George Bush relative to striking writers and actors who respect picket lines: “Drop dead!”

What is it with the Bush family’s unfailing instinct for doing the wrong thing?

First we had George Bush doing everything wrong – absolutely everything – from draining U.S. Treasury by vastly increasing spending while cutting taxes for the rich, to the War Nobody Needed in Iraq, to reading “My Pet Goat” upside down.

Then, as reported here at the New York Crank just a few weeks ago, we had Jeb Bush evidently promoting defaulting securities to Florida school districts and local agencies.

And now, with writers fighting for a share of the income they generate for producers on the Internet, and actors backing them up by refusing to cross the writers picket lines and work, George’s cousin, Billy Bush, goes to work as a labor scab.

I turned on CNN this morning and there was a clip from last night’s Golden Globe awards announcing the winners. Evidently, when actors fighting for their own futures refused to show up even for their awards, and writers refused to write a ceremony, Billy Bush and blonde zero Nancy O’Dell decided to tell all the strikers, “Screw you!”

They appeared, I later learned from a New York Times blog on a rebroadcast of the awards that somehow-or-other was trailing the actual broadcast by a few minutes.

Personally, I’d have no regrets if Billy Bush were frozen out of entertainment biz society and sent to Texas to, well, maybe to curate Cousin George’s presidential library, including My Pet Goat and other books that George thinks he can read.

Ink stained wretches and greedy producers: Whose gun is pointed at whose head?

Despite all the glitz, glamour and multi-million dollar Hollywood deals you keep hearing about, the typical screenwriter is little more than a penurious wretch.

As figures provided by a screenwriters website called The Blank Page indicate, while a few screenwriters at the tippy-top can earn more than half a million bucks , almost half of the union’s members earn zipp-o in any given year. The typical schlub-with-a-keyboard probably pulls down around $45,000 – but only in years when he or she is able to find screenwriting work. That's usually about every other year.

Sadly, the writers’ share of the Hollywood pie is pathetic. These are guys who make a significant part of their $45,000 (or up to $663,000 if they’re on the very top of the hill) from residuals – the additional money paid to writers and others, when a movie goes on TV or gets "distributed" in other ways other than in movie theaters.

The theory behind the practice is a good one. If the movie bombs and nobody wants to see it – or if the script is commissioned but the production company never films it or never distributes the film – writers get paid a relatively small amount for their work. But if they write a hit that these days can generate over $1 billion for a producer, they should share in the profits.

Except they don’t really “share.” In some film and TV distribution categories they get something closer to a pathetic tip. Suppose you go to a retail store and buy a DVD of your favorite movie for $10? Want to guess what share the writer gets?

Four cents, give or take a few tenths of a cent.

This from a business where the executive producer of the Law and Order shows earns $200 million a year and the producer of The Sopranos was earning a "mere" $20 million. 

The Screenwriters are also fighting to have the writers of cartoon films covered by their agreement. Right now, if you write animation – or reality TV shows – you don’t even get the same sorry deal the screenwriters get.

Oh, and top production and network executives get "golden parachutes" worth millions of dollars if they get fired. Lots of screenwriters in a similar situation get to wait on tables.

Last night, I happened to have dinner with two Writers Guild members and a literary agent, none of them in the starving artist class. One of the writers is an Academy Award winner, the other isn’t doing too badly either, and the agent is one of those high-powered dudes who builds up best-selling authors and takes a cut when he sells the rights to their novels to the movies.

These are guys who’d be making pretty darn good money if the strike ended. But their support for the strike to the bitter end was so strong you could almost break your teeth on it.

What’s going on here?

"The producers are trying to break the union,” one of the writers told me. “That’s why the screen actors are backing us up. They know that if we cave in, they’re next.

Meanwhile, “The producers are refusing to negotiate, period,” he reminded me.

In addition, the producers have rejected binding arbitration by an impartial arbitrator.

Greed, a grab and a gun

It sounds to me like the producers are just trying to make a grab at keeping the writers’ residuals.

There are some exceptions, of course. These include David Letterman's company, Worldwide Pants; United Artists; and now the Weinstein Brothers Company, all of which have settled with the writers. But these are all small players. It's the greedy corporate biggies like Fox, NBC, Viacom and others that are trying to kick around the hungry writers.

