WGA’s Divide and Conquer Nabs UA

Following in the footsteps of Worldwide Pants, United Artist - the production company owned by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner, has brokered it’s own deal with the writers guild, giving the struggling re-start-up an advantage, according to Deadline Hollywood Daily.

Granted, given how tiny UA is — only six executives — and how limited their movie development can be, this is more of a symbolic than a significant development in the ongoing WGA strike.

I’m told that, like Letterman’s company, UA has accepted the very same proposals that the WGA presented to the media conglomerates when the Alliance Of Motion Picture & Television Producers walked out of contract negotiations back on December 7th. “It’s the same kind of agreement that the guild made with [David Letterman's] Worldwide Pants. But ‘interim agreement’ is not the right word,” a WGA insider explained to me. “At the end of the day, once an overall agreement is done between the WGA and AMPTP, if the terms and conditions of that agreement are more favorable to UA, they will be able to enjoy that. This essentially means that UA has the ability to be in business with the WGA.”

So the precedent has been set. C’mon, Solidarity SAGers, swing that weight around and end this thing.