It's getting right unpleasant in Hollywood, and this weekend it could get lots worse if NBC finds itself having to yank the airing of the Golden Globe awards, set for Sunday night, because of the writers' strike.
That's a real possibility. A decision to cancel could come as early as today.
Through the weekend, NBC chief Jeff Zucker was frantically attempting to work out a deal that would allow the show to go on, but as of this morning no such deal was in place, and the odds appeared to be running against one.
The Golden Globes special, an annual event, is a good draw for NBC, with last year's special attracting 20 million viewers, as well as a list of top-tier advertisers.
But the bigger issue would be the humiliation factor for Zucker, one of the most powerful television executives in Hollywood, and it would be a major coup for the Writers Guild of America in the two-months-plus strike.
What threatens to kill the special is a refusal by the WGA to cut a deal with Dick Clark Productions, which is producing the special, that would allow the show to go on.
Without a deal in place, striking writers would picket the event, and actors, who have supported the writers for these two months, have vowed to boycott the event. On Friday, the actors' guild formally announced its intention to boycott the event if it's aired by NBC.
Facing that prospect, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association would prefer the event to go on without being televised and has asked NBC to yank the special from its schedule. That way the stars could attend and the awards handed out without anyone having to cross a picket line.
Another option would be to postpone the entire event in hopes of reaching an agreement with the WGA.
The WGA has refused to negotiate an exemption for the NBC special, even though it reached a not-dissimilar deal with Worldwide Pants that made way for the late night shows of David Letterman and Craig Ferguson to return to the air last week with a full staff of writers.
In essence, without saying so directly, the WGA is holding the Golden Globes hostage as a means of forcing the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television and Producers, negotiators for the studios, back to the negotiating table.
The WGA over recent weeks has offered to cut individual deals with production companies, the first being with Worldwide Pants, in a ploy to weaken the position of the AMPTP. The Letterman deal made all-important concessions to writers in the area of fees for content that appears on the internet, the major stumbling block to a deal between the WGA and the studios.
The WGA stands to gain considerable leverage by choosing whom it cuts deals with and whose offers to talk it chooses to ignore.
It's apparently about to reach a deal with United Artists, the company controlled by Tom Cruise, and there's rumors it's also about to enter talks with Weinstein Co. for an interim contract that would return writers to work.
