Sweaty TV Writers Ready To Spill Movie Star Blood On Warner Bros. Lot
Defamer is committed to alerting the entertainment industry to any incipient acts of violence that might result from tensions between members of the favored-above-all, glamorous film caste and the small-screen untouchables who might be unacceptably inconvenienced by the needs of their megabudgeted movie projects, hoping to head off regrettable bloodshed with a civilized dialogue. While the Writers Guild loves to use sweatshop rhetoric for the conditions endured by nonunion writers, scribes on a WGA-certified TV production find themselves ready to overthrow the privileged neighbors robbing their office of the climate control mechanism that allows them to endure the punishing Valley heat. Oh, the humanity! Reports an operative on the Warner Bros. lot:
File this under the inequality of the feature/television production caste system:
On the Warner Bros. lot, there is suffering in the name of the slick George Clooney/Steven Soderbergh Ocean's franchise. While shooting commences on the gargantuan Stage 16, the air conditioning to the adjacent building, which houses the writing staff of Without A Trace, is being turned on and off to accommodate the feature's sound recording.
As a result, the staff is sweltering in heat equivalent to the surface of the sun (this is the Valley, after all) and it doesn't seem as though the injustice will end any time soon. The writers are calling on all of their brethren in the television realm to rise up in solidarity, pelting those responsible with (possibly killer) tomatoes until this grave situation is resolved. If action is not taken, this could only lead to a devastating battle of two Jerrys: Weintraub vs. Bruckheimer. And none of us want to see that happen.
We sincerely hope that a compromise is reached before the sweat-soaked TV writing underclass takes matters into its own hands and rises up against their A/C-withholding tormentors, but we fear that no amount of protest will foment change. Warner Bros. would gladly lock all of Without a Trace's staff in the writers' room and set it ablaze if that's what it takes to ensure that the Ocean's Thirteen shoot proceeds without interruption. They simply can't take the chance that a single take of Brad Pitt stumbling through his lines might be ruined by the ambient noise of a nearby, rattling air-conditioner.