June, 2007
In June of 2007, Tom and I landed a three-year TV deal with the Walt Disney Company (which its employees lovingly, or perhaps not, referred to as Mouse-schvitz). It was pretty cool. We had a third floor office from which we could see the seven carved dwarves on the Team Disney building. We had an assistant named Brie, an aspiring actress who kept us entertained with her train wreck of a social life and ever-expanding list of food allergies. We had a helpful office manager named Cheryl who looked like she had been flash frozen in the sixties and recently thawed out. She was sweet and chipper and no more emotionally invested in us than she was in the furniture. Less, probably, because the furniture stayed around longer.
We also got coveted Silver Passes that gave us free admission to Disneyland. (And also California Adventure, but really, who gives a shit about that place?) Samantha was a Disneyland fanatic and I'm pretty sure I'd never given her an orgasm more powerful than the one she had when I placed that shimmery piece of embossed plastic in her hand.
Most important, though, for a compulsive worrier like me — who frequently woke up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, staring into the darkness, convinced that everything was about to come crashing down — was the three years of guaranteed paychecks (supplemented by freelance film work). That meant three years of peace of mind, three years of blissful sleep. Forget the stupid theme park: As far as I was concerned our three-room office in the Old Animation Building was the happiest place on earth.
But then, four months into our deal, the Writers Strike hit.
Although hit is probably not the right word. It makes it sound like something that happened to us. Like the Writers Strike had leapt out of the bushes and mugged us. No, this was a decision that we writers all made collectively. And like an overwhelming majority of my fellow wordsmiths I voted for it. The core issues were extremely important — we were fighting to survive in the digital age — and I was keenly aware that so many of the benefits that I enjoyed (health insurance, pension, guaranteed minimums) were made possible by Writers Strikes past. And in at least one of those strikes, the studios unabashedly turned fire hoses on the picketing writers, something which I am confident they would still do today if they thought they could get away with it.
So I was absolutely willing to do my part.
Although unlike a great majority of my fellow writers who — after helping themselves to free bagels — shook the meeting hall with their militant optimism when our leadership announced that we were on strike, I felt nothing but dread. I vividly remembered the ugliness of the 1988 strike. Worried eyes and desperate garage sale markdowns. Mirrored end tables and lava lamps sold for a fraction of their worth. And the worst part, I knew, was that after six grinding, demoralizing months in which a lot of people were financially devastated, the strike was a failure.
But we were at the beginning of our strike and when I arrived at Bob Hope Park, across the street from NBC Studios where I would over the next hundred days be logging countless miles, the atmosphere was positively festive. We were all issued picket signs that simply read WRITERS GUILD ON STRIKE in typewriter font, a T-shirt with a graphic of a powerful fist clutching a pencil, and for those of us who got there early enough, Krispy Kreme donuts courtesy of The Tonight Show's Jay Leno, who showed up in a forest green 1931 Duesenberg Town Car and passed them out himself in a show of solidarity.
And then we set up our picket line. At first it felt like a goof. The difference between dressing as a fireman for Halloween — with a plastic axe and simulated soot smeared on your face — and being an actual fireman, fighting an actual fire. People laughingly took pictures of each other with their digital cameras or, for those early adopters among us, the first generation of the iPhone, back when it had a battery life that was measured in nanoseconds and hadn't yet turned us into a nation of narcissistic douche bags.
But there was, I have to admit, something very compelling about mass action — a small taste of revolution — and I think even the most cynical of us felt it. We were energized. By the righteousness of our cause and also, for those of us who worked in television at least, the reunion with our colleagues. Old friends joining together, determined to strike fear into the hearts of the heartless media oligarchy. (And yes, we knew full well that you can't strike fear into the hearts of the heartless, by definition, but we were writers on strike. Our sentences didn't have to make sense.)
We walked with purpose, with conviction. We hoisted our picket signs high in the air — proudly, defiantly — letting everyone who drove by know that we were for real. We would cheer and pump our fists whenever someone honked their horn in support, or out of anger because we were blocking the entrance. Either one, honestly, was considered a victory.
It was tremendous fun. For about an hour. At which point it became clear that we had already milked as much entertainment from walking back and forth with a sign as we could reasonably expect. And then it dawned on us: We had three more hours to go. Today. And then we'd start the whole thing over again tomorrow. This, we realized, was our life for the foreseeable future.
