US:Some of America's most popular television shows are set to go off the air after the Hollywood screenwriters' union recommended the first strike in two decades. Screenwriters want higher residual fees for DVDs and to be paid for replays of their work on the internet, on mobile phones and other media.
Hollywood films and major TV drama series will not be affected immediately because most studios have built up a pipeline of scripts which will last at least until next spring. The shows under immediate threat are late-night comedy and chat shows like those of Jay Leno and David Letterman on the networks and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on cable, which depend on a daily diet of topical jokes.
"Probably the couple of shows that . . . over the next few months are impacted that we have to look at are The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, because of their topical nature," Viacom chief executive Philippe Dauman said yesterday.
"If there should be a strike, we will evaluate what we do in those time slots. As we have done before . . . we will have re-runs for a little while, and then we will see what we do with the format."
The last time the Writers' Guild of America went on strike, in 1988, screenwriters stayed off work for 22 weeks, costing the entertainment industry half a billion dollars. If the latest strike lasts as long, the cost would be twice as high and audiences could see the eventual shutdown of soap operas, TV series and film production as studios exhaust their supply of scripts.
Producers rejected the union's demands as unworkable and too expensive, but screenwriter Bryce Zabel insisted that the writers were being reasonable.
"Everybody knows what a DVD costs and a writer gets four to five cents for a DVD sale. We've asked for eight. And they've said that's outrageous," he said.
Most of the major studios are reported to have built up portfolios of five films, with scripts and plots strong enough to overcome the possible lack of a union writer on board to do rewrites.
Actor Tom Cruise said at the US première of his political drama Lions for Lambs on Thursday that he was hoping for a swift end to the dispute.
"I just want to get it all resolved so we can get on with what we all want to do, which is make movies," he said.