Unfortunately my browser is not compatible with the find software code of Yuku.. so here is a link to two articles.. I hope they work.. if not maybe in exchange for CW9s head imploding I would be happy to try.. yea!!! thanks people who told me how to fix this.. here are the three articles... prays this kills Cw9


Writers' Strike Tests the Mettle of 2 Outsiders


By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES - Patric M. Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America West, is a sporadically busy comedy writer with a law degree that has seen him through the rough spots between jobs at shows like "The Simpsons" and "Futurama." David J. Young, his chief lieutenant, is a plumber turned hard-bitten labor organizer, with roots in the rough-and-tumble world of Los Angeles sweatshops.

An odd couple, not invested in the clubby ways of show business, the pair have upended Hollywood by leading some 12,000 screenwriters on a strike that is now ending its 11th week. This weekend, however, the two men are stuck deliberating a question that may bode ill for both: Is their writers' rebellion over?

On Thursday the Directors Guild of America, which represents Hollywood's movie and television directors, reached an agreement with production companies covering many of the same issues over which the writers are striking. Within Mr. Verrone and Mr. Young's own union, a growing contingent, many with rich careers now on hold, is eyeing the directors' settlement as a path to immediate peace, even though its terms fall short of the writers' demands.

The moment promises a severe test of their staying power. In deciding whether to fight, fold or do something in between, the pair - and the guild's membership, which is demanding a direct voice in the next decision - will determine just how long this strike will last.

In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Verrone said he believed "negotiations will resume" between writers and the companies soon, adding that he expected to meet with the membership in small groups and at a general assembly of members within the next two weeks.

For Mr. Verrone and Mr. Young, those moves will add to personal journeys that have thrust them into the limelight - courted by agents, chased by the press, lionized by stars - but may send them quickly back in the shadows if they fail at what has usually been an insiders' game.

Even the most seasoned Hollywood observers are hard pressed to remember a time when such outsiders took the business on so wild a ride.

"One idea that comes to mind is David Puttnam," said Martin Kaplan, director of the University of Southern California's Norman Lear Center, which studies entertainment, commerce and society, referring to the British film producer who briefly took charge of Columbia Pictures in the 1980s. "The system chewed him up and spit him out in 10 minutes."

The word "Hollywood" says nothing much about either man. Gaunt and dark-haired, Mr. Verrone, 48, who graduated from Harvard, favors white shirts, crisp suits and the sort of ties most accountants might find in need of pepping up. Mr. Young, 49, who attended San Diego State, is blue-eyed, with softer features, and is comfortable with open collars.

The two do not socialize regularly. But they share a deep suspicion of the conglomerates - the News Corporation, General Electric, the Walt Disney Company, Time Warner and others - that now dominate show business as owners of the largest studios and television networks.

In an interview last April Mr. Verrone described himself as having inherited the mission of correcting decades of erosion in the status of writers, actors and filmmakers under pressure from profit-obsessed corporations. If trends continued, Mr. Verrone said, "then somebody else like me would come along. Somebody else would have to." Mr. Young, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was best known as a principal player behind a hard-fought attempt in the mid-1990s by the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees to organize workers who were making clothes for Guess? Inc. That drive failed when Guess? simply moved most of its work out of the country.

Mr. Verrone likes to speak of his own approach as "zealous advocacy," a term he adopted in his law school days at Boston College. His zeal has proved contagious since taking over as president of the West Coast writers' guild in September 2005.

He and Mr. Young won overwhelming support for the strike from members last October, as they tapped a deep well of resentment over declining income from movies, television's drift toward reality programming and the deep-seated unfairness of a Hollywood system that perennially blames the script for problems that often have more to do with a runaway budget or a temperamental star.

Dennis Palumbo, a screenwriter-turned-psychologist whose practice includes a number of Hollywood writers, said guild members - many of whom have come to regard the companies as negative parental figures - appear to see Mr. Verrone and Mr. Young as friendlier alternatives. "Which parent do you go with, the big, bad parent that you know, or someone who's presenting himself as an Alan Alda parent?" Mr. Palumbo said.

Edna Bonacich, a sociologist who worked with Mr. Young in the garment industry struggles and later at the Writers Guild, said in an interview several weeks after the strike began that Mr. Young was not trying to impose an outside viewpoint. "There's no hidden agenda," Ms. Bonacich said. "He's just trying to ensure there's no major grab" by the companies as the delivery of entertainment shifts from movie theaters and television to digital media - for example, Web sites that stream video.

The directors decided that this was not the time to make a stand on new media, agreeing to revisit compensation for their distribution of their work over the Internet, cellphones and other digital media three years from now. In the meantime, however, they will receive for digital distribution roughly double the residuals rate that has been paid for decades when films and television shows are resold on videocassettes or DVDs, and for the first time be paid a reuse fee for advertising-supported programs streamed free on the Web.

In the early days of the writers' strike, mass pickets and a show of trade union support organized by Mr. Young and Jeff Hermanson, a longtime associate who is now strike coordinator, roused the writers. And their cause won support from a public that did not always grasp the details of the dispute, but understood the basic message: that greedy corporations were not sharing enough with those who did the work.

