David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. Love and Downloads: A portrait of an executive/writer marriage
Susanne Daniels is an executive currently running the cable network Lifetime. Her husband Greg is a writer/executive producer who did the unthinkable, transforming the American version of “The Office” into something akin to its brilliant British counterpart (and, to some minds, exceeding it, since it has run so much longer than the original’s 13 episodes).
The writers strike, in the Daniels’ case, is something of a civil war, pitting wife against husband – network executive vs. writer.
When speaking with Susanne on Monday – for a forthcoming story on her book about her days as a WB executive (“Season Finale,” written with Variety’s Cynthia Littleton), she spoke of one little skirmish in the residual wars which lie at the heart of the strike.
“Over Thanksgiving,” she recalled, “I downloaded [NBC’s] ‘Chuck’ – I hadn’t seen ‘Chuck’ yet and I watched a bunch of episodes online. And my husband came in and saw me doing it and he said, (in an incredulous voice) ‘You’re downloading a show online?’ and I said, ‘I think you should get paid for it, but yes! I’m doing it! Don’t get me wrong – I think you should be paid; I’m on your side, but can’t I download it if it’s there?’ He didn’t want me to download the shows!”
(Residuals being a huge sticking point in the ongoing strike, many writers are advocating not downloading episodes, watching episodes online or buying DVDs at this point.)
So what’s it like being in a marriage at ostensibly ideological loggerheads these days?
She replied, “I don’t think it’s fair for the studios to say that they aren’t making enough money when they need to go back and look at the whole system. I think the writers are asking for very little – 2 and a half percent, for goodness’ sake. You can’t say they’re asking for too much money when they’re asking for a percentage that little of the download – they’re clearly bringing in incremental advertising. I have been persuaded by certain by people I know, and I am on the writers’ side of this (chuckling knowingly), but I think there are problems in the system that need to be addressed.”
She continued, offering a suggestion as to where savings for producers might be found:
“I was just in New York, where the Broadway stagehands are also striking. I met with a Broadway actress, and I don’t want say her name, because I don’t think she’d want to be quoted, but she’s a famous Broadway actress who’s interested in being on TV. She said, ‘On the one hand, the stagehands are incredibly helpful to you as an actress when you’re backstage and they do so much for you. I don’t want to sound like I’m ungrateful. On the other hand, you go backstage and look around and you go, what do all you people do? There’s a stagehand who does this (Daniels moved her coffee cup incrementally in one direction) and there’s another stage hand who does this (she moved the cup in another direction). There’s a little too many. We want to pay the stagehands who work. We don’t want to pay all the stagehands.’
“And that’s what the argument’s about,” Daniels concluded. “I think there’s an analogy there a little bit. I think things have gotten out of control in terms of the production and the way it’s done. You always hear about these indie movies that are fabulous and are done for five cents – how come this [production] costs $1 million and that [one] costs $100 million? There are controls throughout the system that really need modifying.”
Consider a can of worms officially opened. Though any action upon Daniels’ observation could have a devastating effect on Hollywood’s below-the-line workforce, if you’ve ever been on a set and seen the scores of production assistants and grips and gaffers standing around endlessly waiting for a scene to be shot, you can tend to wonder what they all actually do.