What do the producers have to say about refusing to negotiate?

“We're not going to negotiate with a gun to our heads—that's just stupid," says Nick Coulter, the negotiator for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

But of course. If there’s no threat to their economic well-being, the producers don’t have to give a thing. That’s why producers earning double-digit millions want to be the ones holding the guns to the heads of the $45,000-a-year people who come up with the ideas that make the producers rich.

Mike Huckabee becomes a strike breaker

Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas Republican governor who wants to be the Republican nominee for President, is scheduled to go on the Jay Leno show tonight.

If he does, he’s probably going to need a Secret Service detail to shoo away members of the Writers Guild of America, the union that is picketing NBC studios in Burbank while it fights for the rights of writers to get paid when the studios and networks use their stuff on the Internet.

It essence, we’ll have an arm of the Federal government stopping a legal labor protest give partisan assistance to a Presidential candidate in his election campaign.

Power to the networks. But none
for you, you inkstained wretch.

Worth noting: networks and studios are part of the same mega-media conglomerates that want to sue you into oblivion if you so much as think about transferring a tune from a CD to your own computer, or lift a song or a movie off the Internet without paying for it.

You don’t need more evidence than the militancy of the studios and networks to know there’s big, very big money there, and that the greedy bastards don’t want to share it with the people who create it. That’s why the writers are striking.

Remember, just a handful of owners who control the likes of Fox, ABC, CBS and other media giants decide what you may or may not see in the movies, on TV news and elsewhere. Fox, for example, is not only the owner of a news network but also a major movie producer and distributor thanks to its ownership of 20th Century Fox. Ditto ABC, which owns Disney. And so on.

To exacerbate the situation, the mostly Bush-appointed Federal Communications Commission has made mergers of media companies easier than ever, concentrating more and more communications power into fewer and fewer hands.

Now Ham-Handed Huckabee, hungry for public exposure, even if it means appearing on comedy shows, has jumped into the situation with both left feet.

“9 munths ago I culdn’t even
spel Prezidential candydate
– and today I are one”

Huck is the Arkansas governor with the “nice guy” image, but not the vaguest clue about matters such as whether Iran has nukes. In essence he's a foreign policy ignoramus in a dangerous world.

On top of that there's his bizarro notion that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation." Or his weird statement that “I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives."

Clearly, foreign policy isn’t Huck’s only weakness. He also evidently hasn’t read the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Not to mention that Ham Handed Huck’s opinion on religion in America insults the founding fathers, a good many of whom were deists; not to mention an insult to Tom Paine, the Deist who wrote “Common Sense,” the pamphlet that helped inspire the American Revolution; not to mention the Quakers who were pretty much responsible for the founding and administration of one of the original 13 colonies; not to mention the Jews who helped to finance George Washington’s army. The best known of them was Haym Salomon.

Now “nice guy” Huck from Arkansas is getting into union busting. The Hollywood writers, being largely peaceable folks, will probably allow themselves to be shunted off to some distant point in the San Fernando Valley while Huckabee is in town, rather than risk becoming a replay of a massacre in Pakistan.

But with the all the crazies running and seeking power in the Republican party, this almost could be Pakistan.

Okay, struck TV networks. You "Axed" for it!

New York: Stunned by the fallout from the Screen Writers Guild strike that threatens to make television an even-vaster wasteland, the networks have begun to consider asking advertising agencies to develop their own programming with non-union advertising copywriters.

The networks may consider promising that in turn for useable scripts, the ad agencies will be permitted to work generous plugs for their clients’ products into each show.

First the respond was an agency seeking to steal the AXE Deodorant account, currently at a different agency. The upstart agency put its best creative team on the job. Here are the first fruits of their fertile minds:

From: Axe Creative Team
To: Dave Whetstone, Creative Director

Dave,
We’ve been working all weekend on these. We think they're really cool.

The Armpit Show: This one’s a real charmer, kind of kooky, kind of droll. It’s a sitcom about a family’s adventures and little conflicts, as told by their armpits.

Now don’t get grossed out, Dave. we don’t want to show real armpits. We're talking about sock puppet armpits. They can sniff each other, talk about stuff like body odor problems, and of course always turn to Axe Deodorant to solve their deepest problems.