With performances at rallies by the likes of Alicia Keys and demonstrations as vivid as a march of aging actors who played Munchkins in "The Wizard of Oz," writers created a Woodstock atmosphere in the weeks after the strike began on Nov. 5.

But as pressure for a settlement has built within the guild, that solidarity has frayed. The two key issues now may be one of politics, and one of judgment.

The first is: Do the writers in the Writers Guild of America West and their allies in the Writers Guild of America East remain confident that Mr. Verrone and Mr. Young can ultimately outplay the insiders?

The second is: Do the pair remain confident that they, and not the directors, have got it right?

On that question, it would take much to shake Mr. Verrone, whose focus seems never to waver. Last summer he appeared at Comic-Con International, the annual comics and fantasy convention in San Diego, in a black T-shirt that said, "Unfair is unfunny." It referred to his passion for organizing, kindled in the days when he helped bring his fellow writers on Fox animated shows into the guild.

A little more than three months later, on the streets of Los Angeles in the heady early days of the strike, Mr. Verrone was asked, "Are you getting any sleep?"

The answer was bound up in his unfailing sense of mission.

"I sleep the sleep of the just," he said.


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TV Networks' Schedule Competition Is Starting to Resemble a Quilting Bee

By BILL CARTER

With favorite scripted shows like "Desperate Housewives," "The Office" and "CSI" now out of fresh episodes, the strike-torn network television season is starting to look like the National Football League around 1987, when "replacement players" took over the league for three weeks during a walkout by the real players.

But the games counted then, and the ratings count now. Starting this month, with the traditional first half of the television season completed, network schedulers have had to improvise as never before, making the most of lineups built on reality shows and bits and pieces of episodes of original series.

Each network seems to be approaching the challenge somewhat differently, depending on how much original scripted programming it was able either to put aside or put off for the second half of the season.

"I can tell you one thing: It's not as much fun this way," said one network scheduling executive, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the network's strike planning.

It may not be as much fun, but it is just as competitive. The season thus far has been one of the tightest contests ever among the four major broadcast networks. While CBS leads as usual among total viewers, three networks are in a tie, with the fourth just a tenth of a rating point behind, for viewers between the ages of 18 and 49. Most advertisers buy commercials based on those ratings.

A scheduling decision here or there could move a network up or down, though it is not likely to change which network is going to win. First place in the 18-to-49 demographic is being all but conceded to Fox, thanks to the combination of its football firepower - the National Football Conference championship game on Sunday night, followed by the Super Bowl in two weeks - and the still-potent ratings of "American Idol."

As a senior executive from another network put it, "Fox is going to crush everybody."

That prediction will stand, even if this week's contract agreement between studios and the directors' guild induces the striking writers to settle with the studios in the near future. A resumption of production may bring back some scripted favorites, though not for 8 to 10 weeks. Still, nothing is expected to derail Fox.

Fox executives seem to have anticipated that the strike might be long, which has given the network an edge in another useful category in this patchwork season: hoarded episodes of scripted shows.

"We planned it out," said Preston Beckman, the chief scheduler for Fox. "We never put ourselves in a position where we don't know what we're doing the next month."

While ABC has nothing left of either of its two top hourlong shows, "Desperate Housewives" and "Grey's Anatomy," and NBC has seen its store of "Heroes" episodes run dry, Fox still has three fresh hours of its hit drama "House."

One of those is to be broadcast after the Super Bowl on Feb. 3. Mr. Beckman said that Fox planned to maximize that exposure by offering one new episode the Tuesday before the game and one the Tuesday after.

Fox also held back a handful of episodes of two other dramas, "Bones" and "Prison Break," and it will have access to all the episodes of its Sunday-night animated series because those are produced so far in advance.

In contrast, ABC may have been hurt most by the strike because it has the biggest scripted hits - and because its audience, heavily female, is most susceptible to being stolen away by "American Idol."

ABC does have a lot of new material to turn to because last spring it ordered far more new series than any other network. At the time ABC drew criticism for what looked like profligacy; now many of those extra shows will presumably be put to use.

But while ABC has retained some valuable chips, like scattered new episodes of "Ugly Betty," "Brothers & Sisters" and "Boston Legal," many of the scripted episodes in the network's vault come from series that have been less than marginal in the ratings. They include multiple episodes of shows like "Men in Trees," "Notes From the Underbelly," "According to Jim," "Cavemen" and "Carpoolers."

On the positive side, ABC will have eight episodes of the much-anticipated new season of "Lost."

CBS has nothing like an abundance of new episodes, but of all the networks it has the strongest corps of repeatable shows, like "CSI," "NCIS" and "Two and a Half Men." The network has one established comedy, "The New Adventures of Old Christine," and one new one, "Welcome to the Captain," ready to come off the bench. And it has the return of the nuclear-nightmare series "Jericho," which will have a complete arc of seven episodes.

CBS also will offer the complete season of the serial-killer series "Dexter," which ran earlier this season on its sister cable network, Showtime.

