AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Forbes
Hollywood is once again on the brink of war. This time the big movie studios and TV networks are skirmishing with their actors, whose union contracts expire next month. Unless both sides can agree on how to split future Internet revenues, the industry faces the terrifying prospect of its second prolonged talent strike of the [...]

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Director George Hickenlooper (”Factory Girl”) has produced and the WGA has posted a series of videos under the title “Speechless without Writers”, posted on a WGA blog that also includes info on the strike, lotsa links, etc. You can see it all here.

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Forbes.com has some interesting views on the WGA strike against the networks and studios. Predictions notwithstanding, there’s some good legwork in this reporting.
A Hollywood Ending? - Forbes
What The Writers’ Strike Won’t Change - Forbes

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Webisodes of ‘Lost’: Model Deal for Writers? - The New York Times
On the picket lines, striking television and film writers adamantly claim that studios are refusing to pay for the use of writers’ scripts on the Internet.
But ABC Studios is doing just that. Over the next three months fans of the hit show “Lost” can [...]

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Come on, writers, script your futures
The Big Picture: As the writers strike enters its third week, I think the future belongs to a tantalizing new hyphenate: the writer-entrepreneur.
Hollywood is a town awash in hyphenates. TV is loaded with writer-producers. The movie biz is full of writer-directors. There’s even a legion of actor-filmmakers like Clint Eastwood [...]

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Digital media won’t be a sideshow in the future - The Los Angeles Times
Downloading and other Internet-based modes are likely to account for a much larger share of the industry’s revenue.
Today’s puny sales of movie and TV downloads makes one wonder: Why are striking members of the Writers Guild of America so intent on getting [...]

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Back Channels Drive New Talks for Writers - The Wall Street Journal
The planned post-Thanksgiving resumption of contract talks between striking screenwriters and Hollywood studios offers a moment of hope in what has been a nasty work stoppage. But people in the industry caution that the prospects of quickly making a deal, and returning the entertainment [...]

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Online Show Quarterlife Gets Picked Up By NBC For Network Debut; Strike Workaround With WGA Possible — Paid Content.org
It is a bit of a co-incidence, but I was talking to a Portfolio reporter this morning about a story he was doing on how TV networks are trying develop original online shows, and in the middle [...]

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Time to rewrite their future - LA Times
Why don’t striking writers create original online programming that could bolster their cause and show the medium’s true potential?
LAST week in a CBS Studios picket line, one TV writer referred to the current WGA work stoppage as “the first Internet strike.” And there may be something to that.
Certainly [...]

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