Your Late Night Links

Picketing with the Stars: More Great Photos
Photography by Hamilton is one of the best online photo galleries I've seen, and it's a great source for pictures of strike events.

Flickr continues to feature lots of strike scenes as well. Kudos to Flickr user ground_glass for her arty black and white shots. Nice!

Here's coverage of the event from USA Today and from Plaintive Wail, the blog of Stephen Falk.

If you have any strike-related pictures to upload but neither the time nor geek inclinations to use a service like Flickr, email them to us, and we'll post them. You can find our small, but hopefully growing, page here. Email your pics to unitedhollywood [at] gmail [dot] com

Oh, and we do video too. But you knew that.

News from the East
Team United Hollywood had a great strategy call Wednesday with Team Strike Notes. You're going to see some close coordination between this site and our sister blog to the east. Right now, we have a box in the upper right of every page featuring Strike Notes' most recent headlines. Click here for a recap of the Disney Store picket on Fifth Avenue. And visit the WGAE Flickr page. Good luck WGAE with the big Viacom picket today!

Words of Support
The editorials, opinion pieces and blog posts supporting our fight for a fair contract keep pouring in!
- "When Will We Feel TV's Hand in Our Pockets," by Peter Ames Carlin of The Oregonian connects the conglomerates' poor treatment of creative professionals with the poor treatment of local cable customers.

[T]his is not a sustainable kind of industry. Strip-mining never is. And as the FCC's newfound interest in the cable providers' unsettling rate hikes and market domination -- the regulators may actually allow for competition in the cable business -- makes clear, the end can come suddenly.
Networks, producers, take heed. When the factory noise overwhelms the dreams you're producing, the next sound you hear will be your customers leaving.

-Jonathan Tasini of Working Life has launched a "call the CEOs" campaign. And he's posted some background information on CEO compensation and company revenues to prepare you for when Zucker or Moonves is on the line.
- Blogger LillyKat of Pass the Remote understands exactly what's at stake and provides some historical context. (And uses our own Kate Purdy to illustrate her point!)
- Ms. Sue Doe-Nim has posted a picture from 1974 of a vintage WGA strike sign. And then an embedded Hulu.com clip under the line "This is why the writers are striking."

- Of course, being writers, we're not too shabby at telling our story for ourselves. Here are two smart and funny pieces worth reading: Douglas McGrath in Newsweek and Michael Colton in the Boston Globe. Read and pass along!

New Contender for Anthem of the Strike
Have you joined the virtual picket line at Hollywood Interrupted? Go now to hear a song by Cantinero entitled "No Apologies."

"No more / poor apologies. / No more / getting screwed by new technologies."

United Hollywood will send a special gift to the first person to send video evidence of this song being played way too loudly in a cubicle inside one of the big six companies.

No One Disputes the Net is the Future Except CEOs
Agents sure don't. The LA Weekly has a long feature article on the move of entertainment to the Web.

“There is going to be a major hit off the Internet someday,” Nadler says, looking out the window onto the rushing cars below, shortly after the Handsome Donkey boys leave. “It’s going to be The Simpsons, who are a global phenomenon that started as silly little cartoons that ran in between segments of The Tracy Ullman Show. It’s going to be huge and everybody will know about it.”

Why We Fight and Why We Have to Win
I want to end with this moving post from a blog called Adventures in Autism. The blogger is Ginger Taylor, a family therapist and mother in Maine. Her son Chandler was diagnosed with autism at age two. In 1998, Ginger's husband wrote a WGA-covered special for Discovery Kids. Four years later, he discovered that the special had run hundreds of times, but his residuals had never been paid. Then comes the heartbreaking part:

"When it was all said and done, the WGA had to go after the production company, and of the $40,000 that was owed to my dear husband, he received $2,000. Just this spring.
I try not to think about all the good we could have done for Chandler with that $38,000. It hurts. We had to discontinue most of Chandler's biomed for much of 2006 because we just didn't have the resources."

I wrote to Ginger to thank her for sharing this with us. It's stories like hers that put a face on our issues. There's just too much at stake to settle for an unfair contract. Fight on.