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Dave, you're such a rearend washcloth. AMPTP still has to re-start talks. That's a script you might want to write.

Speaking of asses -- ironic that Ms. Finke is out on self-imposed sick leave while this story breaks. No scoops, no self-important announcements, no nothing. Poetic justice.

I gotta say Dave, if there's a deal for the WGA done by the end of Sundance, i will indeed have to bow to your superior prognostication skills.

Here's some prognostication of my own.

Nikki will claim she made a similar prediction or "knew it was going to happen"

She will also take credit for helping end the strike.

It doesn't matter if a few people on the internet are against this deal. The majority of us are going to want to go through with it as long as there isn't a catch we aren't aware of.

I'm excited to get back to work.

Well the TV season is apparently over. Here's to them signing a contract that gets crap movies into production. Yippie. I cannot wait til the home video divisions gets to endure a sluggish Q3 because of this strike and the studios shutting it down. Wiffle balls.

I sure hope you knocked on a lot of wood out there before you posted.

If you mean Q3 2009, you may be right, IOI. Q3 DVD releases for this year will be movies that have been in the can for months.

When I guess at something, I might do something like knock on wood.

This is better than a 90% certainty. The odds of the WGA taking an extremist position on this deal are very low. And the odds of AMPTP trying to weasel it into something lesser are even lower. The furthest guild out, SAG, is also very unlikely to strike for the last part of the puzzle, a DVD increase, come June.

This is the problem with making "the other side" in a business negotiation into insane, irrational, devils who want to kill you. It's always simpler than that... especially when the "other side" is the money side. They may be without soul or concern for fairness, but they know as well as anyone that they need the means of production.

I don't want to start a thread for this notion yet, but what is curious is how the strike settlement will be positioned publicly. How big will the group that says that the strike led to the settlement be... how big will the group that claims DGA did what the WGA couldn't, even with a strike, be?

Joe Leydon has mentioned this before, those "be's" dangle too much.

How big will the group be that says the strike led to the settlement... how big will the group be that claims DGA did what the WGA couldn't, even with a strike?

Why is comingsoon.net the only bloggy blog carrying the AMPTP statement, the big come back to Jesus invite to the WGA signed by all the studios? I'm just pointing it out.

Thanks for the editing suggestions, T Holly. Something else to keep me up at night.

No idea what you are talking about regarding the AMPTP letter... and can't find anything like that on comingsoon front page... so please give us a link.

http://www.amptp.org/index.html

Because it's fucking obnoxious, T Holly... that's why.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=41052

I hope you mean too obnoxious to link on your home page.

David, I hope you're right. I'm just not encouraged by the tone of the WGA response, coupled with the more negative comments I have seen from both Mark Evanier and from the posters at UH. This was not helped by posts at UH that referred to me and my fellow ADs as "interchangeable drones" who make our living "repeating the obvious ('we're rolling', we're cutting', 'camera reloads')". (There may be a paraphrase in there - I don't care to re-read the attacks) The overwhelming majority of posts I have seen have been openly hostile to the idea of accepting anything based on the DGA pattern. In the nearly 25 responses to the mostly fair analysis put up by UH, I only could find two that took the "let's try to make this work" approach. The rest ranged from a quick dismissal to a more fervent rejection. I truly hope that this is not the sentiment David Young and Patric Verrone are bringing to their response.

I hope we'll see something today, but I have a feeling we won't see an official response until Monday. (This is sort of like having a time out called in between free throws in an NBA game...)

What are the chances Nikki Finke was "told" to get out of town for a couple weeks by a party involved in the strike. Perhaps someone thought that her presence would interfere with the negotiations and made a vacation worth her while? I'm not saying she has any real power in the real world, but there is a vacuum right now. How could someone who lives on self-promotion not weigh in at the supposed apex of the strike? Rumors are out that she's ill, but if that was the case you would know it because she would want the sympathy. Just sayin'.

"Rumors are out that she's ill"

Maybe someone threw a bucket of water on her.

How is it rumor if she says she's exaughsted, not feeling well, needs a week off and sticks to it? This is not the apex, either, that'll be when the talks start again, and besides it's Sundance week. Thanks Dave, for seeing the light and making the linky loo.

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