I soon fell into a tedious routine. Show up. Get coffee from Strike Captain. Get donut from Jay Leno. Walk. Walk. Walk. Use bathroom. Walk. Walk. Walk. Get latest rumors on the negotiations. Walk. Walk. Walk. Long for death. Walk. Walk. Walk. Use bathroom. Drive home in rush hour traffic.
Rinse. Repeat.
Occasionally, some zealot would insist that we all strike up a chant, because nothing can bring multinational conglomerates to their knees faster than an AA/BB rhyme scheme. Usually, we failed to reach consensus on the verbiage of the chant itself — impassioned disagreements about what would be sufficiently original, yet widely accessible and memorable and likely to engender public sympathy — and the whole enterprise would die in committee.
It was interesting how much our world shrank. We were talented professionals (granted, some more than others) used to spending our days creating entertainment that would be seen nation- or even world-wide. Our words reached millions.
But now our reach was confined to a stretch of sidewalk and our talents utterly irrelevant. The only thing that mattered about us was the fact of our presence. We were just bodies mindlessly walking the wheel.
We yearned for distractions and occasionally the WGA provided them. Thousands of us showed up at the Fox Lot for a rally, where we heard the hard rock band Rage Against The Machine actually raging against the machine. (The machine, I have to say in all candor, wasn't impressed.) At another rally, this one in Hollywood, R&B artist Alicia Keyes performed what I assumed were her hits on the back of a flatbed truck. And in Burbank we were treated to Tenacious D (a duo consisting of Jack Black and some other guy). There, they debuted a brand new song called "Fuck The Bullshit" which was about the bullshit and how it should be fucked, a sentiment we all heartily agreed with.
Mostly, though, any break from the drudgery was the product of happenstance. A striker getting run over by an irate motorist (she lived). A drunken truck driver crashing through a studio gate (he got arrested). A photo op by John Edwards, a candidate seeking the nomination of the Democratic party (he lost).
One day, I was witness to an an incredibly surreal encounter when a minivan pulled up and, when the sliding door opened, revealed three of the original Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. They were there, we were told, to picket with us. The Writers Guild meets the Lollipop Guild. Truly, I felt like I was tripping on peyote.
The Munchkins stayed only a few minutes, just long enough to hand out Dunkin' Donuts Munchkins (get it?) and be filmed by news cameras. One of them said, with surprising energy, "We always stick up, for the little guy!" (get it?). After that, the Munchkin Wrangler herded them back into the minivan and they were gone. Somewhere over the rainbow, I guessed.
I also had an incredibly rewarding encounter with Ellen Degeneres when she drove up to NBC in her Porsche 911 with the intention of crossing the picket line. She was waiting for a break in the traffic to make her turn into the lot when she caught my eye. She gave me a timid, friendly wave. In response I glowered back at her. And under the heat of my righteous indignation she lowered her eyes, ashamed.
She still crossed the picket line and did her show and cashed her paycheck, but I'd like to think her heart wasn't in it.
One day, Dale from Chicago, as he referred to himself, walked the line with us. He had leathery skin, callused hands and steely gray eyes. He explained that he was third generation UAW (United Auto Workers) and whenever he saw a strike, he made it a point to support them. And if I'm being totally honest, I have to admit that the idea of joining someone else's strike would never have occurred to me in a million years.
Dale watched in confusion as writers stepped out of the way, allowing NBC executives to drive into the parking lot unmolested. "This is the politest strike I've ever seen," he told me. It wasn't a compliment. He contrasted it with the strikes he was used to, where anyone who crossed the line was risking a serious ass-kicking. And everyone, he said, had jack rocks. He was shocked and disappointed to discover that I had never heard of jack rocks. (They are sharpened metal caltrops designed to puncture a tire. Another disincentive to cross the picket line.)
"And I've definitely never seen," Dale continued critically, "a strike with so many nice cars." He gestured at the Bentley coup, E-Class Mercedes and GS Lexus across the street. I didn't let on that the Lexus was mine.
Dale made some crack about being surprised that we didn't make our butlers picket in our stead. Then he gave me a vise-grip handshake, wished me luck and left.
