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There's scabbing and then there's scabbing. For the Writers Guild and its supporters, it would be easy to condemn and/or punish anyone, union or not, who provided script material to a network or studio during a strike. And rumors have already begun to circulate on the picket lines of assistant directors on sets mysteriously receiving faxed, rewritten pages from anonymous sources.
But what about a writer who continues to work on a screenplay assignment in the privacy of his own home office during non-picketing hours, with no intention of filing pages to anyone until a strike is resolved? Well, technically, this is outlawed writing as well. The guild expects that not a single word should be written to further a script owed to a struck company, regardless of whether you keep it to yourself.
For many writers, the thought of dropping creative momentum on a script and trying to return to it months later is terrifying. "I would hate to have been right in the middle of something," admits Oscar-nominated writer Josh Olson ("A History of Violence"), who sold a pitch just before the strike started but had not yet started writing it. "But you shouldn't be writing."
Still, the push and pull between honoring the WGA's methodologies and the desire to be productive is a major dilemma for some of the striking guild members. And since writing -- particularly for feature scribes -- is usually such private work, confirming whether a writer is doing this kind of low-grade scabbing is tricky.
Several agents have asserted that their clients will quietly work away on their open projects but wait until a strike's end to turn them in. A prominent producer admits that she's hoping that her writers are at least "thinking" about the project at hand while pacing the 30 feet of sidewalk outside of Warner Bros. Gate 7.
One writer pointed out that, hypothetically, anyone could finish a script during the strike, then sit on it for a few weeks after the strike's end and claim it was written then. Even the guild's Script Validation Program couldn't police that maneuver.
"I don't know how you get around that," this writer says. "Are you gonna seize the computers?"
Additionally, any writer who truly honored the...