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January 07, 2008
A Smart-Minded Piece On The Strike From A Lawyer's Perspective
"Here’s the thing to remember, fairness and reasonableness have NOTHING TO DO with their approach. No corporate lawyer I’ve ever known has ever met with a client and promised to get them the most “fair and equitable deal” possible.
That’s not their goal. Instead, they promise to save them a lot of money – remember, added value. If the studios were genuinely interested in reaching a fair and equitable deal, the CEOs and their CFOs would talk directly to our negotiating committee and financial people, and a deal could be reached today – by the way, this is what we’re driving towards. We will know we will have won when the CEOs and their CFOs talk to us directly – more on this later. Back to Counter…
So, what exactly have Counter and Lombardi promised their clients – the studio heads? Two things: a specific outcome by a certain point in time and peace of mind."
The piece does mention that the WGA should have put DVD back on the table after it turned out that the bargaining that got them to take it off the table was in bad faith. (100% agreement) And the one thing it doesn't mention, as strategy, are the side deals being made, which I think distract mightily from the clarity of vision this man writes about.
But a thoughtful, mostly clear-headed piece.
Posted by poland at January 7, 2008 01:10 AM
Comments
this is the best piece I've yet read on the strike.
I thought the DVDs were back on the table, they should go back right now. But actually they should go back at 12 cents, the old "ask for triple, settle for double" maxim of horse trading.
everyone says 4cents per dvd but is that actually a percentage of $20 or is it a flat rate for all dvds? because as a percentage that's only 0.2% which is ludicrous even at double or triple the current value.
The studios are essentially already at zero on dvds (and are for new media) they can't make their offers lower, not to negative numbers. So why should the writers continually lower? as said in Stardust, "that's not bargaining, I keep changing my price and your price is staying the same."
---
that NYT article was interesting, on violence in movies relating to real world violence. he compared the data to see if film violence had a correlation in violent crime statistics. and he found one, not a big surprise, selection bias and what not. And even taking the perspective that he's right, there's a prominent confounding factor in the last ten years, Goldeneye was released in 1997, and popularized the FPS beyond the then limited scope of PC based shooters the genre began on. After goldeneye the genre became one of the dominant forces of the videogame industry, so in only looking at the last decade, you have to account for that and other potential confounding factors (the spread of the internet for example could have an impact, greater rates of incarceration, larger police forces, the continuing impact of abortion and birth control, and poor nutrition resulting in lower fertility rates especially in the urban poor. All of which will have tertiary impacts on a statistic like this.
the study is akin to freakonomics, which is a simplification of complexity theory, but for the most part the NYT presented it very badly, it's simply a headline grabber, no good way to tell if it should be taken seriously or not from a scientific perspective, but skepticism (not taking it seriously, or the counter hypothesis: "they absolutely and obviously increase violent crime--duh, it's common sense we don't need evidence!") is the best course and the way good science will occur in this arena. Movies are a cultural force and have an impact on culture so there probably is a relationship here. but it's not occuring in isolation or with a predictable and consistant variance. there's a better explanation, but this is an interesting starting point, and proving this hypothesis wrong would result in a really solid understanding of any connection (or not)
Posted by: movielocke ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/nav-commenters.gif)
at January 7, 2008 04:12 AM
The DVD rate is a percentage equal to 1.5% or 1.8% of 20% of the distributor's gross, which generally works out to 0.36% of the distributor's gross.
Posted by: RDP at January 7, 2008 01:15 PM
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