Dale had hit on something of a sore point, the idea that we were all spoiled rich people. It was something that our corporate opponents liked to highlight, the perversity of affluent writers greedily demanding even more money. Reporters loved to ask writers how much money they made in a year, wryly noting either the impressiveness of the sum or the suspicious refusal to comment. Of course none of the reporters, it seemed, bothered to ask the same question of heads of studios and presidents of networks. (This was one of the many downsides of striking against the people who actually owned the news media.)
We all understood that the optics weren't great, but the reality was that only some of the writers were rich people (spoiled or otherwise) and they stood to gain absolutely nothing from the strike. It was the new generation of writers, and the ones after them, that would benefit. Hopefully.
Anyway.
I was required to picket sixteen hours a week, which was a lot — and I had the joint pain to prove it — but it also meant I had quite a bit of extra time on my hands. We were not supposed to write anything, even spec. scripts ("Pencils down means pencils down" the WGA admonished us) so I decided to sell off my compact disc collection on eBay.
It was busywork, but it gave me a sense of purpose. Writing product descriptions, checking on the bids, packing up the CD's and taking them to the Post Office. And it was exciting to see how much each disc went for, if it went at all. Most were snapped up for a next to nothing (plus shipping) but a few did astonishingly well. Steely Dan's Aja went for more than fifty dollars. My copy of Olivia Newton John's Greatest Hits went for a puzzling sixty-five. The winner, though, appropriately enough, was an original pressing of Weird Al's Dare To Be Stupid. One-hundred-and-eight dollars.
For me, this was just a diversion, but it also turned out to be a tremendous source of comfort to eight year-old Jana. "It's good that we still have money coming in," my daughter would say, tremendously overestimating both the revenue stream from my CD collection and the direness of our financial straits.
Or maybe not.
Because on January 11, 2008, The Walt Disney Studio invoked what lawyers referred to as force majeure — which, by the way, was also the name of a Tangerine Dream CD which I sold for nineteen bucks — and it meant that our studio deal was null and void. We weren't just on strike anymore; we were unemployed.
The one consolation, if you can call it that, was that the news of our termination appeared — for the first and only time in our career — on the front page of both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety (along with a handful of other writers). We had friends who had also lost their deals in the same bloodbath who weren't mentioned in the trades at all, and they were openly jealous of us. In Hollywood, even calamity has a pecking order.
Samantha took the news quite badly. It wasn't so much that thirty months of what was supposed to be guaranteed employment had dissolved into nothingness, but the loss of the Silver Pass. She made an anguished noise that I've never heard her make before or after. "Those fucking assholes!" she railed. "I only got to use it twice!"
It was a particularly awful day on the picket line. I had known from the beginning that force majeure was a possibility, and I thought I had girded myself for it, but I was practically shaking with anger. And paradoxically I focused that anger not on the ones who had done this to me — the champagne-guzzling plutocrats who were laughing their asses off in their fancy boardrooms — but on the writers around me. I became acutely aware of how unseriously they were taking this strike. Showing up late. Walking lackadaisically with their picket signs casually resting on their shoulders. They were chatting. They were laughing. They were sitting in the shade on the grass for ten, sometimes twenty minutes at a time. (I timed them.) And all I could think was, I lost my job for you shit-heads?
I knew I was being unfair. But then again, I rationalized, so was life. (On balance, of course, it was mostly unfair in my favor, but I didn't want to hear that shit. Not then.)
Cheryl let us into our (former) office so we could collect our things. She was pleasant but indifferent. Her concern was the office, not its interchangeable occupants.
Tom and I gathered our belongings. Coffee mugs, wall art, memorabilia from shows we had worked on, framed photos on our desks. And then we turned our attention to theft. We stole ball point pens by the boxful, printer paper by the ream and staplers by the... um... stapler. We swiped light bulbs, legal pads, three-hole punches, paper clips, brads, thumb tacks, cork boards, envelopes, Post-It Notes in assorted colors and sizes. It was an impressive haul — it would be years before either of us paid a dime for our own office supplies — but we came nowhere close to breaking even, I can promise you that.
That night, I woke up in a cold sweat. My heart was pounding as I stared into the darkness. After all those years of worry, everything had finally come crashing down. Just like I always knew it would.