NBC also scrambled to borrow from a cable partner, importing episodes of the USA Network shows "Monk" and "Psych." But NBC, which has so far enjoyed a ratings resurgence during the strike weeks, is confident it will continue to compete well, said Ben Silverman, the network's co-chairman of entertainment.

"We've been better prepared and given ourselves some genuine strike options," Mr. Silverman said in a telephone interview. Since the start of the year NBC has scored with reality shows and judicious use of scripted episodes. Mr. Silverman said he had already planned to expand NBC's newest reality hit, "American Gladiators," and its still-strong game show "Deal or No Deal" to 90 minutes each on Monday nights, filling that night's prime time with just two programs.

That will allow NBC to relocate six new episodes of the drama "Medium." NBC also has seven episodes of a new drama, "Lipstick Jungle," coming next month. The decision to keep the network war horse "Law & Order" out of the fall season also seems to be paying off, with 10 fresh episodes left to broadcast.

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A Hard Knock Tale of a Writer's Life.....

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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Knocked Out


By ANNA FRICKE


JAMIE OLIVER'S heading up my suicide watch; so far I'm still alive. Between the Food Network and his many cookbooks, I have managed to eat my way through three months of the writers' strike, the first four months of my pregnancy - and now the initial hours of a tentative deal between the directors' guild and the producers. Yes, I'm getting fat.

"It's so simple to do it, I don't even want to show you," Jamie Oliver declares in his Essex accent, before breaking down and showing me how to roast the duck. As he shoves the meat in the oven, I pay attention instead to my neighbor and his young son taking out the garbage. They can see me too - our tiny house is all window - and I sink down deeper into my burrow of blankets. But I gave up worrying about appearances months ago. By now the whole neighborhood has seen me in my unvarying wardrobe of sweats and oversized T-shirts.

"How's the strike treating you guys?" people ask, with sympathetic faces. My husband, Jeremy, and I were television writers before we were professional picket-line walkers. "Not good," we reply, stumbling after our two 90-pound boxers. I'm starting to think that when they say, "How's the strike?" they really mean, "Would it kill you to shower?"

I didn't stop grooming all at once. Although Writers Guild of America T-shirts don't flatter the female form, I tried to pull myself together Monday through Thursday. Fridays, reserved for mass rallies to raise our flagging spirits, required extra thought. Sneakers or hiking shoes? White thermal or blue?

These rallies are like super-saturated high school reunions. Every writer you've ever worked with or slept with, admired or betrayed - they're all there. At the first one, I elbowed my way through the crowd and right into my nemesis, who beamed at me artificially. "Anna, how are you?" She looked over my baggy ensemble, probably wondering if I was just fat or actually pregnant, and how long into my maternity leave she could steal my job.

As the screaming scribes erupted in a round of "When I say 'union' you say 'power!' " I reeled with nausea and clutched Jeremy. He maneuvered me toward the curb, where I collapsed, all flop sweat and unfortunately exposed posterior.

So, no more rallies for me. Now I mostly spend Fridays burrowing and eating, like a bear. Jeremy, on the other hand, sees Fridays as a bonus day of picketing. Note: my husband is a strike captain. Every show needs someone to attend meetings, organize picketing schedules and help squelch/spread the endless rumors and conspiracy theories that surround the strike.

Over the past few months, Jeremy has developed a squeaky-clean fervor. He spends hours constructing resolute e-mail messages to his team, and hesitates to choose ob-gyn appointments over picketing. It's like living with a truant officer.

I used to share his passion. In those first weeks, my co-workers and I took the early shift, showing up before dawn, creeping single file like ants down Melrose Avenue. Beneath our picket signs, we played games like I Spy, but as the day wore on, we often fell into silence, hot and dejected.

I frequented the restroom in a nearby parking garage; the security guards let us in if we promised to cover up our red Writers Guild shirts. In the mirror, I looked at my face, sweaty, sunburned. I exhaled, finally releasing my emerging belly. When Jeremy and I planned on having a baby, we hadn't planned on this.

We would meet up at home after our shifts and blink at each other in the brightness of our living room while our dogs, thrilled to see us in the middle of the day, hurled themselves across our bodies with bone-breaking love. We'd never had this much time together. What to do with such freedom? We could write a screenplay together! We could have sex!

But instead, Jeremy would fall into a haze in front of the Internet while I complained that I couldn't drink a bottle of wine because of my high-maintenance unborn child.

Sometimes, with yet another free Friday stretching out in front of me, I sit down and try to write what I've been meaning to write for years. After a couple of hours, I stretch, satisfied. Back in the saddle! I look over what I've done: it's the exact premise of the show I worked for when the strike began. I am an unoriginal hack. Maybe after eight years of laboring inside the entity that is the writers' room, I am no longer a writer without a room.

Jeremy comes home flush with union power and finds me in the middle of Jamie Oliver's eggplant penne recipe. He doesn't bother to tell me what happened on the line, and we sit down to dinner at the table. It's a nice, new custom we've adopted now that there's nothing on television. The strike is not without its benefits. Tomorrow is Saturday. I might do laundry. And maybe, come Monday, I'll wear pants again.

Anna Fricke is a writer for television.