and studio heads have seemed brightly impervious to the strike ("Writing? What is this 'writing' of which you speak?") as they have touted great results, celebrated the side-benefit savings of not having to produce scripted work (reality TV shall save!), and enthused about how well reruns do. The writers have been eviscerating in their counterattack, laying the profits bare using the moguls' own words and noting ironies of their own hardball efforts to assert digitial rights, in hard-cash terms — all while ratcheting up public sympathy over how much they're not making from the enterprise. Per Office writer/co-producer Mike Schur:"You're watching this on the internet, a thing that pays us zero dollars." Aw! Mean greedy studio heads, let these writers back to work! America needs to laugh again!
As Adam Sternbergh notes in this week's New York magazine, the writers have done a bang-up job of selling their cause, as opposed to Broadway's striking stagehands, who have been painted as the Grinches of the holiday season for excited out-of-town ticket holders. Sternbergh notes that the writers have framed this as an issue of fairness, of credit, and of forward-looking embrace of a changing era — all about the pie, and how much of a piece they're not getting, even though they're responsible for dreaming up the whole damn thing. Of course, this doesn't acknowledge plenty on the part of the studios — the fact that they make the whole bloody pie come together by hiring everyone necessary for production — including the writers — and also paying for promotion and every other administrative cost, plus shouldering the massive burden of risk should the whole thing go belly-up (cough Coupling cough Joey cough Studio 60 etc. etc.). But who cares? You don't, and the writers know it. It's pretty hard to sympathize with Roger A. Travanti.
There's something innocent and pure, too, about the writers here: Sure, they're striking for money, but that's not why they write — that they do for love. On the heels of the actual strike came blog posts, articles, YouTube videos, impromptu stage productions and actual made-for-Internet movies — all done pointedly for free, to say to the audience, "Hey — we hate this too. We're on YOUR side — against THEM!" It's all a message that has been working.
And for the perfect amount of time, too — now the parties are back at the negotiating table (perhaps with an agreement already in place, as Nikki Finke reports) — while new strike videos are still a novelty (though waning) and audiences haven't yet had time to shift viewing habits to new shows or networks, or to DVD box sets and finally downloading that critically-acclaimed series that they've been meaning to watch (Veronica Mars; Freaks & Geeks; According To Jim). It may be too late for Journeyman, but it's not too late for The Office or 30 Rock or Jay or Conan or SNL. That wouldn't have taken much longer, and in truth studios probably wouldn't have felt the pinch — just the added revenue from surging DVD sales and digital downloads. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, until you forget about what you were missing in the first place, and why would you bother to remember when there's a special two-hour version of "American Idol" on? There's no better time than now for the writers to get the AMPTP back to the table, because there's no time when the public will want them back as much. Even Galt had to leave the Gulch sometime.
Related:
Studio Boss Roger A. Travanti at the NY Picket Lines [YouTube]
Dreamy McStrikey! Unexpected By-Product of the Writers' Strike: Great Material [ETP]
Gotta Write! Daily Show Writers Just Can't Help Themselves [ETP]
Sorta Related:
"We write the story-a for Eva Longoria!" [ABC]
Read more about the strike on the Huffington Post's writers' strike page.