Speaking of valuable insights on the strike coming from other places, the second half of this video is a nicely articulated summary of one of the main issues of the strike, by a writer/producer on October Road.

I have avoided posting much about the Writers’ Strike here because there are many people much more qualified to comment than I.  I am not yet a Guild member, and I could never hope to match the sources of information available at United Hollywood, Variety’s Scribe Vibe blog, or even Deadline Hollywood Daily.

But if I can help point even a few people at some of the aspects of the issues that are commonly overlooked, I’d love to do that.  At the moment, the big talk is that the DGA has made its deal, and the expectation is that the WGA should follow.  After all, the studios have made concessions, and therefore the writers should be happy.  What people don’t understand about this is that most of the members of the Directors Guild are below-the-line staff, 1st ADs and such, which means that they aren’t likely to have royalties factored in to their contracts anyway.  As a collective, they are much happier to accept a deal that with decent minimums and smaller or no royalties.  It doesn’t affect the below-the-line directors, and the more powerful movie directors can negotiate their own deals that are better than the minimum contract.  In order to produce a movie, I must pay all my day-to-day workers, including the directorial support staff, a fixed daily amount.  However, I can defer some of my financial risk by paying a writer less than what his intellectual property would otherwise sell for, in exchange for the promise of royalties.  For this reason, writers depend on royalties in a way that other filmmaking staff do not. But you rarely hear that.  Instead, you hear the spin provided by the expensive PR factory used by the studios.  Ain’t they clever.

If the suspicions of many writers are to be believed, this PR engine has been tasked with creating feelings of disunion among the Writers’ Guild.  One interesting response to this phenomenon comes from writer/director Paul Haggis.  His posting at United Hollywood is well worth the read.

Sadly, it’s a leap year, so there are still 366 days.  However, at noon, a year from now, we get someone new.  It can’t happen soon enough.

I keep searching for funny comedy out there on the net. It’s surprisingly few and far between. If you’re looking for humor beyond monkeys getting kicked in the nads*, a fuzzy scene stolen from a 1993 episode of SNL, or youtubes of boarding school kids lipsynching to someone else’s youtube, you’re gonna have to search. Short, scripted comedy seems like the non-porn PURPOSE for the internet, and yet…

Anyway, here’s some of my faves lately. Some are new, some just new to me. All are pretty impressive, in my book.

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It’s the small victories that count best, right?

In the months since I bought a cheap laptop to use as a second computer, I have been frustrated with Microsoft Vista and its… well, it’s everything.  I don’t like to be one of those people who sits around complaining about things like operating systems.  How cool can you possibly be if you sit around complaining about things like operating systems?  Still, there’s no denying that Vista feels a big step backwards.  It honestly seems like a mistake.  As I’ve posted in the past, my least favorite feature is the way it asks you for permission to do whatever task it is you JUST TOLD IT TO DO!

Anyway, one of the big annoyances when I first bought this laptop was the discovery that it wouldn’t play DVDs.  In the DVD player the laptop came with.  I could, of course, always pay extra to upgrade to the version of Vista that would include that feature.  Seriously?  I give you several hundred dollars, and that doesn’t include software to run the peripherals properly?  If ever we needed evidence the entire OS is not so much an improvement in offerings, but rather a new Thing To Sell, this was it.

Not really needing to watch DVDs, I figured it wasn’t worth being fleeced out of 20 or 30 bucks for something that has always come with a machine in the past.  I watched DVDs elsewhere and didn’t bother trying on my laptop.  However, today I realized something:

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