Continuing characters might include Bob Armpit as Father, Melissa Armpit as Mother, Bart Armpit (or if that’s too close to the Simpsons we could change his name to Brad Armpit) as the teen-aged son, Madison Armpit as the Little Sister, and a nosy neighbor, Mrs. Grungy Pitts.

Armpits In The News: Dave, I really, really think this could be serious competition to the Daily Show. The idea is to get laughs about the news by taking the people in the headlines and zooming in on their armpits. Sometimes you’ll be able to show wet armpits, but just as important, we’ll be able to rate the probable wetness under their clothing by the tenseness of whatever situation they happen to be in, on a scale of 1 to 10.

For example, if Barry Bonds has to answer questions about steroids and starts to look a little bit sweaty, that's an eight. If George Bush gets asked a question and gets that deer-in-the-headlights look again, that’s a nine. If Jessica Simpson gets asked about her love life – well, I think you get the idea. I foresee this adding a new phrase to the American idiom, “This looks like a number 10 armpit moment.”

The Scent Of Love. No, no, no, Dave, this is not a show about people. It’s kind of a Nature Channel show that each week features the scent of a different animal or bug and how that scent leads these wonderful creatures to find each other and reproduce. I figure our target audience would be adolescents, who are interested in sex but who can watch this show as an excuse to do high school biology term papers and feel they’re learning something.

Of course, adolescence is when a lot of brand preferences for things like underarm deodorant get formed, so this is a perfect show for the Axe people. We could even give it an intellectual atmosphere with scientific experiments. For example, we could coat a female fruit fly with Axe and watch how she gets ignored by male fruit flies.

Smelly Friends. The idea is, we have this co-ed apartment in the middle of Manhattan with a cast of continuing characters that include a guy and gal who are in love with each other but don’t know it, two gay guys who are in love with each other but also don’t know it and only one of them knows he’s gay, a real trampy-looking blonde who’s always bringing home guys she picked up in a bar or on the subway, and her two kids by an annulled marriage.

The big idea is, because it’s a New York apartment it’s always too hot, and there’s no way of turning off the radiator, so of course body odor becomes the main issue in all their lives. We keep seeing how body odor affects their romances and career prospects and how Axe comes in from time to time to solve various lifestyle problems.

The Axe Factory would be a program about a factory that makes electric guitars, and the musicians that buy them. Each week we follow a new guitar from the factory as it makes its way into the life of a different musician.

We see musicians on the road, sweating on stage, climbing back into cramped busses and so on. We learn a lot of inside stuff about musicians – for instance, that they have problems with expensive costumes that they can’t afford to replace very often – and that’s why they worry a lot about sweat stains. We have the tensions that arise on the bus when one or more of the actors get a little gamy. And of course we see how all these tensions get resolved with the help of Axe deodorant.

Axe Me Anything. This is a show about hip hop America, and the growing role that Axe deodorant plays in it. Each week, various up-and-coming hip hop stars get called to the stage and told an anecdote about body odor and Axe deodorant. They must then immediately do a rap song about the anecdote. The idea is to see which of the contestants can come up with the coolest rap number about body odor and Axe.

The audience gets to vote by keying their cell phones, and only Axe consumers who have a special phone number printed on the side of their Axe Deodorant know how to call in and vote. I see this as a kind of cross-cultural, or maybe multi-cultural kind of viewing experience with African-American, Spanish-American, Asian-American Indian-American and of course Caucasian-American rappers all doing their different numbers, so we can appeal to the widest possible audience.

Actor’s Apprentice: A group of waitpersons working in a restaurant on the Upper West Side vie to understudy Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. The audience votes via cell phone whether to keep the actors on or throw them off the show. Once again, only Axe Deodorant consumers will have the phone number.

The waitpersons have to sing, dance, do love scenes – and of course there’s this great tie-in to Axe. See, they’ll have to do a lot of running, climbing and other adventure-type scenes and then pass an armpit dryness test. Of course, only those waitpersons using Axe pass. The rest get told, “You’re fired, Stinky!” It’s a great way of demonstrating on camera the efficacy of the product

The Odornos: I don’t need to explain this one to you, Dave. It’s like the Sopranos, but with body odor.