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I Walked The Line | December 11, 2007

Last Friday, I arrived in the land of limos and Priuses. I moved back to Los Angeles to pursue my dream of writing for television. Since I've been here, I've talked to old friends, applied for jobs, and looked for apartments. Today, though, I did something a little more important: I picketed.

My friend and roommate is a writing student at USC, and one of her professors is a former writer of The Cosby Show. If you know nothing else about me, you should know that I revere The Cosby Show. It is as near perfection as any sitcom has ever reached. When Amy told me that her professor was going to be picketing at the 20th Century Fox studios, suggesting that I go there to meet him, I leapt at the opportunity.

Perhaps leapt is the wrong word. It implies velocity, and since I was taking the freeways, traveling 25 miles per hour, my velocity was as low as my current income. When I reached Fox, I saw an intense looking bunch of folks clustered near the entrance to the studio. They all were hoisting signs and chatting about the biz. I joined them, glancing around for anyone remotely resembling Amy's professor. I never saw him, but I kept up the picket, anyway. I marched with them, round and round, soliciting honks from the fancy cars on the streets. I noticed that most of the honks we received were from older people. I appreciated their gestures of solidarity, and I'm sure they were proud of the young whippersnappers. HONK! HONK! "You know, we protested once, too! Against the British. We called it the Revolutionary War."

As I was picketing, I made a friend, a woman named Mary who, like me, was not a member of the guild. She was showing her solidarity. Mary informed me that she'd be moving her picket to the Sony studios once our line folded. About five minutes later, at two o'clock our line closed down, and we pledged to meet up at Sony, about ten minutes from Fox.

The Sony picket was a little more boisterous. The crowd was larger and more vocal. Not only that, but this picket had choice snacks! The organizer of this picket was Sybil Gardner who was kind enough to chat with me as we marched back and forth across Sony's entrance gate. Mary soon showed up, and I felt welcome, and it was here that my reasoning for marching with the striking writers changed. Initially, I wanted to use the strike as an opportunity for networking. As I talked with Mary and a film writer about the strike, I realized that I needed to be a part of the strike. I explained to Mary how I watched almost all of ABC's programming online and how Gary Marshall had written in his autobiography that residuals from writing for the Lucy Show had helped put his children through college. As I was connecting those threads to the idea that shows were going to be rerun, on demand, more often on the internet, depriving writers of a income stream from revenue that was enriching the studios' bottom lines, I realized that I needed to be there on that picket line. I want to write for TV, and though I'm not yet a member of the guild, these issues will effect me as much they effect current TV writers. I'll definitely be back on the lines, tomorrow.

Posted by earnest in Earnest's | permalink