Whedon and Company Can't Resist Writing While Striking

By Katey Rich

Joss Whedon, blogger extraordinaire.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and writers gotta find someone to listen to their one-liners. Hollywood writers have been popping up in places other than the picket lines in the last week, covering the strike on their own blogs, in newspaper op-eds and even on their fansites. New York Magazine's Culture Vulture graded the various op-eds, leaving out "Daily Show" writer Rachel Axler's funny piece in the New York Times Style section (huh?), the blog kept by writers from "The Late Show with David Letterman" (about as funny as the show itself), and probably plenty of other writing that has managed to pass me by.

Still, Vulture gives top awards to Joss Whedon's op-ed from the fansite Whedonesque, and I have to agree. Now, as a graduate of Wesleyan University I'm contractually required to worship at Whedon's altar (I think it's in the application somewhere), but I've never quite fallen for any of his shows. After seeing him in person a few times and reading this essay, though, I'm officially head-over-heels for the man himself. He gets at a really key element of the strike coverage, the way that some parts of the media and a lot of us regular Americans are secretly looking at the strikers and saying "Big deal, shut up and get back to your venti lattes and house in the Hollywood Hills." This is a union strike, but because they're not the blue-collar workers we're used to seeing on strike, we're not quite viewing it that way.

"Since we aren't real workers, this isn't a real union issue. (We're just a guild!) And that's where all my �what is a writer' rambling becomes important," Whedon writes. "Because this IS a union issue, one that will affect not just artists but every member of a community that could find itself at the mercy of a machine that absolutely and unhesitatingly would dismantle every union, remove every benefit, turn every worker into a cowed wage-slave in the singular pursuit of profit. (There is a machine. Its program is �profit'. This is not a myth.) This is about a fair wage for our work. No different than any other union."

Lindelof will likely face a mob of angry fans if "Lost" suffers in quality due to the strike.

The entire essay is great, and really, really funny (he works in the word "popinjays" and a reference to Twelfth Night, for goodness sake), and worth reading. Whedon also hints at the dark future of the strike that no one really wants to acknowledge: soon enough we'll get bored with watching three different versions of "Dancing with the Stars" and want those popinjay writers to get back to what we pay them for: entertaining us. Damon Lindelof, co-creator of "Lost," made the same point in an op-ed for the New York Times: "Public sentiment may have swung toward the guild for now, but once the viewing audience has spent a month or so subsisting on 'America's Next Hottest Cop' and 'Celebrity Eating Contest,' I have little doubt that the tide will turn against us."

The strike has real potential for forcing us all, the media-consuming public, to reconsider the way we view our entertainment. Writers have always been the man behind the curtain, especially in television; the people who make Ross and Rachel funny are seen as infinitely less important than the people who make Ross and Rachel attractive, or fashion icons. In the last few years, though, especially on television, they've gained a new kind of cachet: Tina Fey was on the airwaves while she was still writing "Saturday Night Live," and Marc Cherry, writer and creator of "Desperate Housewives," has as much pull if not more than Eva Longoria. On film, too, Judd Apatow has created a mini-industry by writing good scripts and then fostering writers he likes. Now that they've got us all understanding phrases like "residuals" and "percentage from the back-end," will they expand this newfound cultural power? Or will we, as Lindelof suggests, turn our backs, shoving them back into their writers rooms without caring about their income, so long as we finally find out how Jack and Kate got off the island.

It's probably too early for all this speculation, since the wolves remain at bay while there are still new episodes of The Office and the movie industry remains largely intact. And even when the shows go dark, we'll still have bloggers like Whedon to keep us entertained. The online presence of the writers during the strike is ironic given that the Internet is key to their demands, but a refreshing reminder that we, the fans, still matter, even when they're leaving us in the dark.

It ain't bragging if you done it: Joss Whedon, with me and the rest of the plebes, at Wesleyan's graduation in May.