The GOOD Part of the WGA Strike

Very talented people with too much time on their hands! 

The latest offering, which will be best appreciated by insiders but fun for the non-pro too, is the 2007 Strikers Guide to the Los Angeles Studios.  It's a Zagat-style guide for WGA members who are trying to decide where to picket on any given day.  It reads as if it were written by the love child of Diogenes and Joe Garcia -- which thought alone is almost enough to make me relax my death grip on Catholic moral teaching, especially since it's very close to scientifically possible.  (Then I start thinking about exhuming and cloning everyone from Preston Sturges to Shakespeare...it's like the literary version of a pornado has been launched on my mental desktop...)

It helps if you know the studios, but just trust me when I tell you that every word is so true it hurts.  Nikki Finke says the prevailing rumor is that it was written by Jonathan Schmock.  There's a good interview with him here, whether he's the author or not.  I really like his answers.

Here's my favorie of the studio reviews:

WARNER BROS
"Kick back" as an "Asian girl" makes you "chant like a Marine" and
crew guys give you that "hey fag" look as you sample the many
entrances to this "lavish, animation-geared sweatshop." "Giant,
plentiful, life-like murals" of "other people's hits" make you feel as
if you are "walking in a circle in the sun." "Free Pizza" and
"limitless In and Out Burgers" have recently given way to "water" and
"whatever's in your pockets."

Read the whole thing here.

Comments

[Joe]

If he starts a blog and gives it the highly felicituous title of "Schmock with Underwood" I want 10%.

-J.

[Karen]

I think you should find his e-mail and suggest that to him. Although he has probably either thought of it, or heard it before.

Was that not brilliant?

[Karen]

p.s. My favorite line was "When I say 'Union,' you'll say 'Kill me.'" But I think you can only fully appreciate that if you have (a) marched for 4 hours in a picket line and (b) attended WAY too many birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese.

[Lickona]

"Pornado" is a remarkable word. Is it intentional?

[Karen]

No, it's a real thing. I'm amazed you don't know that, given your area(s) of expertise.

There's an interesting story, if you google it (of course, you have to google carefully!) about a teacher who was convicted for exposing her 4th grade (I believe) class to pornography when -- she claims -- she accidentally got stuck in a pornado.

A "pornado" is sometimes a virus, or so I'm told, but my one experience was when at "Judging Amy" -- we were doing a story about Tyne Daly's character (a social worker) wanting to take a foster child away from a couple she'd run into at a hotel that happened to be hosting a convention of plushies. (Surely I don't have to explain that one too.)

The network axed plushies because CSI had already done them, so we had to come up with some other kind of weird adult...um...role playing convention. As was often the case on that show, research was difficult. I mean, you'd be amazed, and horrified, at what you come up with when you put "gifted children" into a search engine. (We were trying to do a story about parents who were pushing a prodigy too hard.)

Anyway, while trying to come up with an entire new subplot in three hours, which necessarily involved googling weird sex, we clicked on a link that opened a pornado. A pornado starts as a photo that, speaking for myself, you instantly wish you could un-see. But when you click on the "X" to close it, a worse picture opens. The pictures get worse and worse and bigger and bigger, and if it's your first pornado, you tend to panic because all you can think is "what if someone walks into my office right now?????"

I've never had it happen again, but I think having experienced it once, it wouldn't take me long to go to "turn off the computer."

[Lickona]

Sadly, you don't have to explain plushies. But thanks for the explanation on pornado - yes, amazing that I hadn't heard that term before. There's a very funny video out there on the web about this happening to a guy - he accidentally opens a pornspam email marked "Hi" just as his female co-worker and boss stop in to his cubicle. He's fired, of course, and it begins the total disintegration of his life (he tries to hang himself with his belt, only his pants fall off while he's hanging there since he's not wearing his belt any more, and his mother walks in and concludes he's into auto-erotic asphyxiation). I'd google to find the video for you, but "funny farm sex video" is probably not a wise search term.

[Holly]

Speaking of writers with too much time on their hands...have you seen www.amptp.com?

[angelmeg]

They used the pornado idea in a scene that got cut from Love Actually, which you can see on the DVD. I really think it is cute because it brings the greiving husband and step son together over the pornado incident. Sort of wish they had left it in.

I remember a classmate stating be careful what you google after showing an impressive Power Point she had done on Contemporary American Catholic Identity. She was looking for pictures of people picketing abortion clinics I think (or was it a picture of the Blessed Virgin0 both things can lead to images you wish you could un-see

[Melody]

Holly, I went to amptp.com after I read your comment. Other than some language I could do without (yes, I'm one of those people who really doesn't use that word at all - ever) I laughed a lot when I read it.

[Holly]

Melody,

Oh, I forgot to mention the language! My apologies.