The making of the Hollywood working class; how the writers' strike drove the Jaguar owners to the barricades.

• Author: Eisendrath, John

How the writers' strike drove the Jaguar owners to the barricades

Whew! For a while there it looked like America would have to endure an entire fall television season without new episodes of "Sonny Spoon." Now after a five-month strike the writers are back at work, the new season has begun, and the couch potatoes can rejoice.

In Hollywood, though, there is relief but no joy. The writers (and the producers for whom they work) resolved the narrow question of royalty payments, which was at the core of the strike. But the future looks uncertain for the dozens of studios that sell shows to the major television networks. In 1981, the major networks controlled 90 percent of prime-time viewership; now with competition from upstarts like Fox and CNN, that share has shrunk to 70 percent. Videocassette recorders are now in 60 percent of American homes, contributing to eroding network ratings and revenues. As of August 1, the advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, had spent $500 million less on television advertising this year than last; up-front, prime-time network sales are expected to drop 6 percent this year to $2.9 billion. Less money for the networks means less money for the Hollywood studios. This, together with some dogs at the TV box office, has crippled certain studios. Lorimar Telepictures (producers of "Dallas") lost $86 million in 1987. New World Entertainment ("The Wonder Years") is nearly bankrupt, and the DeLaurentis Entertainment Group is under Chapter xi.

You're probably assuming a dispute between Hollywood writers and producers on the set of "ME Belvedere" would be different from gritty labormanagement showdowns in Youngstown: that it would be a family affair, pitting liberal against liberal, the affluent against the rich. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is as much animosity between, and shortsightedness among, labor and management in Hollywood as in any mill town in America, and there is the threat of competition, too. Do any of these scenarios-all present in the writers' strike-sound familiar? Management demanding rollbacks from labor while receiving multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses. Workers caring more about their own bottom lines-wages and profitsthan in fighting for a more democratic workplace where risk and reward are shared.

What producers and writers do share is a sense of self-pity that knows no bounds. With memories of the early guild baffles and anticommunist witchhunts, the writers see themselves as oppressed artists chained to the assembly lines of the Hollywood entertainment factory. At a minimum a writer makes $68,880 for a 40-week season. And they very frequently make several times that. The producers feel put upon: they take big risks, underwriting dozens of unsuccessful pilots and movies in search of a hit, yet they are among the highest paid executives in any industry.

There is no reason to believe Hollywood will be able to write itself a happy ending. Neither side has shown the willingness to temper its whining and meet the common enemy of outside competition. Like the steelworkers and factory bosses who squabbled between themselves while plants were moved overseas, the denizens of Rodeo Drive seem equally oblivious.

Ten years ago at least portions of 80 percent of all films were shot in Hollywood. According to Lionel Chetwynd, a former WGA board member, in 1987 only 20 percent were filmed there. During the strike, British writers easily geared up to write "Dallas" and "Knots Landing"; 20-year-old episodes of "Mission Impossible" were reproduced in Australia. It's hard to imagine the Decline of the Hollywood Empire, but of course in 1960 no one in Detroit had ever heard of Honda.

Divide and conquer

Television is called a medium, the comedian Fred Allen once remarked, because it is rare that it is well done. It is always expensive. To understand the writers' strike, it's important to understand where the costs and the profits are. While the networks are starting to produce more of their own shows, the vast majority are produced by independent studios, which sell them to the networks.

To make money, the studios sell to local stations and to cable networks the rights to...