Every movie about a strike needs a heroine, someone brash enough to stand on top of a table with a megaphone and demand justice.
But some credit for the possible ending of the three-month-old strike by the Writers Guild of America may be going to a different sort of star.
New York Times reporter Michael Cieply writes today that Laeta Kalogridis, most recently the executive producer of Bionic Woman, helped bring the warring parties together not with a megaphone but with a phone and with e-mail.
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Working behind the scenes, she helped link David J. Young, the executive director of the Writers Guild of America West and Peter A. Chernin, president and COO of News Corp., the parent corporation of 20th Century Fox and Fox Broadcasting.
Chernin and Robert A. Iger, president and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, served as the chief negotiators for management during the strike.
In addition, Kalogridis’s agent helped connect labor and management.
Negotiators reached the general terms of an agreement last Friday. Tomorrow, guild members in Los Angeles and New York City will review the proposed settlement.
If writers accept the proposal, they could be back to work next week, the Times reported.
The contract reportedly gives the writers some of the revenue they sought for shows that are rebroadcast on the Internet.
As unraveled by Cieply, the possible resolution of the strike came about because of people, like Kalogridis, who had friends in both camps.
One of Chernin’s links to the union was his lifelong friend, Rick Rosen of Endeavor Agency LLC. Rosen, in turn was Kalogridis’s agent.
Early on Chernin advised the union to bring in a lawyer used to these sorts of negotiations. Patric M. Verrone, the president of Writers Guild of America West, and John Bowman, the group’s chief negotiator, resisted the suggestion.
Eventually, at the urging of Rubin and others, the union leaders did hire Alan Wertheimer, a lawyer for many entertainment figures. His clients include Ron Bass and Tom Schulman, guild board members.
Wertheimer, is also a law partner of Jim Jackoway, the lawyer for David Letterman. The talk show host had earlier agreed to a separate deal with his writers that got his program back on the air.
An end to the strike could mean that the Feb. 24 Academy Awards program will be broadcast as scheduled on ABC.
During the strike, which began Nov. 5, Kalogridis helped found a website, United Hollywood. It was a kind of rumor control and information conduit during the strike.
Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, the site today served as a platform for people to quarrel with the Times story and take a little luster off the Kalogridis halo.
“This struggle is about the sacrifices of many, not the phone calls of a few,” wrote one blogger.
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