arch is usually a relatively relaxed time for writers. At least, for this writer. The rains have ended. There's the NCAA basketball tournament to eat up lots of time. Network series have all wound down; some have even wrapped for the season. So even if you wanted to get an assignment--or needed one for tax season--too bad. The only thing you'll find is a syndicated episode, and in that case you will probably have to be a citizen of Canada in order to be eligible.
In a normal March, you would go to the driving range and find it full of writers and actors hacking away. All of you would gossip about the new pilots that are in production, and speculate about which ones will be picked up to series no matter how awful they are.
You would work on a spec pilot, or screenplay, or pull that novel out of the bottom drawer. And make plans for staffing season two months hence.
Not in March 2001, however. While on the surface you may watch basketball or write with the same aplomb, inside you churn with the ill-concealed terror of a cancer patient awaiting news on a biopsy.
That's because 2001, in addition to being Arthur C. Clarke's year, is a strike year.
Unemployment's deep, echoing impact
It's hard for most viewers or readers to get too worked up about labor problems in Hollywood, especially labor problems involving writers and actors. On a scale of concern, with the stock market at 10 and these troubling new stories about mass extinctions 250 million years ago at 8, disputes pitting the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers rates about a 2.
The assumption is that they--sorry, we--are all overpaid, anyway.
Now, it's certainly true that, like many professional athletes, some writers and actors make obscene amounts of money. Certainly more money than any one person or family needs. Enough money to make a stock-market dip a momentary annoyance, to make the end of a project an opportunity for a vacation, not a financial disaster.
Well, that's the perception.
In truth, most members of the two guilds are middle-class folks, at best, who share with pro athletes the nasty fact that their careers are painfully finite and capable of ending on any given afternoon. Many more are part-timers doomed by lack of talent or, more often, lack of that big
break, who will always dream about having even that difficult middle-class career.
(I know that no career lasts forever, except possibly that of a senior United States senator from the state of South Carolina. I understand that there is no clause in the Bill of Rights which guarantees me a living in the entertainment business. But my parents were schoolteachers who logged 40 and 30 years in their profession, retiring when they chose. It's not like that in sports or entertainment.)
I won't bore you with the specific disagreements. As a member of the Writers Guild of America West, I'm hardly an objective source of information on the matter. I might even disagree with my guild's position on certain issues.
I know this, however. A summer 2001 strike by the writers and the actors (the assumption is that you won't have one without the other) means a lot of people in Southern California will lose houses, college nest eggs and retirement funds. They will suffer all the pain suffered by those who go
out on strike and (let's not forget) by those whose lives are affected by a strike--the craft unions whose jobs disappear when production shuts down.
Even the waiters in restaurants who won't get tips, because their showbizzy clientele isn't dining out.
And you viewers won't have a fall television season. No more Buffy. No further adventures of Dark Angel.
It will be as if a good-sized asteroid has smacked into Hollywood, wiping out the life forms there. Only after a year or more of "winter" will new, reality-based programs emerge.
It won't be Armageddon, but it will be Deep Impact.
Television's future science fiction
On the chance that there won't be a strike, let's look at what sci-fi and fantasy projects the networks are developing.
ABC has a contemporary version of Grimm's Fairy Tales, from Touchstone and producers Greer Shephard, Michael Robins and Blake Herron. Trolls in New York City? Why not? CBS has Wolf Lake from producer John Leekley. As you might guess, it's about werewolves, though the log-line also mentions the film American Beauty.
NBC has what strikes me as the most promising new entry from the major networks--Earth Angels, from novelist Anne Rice, in collaboration with Thania St. John and Toni Graphia, most recently of Roswell. This is supposedly about angels protecting earth people (and possibly mediating strikes?). Of course, NBC has a recent history of developing intriguing sci-fi or fantasy series, then failing to find a place for them on their schedule, usually at the last minute. Prosecution cites last season's News from the Edge, since rescued by the SCI FI Channel.
Naturally, most of the sci-fi is being developed by the smaller networks, like Fox. (Their continued insistence on this status, which allows them to pay lower residuals to actors and writers, is one of the potential strike issues. Sorry, but I had to mention one, didn't I?) Fox still has
The X-Files and Dark Angel and, for the moment, The Lone Gunmen, so its need for sci-fi
isn't great. And they don't have anything upcoming.
UPN, however, which is now part of the Viacom-CBS family, has two genre series in the works, Dead Zone, based on the Stephen King novel, from producers Michael Piller and Shawn Piller, and what is still being called the Untitled Wes Craven Project, from Wes Craven and Mark Kruger, about a team exploring the supernatural.
WB has the two series which intrigue me the most: Smallville, the adventures of Superman as a teenager, from the producing team of Tollin-Robbins. This one has a series commitment attached to it, so you'll eventually see some episodes whether it works or not, strike or not. I liked the way Superman was reinvented a few years back as Lois & Clark, and see no reason why an updated version of Superboy shouldn't work now.
Also, Dragonriders of Pern, from Ron Moore of Trek fame. Based on Anne McCaffrey's classic novels, this is the closest thing to pure sci-fi, and would have been impossible to sell even a few short years ago. ("Dragons? Another planet? On a television schedule? You've got to be kidding!") With a female lead, it should be a slam-dunk for the WB.
Most of these will fail to become series, however, but in March they are still in production, still in contention, their writers, actors and producers still hopeful.
Unlike the rest of us.
Michael Cassutt has been a writer and/or producer for a number of SF and
fantasy television series, from The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom through Eerie, Indiana, The Outer Limits and, most recently, Seven Days. He is also the author of a number of books on space flight, including his new novel, Red Moon, to be published by Forge Books in January 2001. His short story "More Adventures on Other Planets" was recently published in SCI FICTION.
