Writers Guild of America Signs Interim Deal with United Artists

What’s going on with the Writers Strike?

As weeks of walking the picket lines have turned into months, more and more producers are taking action and striking deals with the WGA to reinstate their programming on major network television, including the Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

It appears that Worldwide Pants (Letterman’s company) isn’t the only production house with goals of getting back to work.

Reports from Variety and Hollywood Reporter as of January 5th, 2008 claim that United Artists (UA) is set to go ahead with an interim pact with the Writers Guild of America, giving the newly helmed organization headed by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner (as of 2006), some breathing room to allow the UA to bring writers back to work on feature films in efforts to save other productions from falling through the cracks.

United Artists, an organization whose majority shareholder is MGM, is moving ahead without the involvement of the powers that be at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Cruise and Wagner’s move to sign an interim pact with the WGA is an agreement that would go into affect as soon as Monday January 7, 2008.

United Artists was founded nearly 90 years ago by actor Charlie Chaplin with friends Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith, and Canadian-born actress, Mary Pickford.

The deal to be struck between the WGA and the UA is said to be very similar, if not a mirror of the agreement that Worldwide Pants signed with the WGA.

Variety says that the Worldwide Pants and UA deals are part of the WGA’s strategy to “divide and conquer” the industry by negotiating individual agreements, thus enabling the guild to portray itself as a reasonably party in what’s been a bitter dispute with the majors. The guild’s talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers collapsed on Dec. 7 after the AMPTP demanded that the WGA take six proposals off the table as a condition of continuing negotiations; no new talks have been set.

The WGA’s deal with Worldwide Pants deal allowed “Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson” to begin airing Wednesday on CBS with writers on board and no pickets outside the studio.

The WGA announced the specific terms of the Pants deal Friday, which included provisions for new-media compensation in areas such as Web streaming and paid downloads. That pact also includes a favored nations clause that allows it to revert to whatever terms the WGA and AMPTP eventually settle on.

Sources: Variety, Hollywood Reporter