Many members of the staff of " The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" have been laid off as a result of a strike started on Nov. 5 by Hollywood writers while some of the staff members resolve to continue the strike.
"The Tonight Show" was among the many late-night talk shows that have been forced into reruns since the strike began Nov. 5 in a dispute over pay for work distributed via the Internet, video iPods, cell phones and other new media.
"Everyone I think generally is for the writers, (and) want them to get what they deserve, but people have lives too," Bill McNeill, a "Tonight Show" graphic artist, told NBC4. "All of a sudden your paycheck goes away."
Staff members on many prime time series have also been laid off.
Meanwhile, writers of movies and television series from the 1940s through 1960s expressed their resolve to continue the strike.
"I've never seen the guild with a more properly militant leadership," said Tom Mankiewicz, who wrote many of the early James Bond films. "If we do this right this time, we won't have to do it again."
Negotiations to attempt to end the strike are set to resume Tuesday.
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represent the movie studios and television networks, negotiated four consecutive days through Friday in the first set of talks since the strike began.
The alliance presented what it dubbed a "New Economic Partnership" to writers on Friday, which it said included "groundbreaking moves in several areas of new media, including streaming, content made for new media and programming delivered over digital broadcast channels."
"The entire value of the New Economic Partnership will deliver more than 130 million dollars in additional compensation above and beyond the more than 1.3 billion dollars writers already receive each year," an alliance statement said.
"In response, the WGA has asked for time to study the proposals. While we strongly preferred to continue discussions, we respect and understand the WGA's desire to review the proposal. We look forward to resuming talks on Tuesday."
The proposal "amounts to a massive rollback," Patric M. Verrone, president of WGA, West and Michael Winship, president of WGA, East, said in a joint statement.
"In their new proposal, they made absolutely no move on the download formula (which they propose to pay at the DVD rate), and continue to assert that they can deem any reuse 'promotional' and pay no residual, even if they replay the entire film or TV episode and even if they make money," the guild statement said.
For television episodes streamed over the Internet, producers proposed a residual structure of less than 250 dollars for a year's reuse of an hour-long program, compared to more than 20,000 dollars for a network rerun, according to the guild statement. No residuals were offered for movies that are streamed.
Writers would receive a script fee of 1,300 dollars for made- for-the Internet programming of at least 15 minutes. There was no change on the residual formula for downloads, while any reuse of programming can be considered promotional, allowing payment of residuals to be avoided.
The writers said their proposal would cost 151 million dollars over three years, "a little over a 3 percent increase in writer earnings every year, while company revenues are projected to grow at a rate of 10 percent."
"The AMPTP's intractability is dispiriting news, but it also must be motivating," the guild statement said. "Any movement on the part of these multinational conglomerates has been the result of the collective action of our membership."
"We must fight on, returning to the lines on Monday in force to make it clear that we will not back down, that we will not accept a bad deal and that we are all in this together," said the statement.
(Xinhua News Agency December 2, 2007)
