Already plagued by questions about which honorees might be willing to cross the WGA picket line to collect their gilded tokens of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's inscrutable esteem, the producers of the Golden Globes learned late yesterday that the Guild had turned down a waiver request to allow WGA…
We sacrificed vidkid Alex Goldberg to possible pneumonia and sent him to check out the joint WGA-Viacom protest outside Viacom this afternoon. There was some confusion among WGAers about what exactly they were doing in midtown, other than, you know, trying for the 39th day in a row to get paid or something. "The MTV…
Is anyone confused by all the fuss over freelancer benefits in the Viacom mess? Freelancer, permalancer, part-time employee, full-time employee: What's the difference anymore? Why are Viacom's independent contractors complaining about having their benefits cut when the general impression is that freelancers don't…
From the mailbag: "The Viacom Walk-Out seems to have disintegrated into a dance session in Times Square. The chanting is sooo catchy!"
The Writers Guild of America East is marching on Viacom Thursday morning! "Students and future members of the Writers Guild will join us to march with us, learn about the issues of our strike and show their support," reads a description of the event on their website. Hey, the longer the picket line, the shorter the…
Thousands of Viacom's permalancers and contract employees have been encouraged to walk out and rally today at 3 p.m., in protest of the terms of their new contracts. N.B.: we rebut this announcement a little. The Times and the Post and others certainly have been alerted, and no doubt they'll finally show up today, but…
Keach Hagey, the short-lived former Village Voice press columnist, is suggesting over on her blog at CBS News that yesterday's video of an average white man being assaulted by a group of black teenage girls on the A train could be a hoax. Why? Because the girl who filmed it was an aspiring filmmaker who claimed, at…
In Gandhi's 1929 autobiography The Story of My Experiments in Truth, the founder of modern-day non-violent resistance wrote:
Broadway negotiations are going about as expected: "About 2 a.m. yesterday, a union official who was outside with other officials for a cigarette break got in a fistfight with a panhandler walking around 48th Street."
CBS News writers represented by the WGA have voted to authorize the Guild to call a strike. Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America, East, was all like "This is a wake-up call to CBS News management. We're saying that we are really at the end of our rope," CBS News was basically all like "Whatevs,…
Now that they're on strike, it seems like screenwriters are busier and more productive than ever. But left to their own devices, it turns out that they are a distinctly unfunny bunch. Put a bunch of 'em in a room and eventually they'll write Six Feet Under, but in the end they're just monkeys—monkeys writing for the …
Will Broadway's stagehands walk out tonight? Maybe! Man, if they strike, and if the writers don't get their asses back to work, we are totally going to be out of entertainment in this city. Except for... the books? [[NYP]]
Magazine and newspaper advertising folks just don't know what they're missing! While they may have invented the advertorial ad, wherein, say, Washington Post articles get reprinted in ad space, print folks have none of the boundless freedom of online ad folks, who aren't restrained by the physical facts of editorial…
So apparently, due to the taxi strike, we're now operating on the zoned fare system so popular in backwater burgs like D.C. The map here (click to enlarge) shows the zones and fares. A ride from 62nd Street to 22nd Street will run you a good twenty bucks, but what the hell are you doing up above 14th Street anyway?…
So some taxi drivers are on strike? And some aren't? Live from the carnage:
In any event, McMillan can't be a worse hire than WGA mole George "Scab Writer" Ellis, whom the Guild hopes will be snapped up during a studio's MySpace hunt for cheap, strike-insurance labor, and whose shoddy, non-union workmanship will doom any stockpiled project to instant failure. His video resume follows:
