A business story by Brooks Barnes in The New York Times examines how the writers' strike is affecting social interaction "in the giant high school cafeteria that is Hollywood." As Barnes points out, "Only a rarefied circle of writers, of course, has the ability to truly mingle with Hollywood’s corporate royalty. The vast majority of writers are average folks who manage a middle-class existence or are unemployed in their chosen profession at any given moment. The union says the average income for a member is $60,000. But the union also counts as members dozens of creators of hit television shows, who can take home upwards of $5 million a year, and writers who command fees of $1 million for a screenplay or more." These are the ones who frequent the same restaurants, hotels, and luxury resorts as the bloated capitalist overdogs who run the studios, and who are finding themselves huddled in whispers about the greedy moneybags at the adjoining table at the Four Seasons, not the first place where you might expect to hear voices raised in a rousing, impromptu chorus of "Joe Hill." The strike does seem to be bringing inch-stained wretches of different tax brackets together: when David Letterman, having worked out a deal with the WGA to use his own writing staff (paid by his production company, not CBS), returned to the air last night, the ten "striking writers" who marched onstage to read the Top Ten list included Nora Ephron, the celebrity journalist turned Hollywood player (Sleepless in Seattle, the screenplay of When Harry Met Sally). In the meantime, writers and executives who were once nominally friendly and ducking past each other at grocery stores and their kids' school assemblies and being seated "selectively" at Campanile, whose manager, Jay Perrin, told the paper, “I don’t think a fistfight would break out. It is more like people cracking jokes about each other with more bite than normal.” The strike also crosses family lines; Barnes cites examples of striking writers who happen to be married to network executives, leading us to wonder if maybe Nora Ephron is taking notes for a future wacky romantic comedy while she's down there in the trenches. That might be reason enough to hope the strike will never end.
