Tom Corwine

For the past couple of days, I’ve done some location picketing. As one might suspect, location picketing involves picketing productions where they’re shooting on location. This is very different from picketing studios, where we’re just walking back and forth in front of a gate. On location picketing, we’re walking on public sidewalks right next to the production. We have interactions with crew members. They talk to us, we talk to them. The chances of a battle ensuing are greater.

Despite the greater tension of doing a location picket, I feel we’re getting more accomplished. We’re actually able to communicate a message to the cast and crew and get our voices heard. Many of them support the WGA’s position, and the whole event is very civil, although a few line producers have pulled the hair out of their head trying to get the cops to make us leave.

Speaking of cops, the LAPD has done great job allowing us to express our 1st Amendment right while balancing complaints from the production.

There’s no more picketing left this year. It will resume January 7th, if necessary.

It’s Saturday night and I’m finally getting around to writing about Monday and Tuesday on the strike lines.

For the most part, they were pretty normal days. The one new thing this week was the time, I started doing a later shift, 9am to 12pm. As much as I like walking in circles with the same people over and over again, meeting new people is always nice too.

Tuesday at noon, the cast of Heroes showed up to the lines. Many fans of the show turned out to meet the cast, including two girls from Utah. Another girl showed up early and walked the lines at gate 3 with us, which was greatly appreciated. It was a great turnout, and I’m sure it brought Universal’s moguls to their knees.

As usual, I took some cellphone pics. I haven’t really taken a good look at them, but if any of them are decent, I’ll post them here tomorrow. I wish I had some better ones, but camera phones suck.

Last Wednesday, I spent another day at Universal, making it the first week I walked the same gate each day. As much as I’d like to wander to the other studios, I can take the Red Line to Universal and forgo dealing with the parking situation at the other picket locations.

The only event that can qualify as exciting was a visit from the LAPD. We didn’t do anything wrong, but we’ve had various near misses with cars ignoring our right-of-way in the crosswalk. The LAPD showed up to monitor the situation and talk to any motorist who felt it’s okay to hit a pedestrian in the crosswalk, so long as they’re holding a picket sign.

Gate 3, in all its glory.

Next week my schedule may vary somewhat, as I have some other strike-related projects I’m working on that might hinder my picketing availability. I’ll post some links to those projects next week, hopefully.

It was typical day at Gate 3, Universal - show up at 6am, walk for three hours, go home. Today, though, instead of going home, I went out to eat with two other picket line walkers, Fred and Isaac. While talking on the picket line is great, the restaurant was a better environment to chat, since we’re not subjected to traffic noise and sucking carbon monoxide fumes.

I returned to Universal later in the day to attend location picketing training. As the name suggests, location picketing entails going out to locations and asserting our 1st Amendment right to get our message across. Location picketing doesn’t have a fixed schedule like studio picketing, it’s more like on call, on the fly type work. It sounded interesting, but for now I think I’ll stick to the studios.

If anyone out there would like to come out to Universal and join the line, we’d love to have you. The Gate 3 morning shift has at least five regulars who are not WGA members, including myself, so you will be in good company. Information about picket locations and shifts is available at the WGAw web site.

Fridays are reserved for rallies, and this Friday’s (12/7/07) rally is the It’s All Written Rally at FremantleMedia from 12pm to 2pm.

The only picture I took today was a close up of a picket sign. I intend to use this to create a virtual picket sign in Second Life. If you are interested in participating in a virtual strike, get on Second Life and search for the Fans For Writers group.

Here is the picture of the picket sign, in case I don’t get a chance to make my virtual picket sign before Saturday.

Universal Studios is getting to be a regular stop for me, as Paramount was the first few weeks. As usual, I worked the morning shift - 6am. Today, we had some close calls of picketers getting run over by cars, myself included. In the end, though, we all made it through unscathed.

We had a visit from Neal Baer, a member of the WGA negotiating committee, who talked about what went on in the negotiating room last week and where the WGA is going from here. The discussion went on for over 30 minutes and was very detailed. I’m not going to try and sum it up here, there are better web sites for that kind of information.

Past jobs was a topic of conversation today. I talked a little about my pizza delivery days while others talked about operating forklifts, loading trucks and stocking grocery stores. Some jobs seemed very out-of-place for a writer, like our gate captain, Steve, who used to be a prosecutor. Our visitor, Neal Baer, went to medical school and became a pediatrician before his current role as showrunner of Law & Order: SVU.

I’m not sure where I’m going to head tomorrow, either Fox, Paramount or Universal. I’ll make up my mind in the morning.