Close up your laptops, ladies and gentlemen, and get out those walking shoes. The writers are on strike again in company town Los Angeles (and New York) with fourteen studio sites scheduled for picketing Monday at 8AM from Culver City to Burbank.
Entertainment journos like Nikki Finke – who is doing a great job covering the Writers‚Äô Strike, by the way – love to call Los Angeles a “company town” for show biz the way Washington is for politics. It’s not, really. Vastly bigger than the DC metro area, LA, city and county, is a sprawling megalopolis of nearly ten million (not counting illegals) with more Koreans than any city but Seoul and more Iranians than anywhere but Tehran. Almost half that population is of Hispanic or Latino origin. Few of these people have anything even remotely to do with Hollywood. (Well, some of the Iranians do.)
Still, the last time there was a writers‚Äô’strike (1988, 22 weeks) lots of folks lost their jobs who weren‚Äôt writers – dry cleaners, restaurant workers, you name it – all the people who service the supposedly privileged of the entertainment industry. Businesses closed down that never opened again. A strike by the 12,000-member Writers’ Guild has its consequences, especially if it runs as long as the 1988 one did.
Read the rest at PJM….
Join the conversation as a VIP Member