The New Economic Partnership

For most of the week, the AMPTP seemed very much a Coalition of the Unwilling.

On Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, they spent most of their time, and ours, reiterating in laborious detail their old positions. As Wolcott Gibbs once said, "backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind."

But then, yesterday, the AMPTP remembered--oh, yes, here it is--that they actually had a proposal. Not just any proposal: a fine fine superfine proposal, a comprehensive and epochal proposal, a proposal so large it deserved its own name. And so, with grand fanfare and the grand fluttering of press releases, the AMPTP unveiled...

[drum roll, please]

...the New Economic Partnership!

• A win-win! A grand, sweeping solution to everyone's problems!

• NEP: something Roosevelt would have loved!

• Economic Partnership--a choriamb followed by a dactyl! A phrase so mellifluous, it must be good news!

Alas, the New Economic Partnership--like, for instance, The Clear Skies Act of 2003, or The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, or Operation Enduring Freedom--is perhaps somewhat at odds with its own title.

Because when you Read the Fine Print, the New Economic Partnership offers this to its New Partners:

• No movement, not even a fraction of a fraction of a cent, on the core issue of these negotiations, internet downloads.

• For internet streaming of television programs, a flat fee of $250 for a year's re-use of an hour-long episode (compared to the current $20K for a network rerun).

• For internet streaming of movies: $0.00.

• And, oh yes: the companies can, at their discretion, deem any streaming internet re-use "promotional"--and pay nothing. Even if it is larded with ads. Even if they're making money on it.

This is the proposal which they term "groundbreaking."

David Mamet--who today celebrates his 60th birthday--in 1989 wrote the seminal essay Film is a Collaborative Business, in which he said, "From a screenwriters point of view, the correct rendering should be, 'Film is a collaborative business: bend over.'"

It becomes increasingly clear that to the conglomerates, "partnership," like "collaboration," is a term of art.

For writers, at this juncture, perhaps the most apposite disquisition on partnership was uttered by Hyman Roth (as written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola in Godfather II).

Roth put it simply:

"I'm going to take a nap. When I wake up, if the money is on the table, I'll know I have a partner. If it isn't, I'll know I don't."

Read more strike coverage on the Huffington Post's writers' strike page.

Comments

[InofTouch]

well first off...be glad that now there a piece of paper involve...but it wasn't as that if this plan was final....that the way I readed...so of course it the WGA turn to edit out the NEP

[splashy]

The parasites are at it again, trying to screw the creative people that actually create the product.

Pathetic.

[JailNeoconVicts]

It seems to me that the answer, sooner or than later, is to bypass the studios altogether and create new, if smaller, companies that will honor WGA terms, perhaps be run by WGA members, hire people the studios have laid off, and who can then stream their own content and sell directly to advertisers online. Sooner or later TV and broadband are going to merge anyway.

Many might fail along the way, but those that survive will replace the dinosaurs who think nothing of putting thousands out of work to the tune of a single mogul's bonus compensation.

[Danny]

Wonder if the French strikers did any better ...

[realitytrumpsbull]

How about The Balanced Budget Act of 2008?
Let's get the Con Me into the black, there,
before they start having any more economic
partnerships.

[freddy2000]

My family does craft service for some of the shut-down shows--- we were hanging on every word this week for the strike to resolve. We are pretty financially devestated -- if this goes on much longer I don't know what will happen. You guys are starting to sound pretty arrogant.

[Cubancoffee]

And let's not forget, somebody *wrote* that line for Hyman Roth.

[petegrif]

It shouldn"t surprise us that the "new" proposal is so lame. The real question is "why is there a strike?" It stems from the fact that the film and TV businesses are facing major strategic problems occasioned by technological change. The impact of the internet should not be a surprise to anyone other than the most seriously myopic because it has been luminously clear for at least fifteen years that the same tidal wave that swamped the music business was heading for film and TV. Fifteen years the obscenely well paid senior management of these media companies has had to assess the challenge and construct a strategic response. But Instead of addressing this most profound of all strategic questions they have stuck their heads in the sand and continued with the existing business model. The wave is now breaking over the bow of the ship and panic has set in. Their desperate response to a situation that is spiraling out of control is to squeeze the employees. Writers, actors and directors are to suffer a pay cut. But business history is rife with examples of this tactic. It is the typical response of second rate management reacting to a problem they have failed to deal with " they don"t have a real solution so they set out to cut costs and hope it will become their successor"s problem. It is striking that they are not themselves volunteering to cut costs by reducing their own boated remuneration, even when they have so obviously miserably failed to address one of the key responsibilities of senior management " how should the organization respond to a significant environmental threat? Perhaps that isn't what is meant by a new economic partnership! This is just second rate management passing its failures down the line and trying to make others pay the price of their incompetence. That is the real reason they have precipitated a writer"s strike " to continue to enjoy their fat salaries and postpone the day when the wave breaks over the wheelhouse and sweeps this crew of sorry losers into the ocean.

[zaneblue]

I'm so ANGRY! I'm pining for The Colbert Report, but how on earth can they even begin to call that any sort of negotiations! How insulting.

[parisblues]

"New Economic Partnership"? So now we know: Bushspeak, regrettably, is contageous.

[jonwiener]

No Writer Left Behind -- sounds great! The LA Times report this morning left out some key info. They did report the offer was zero for promotional material on the internet -- but they left out that the companies can deem any internet re-use "promotional" even if they're making money on it.

[zenx98]

Since every Mafia don's son has been to Harvard business school since Meyer Lanski hit Vegas, is it really any wonder you have a deal you can't refuse?