Miscellany

Pernod, the French anise-flavored liquor, is a fantastic addition to any kind of mussel/shrimp/scallop dish. I've already steamed up some mussels with good results, and I have high hopes for its next use. However, I have yet to find a way to consume the stuff in a glass without wanting to shave my tongue afterwards. My first taste was, hmm, very reminiscent of Triaminic brand children's cough syrup.

And now, a long overdue follow up on my conversations with various relatives w/r/t to what exactly is the deal with this writers' strike.

In these conversations, I have frequently explained the concept of force majeure. Said principle allows one or both parties in a contractual agreement to withdraw from said agreement without financial penalty. Among the various act of god clauses in the standard deal contract, most industry contracts also specifically mention that a strike of eight to ten weeks will also trigger force majeure.

You have to understand is that virtually everyone and everything more important than a stapler has a studio deal. I worked for a company in Santa Monica that was funded completely by a deal with Disney (21 miles away in Burbank.) The next office over belonged to David Duchovny and Tea Leoni's production company -- a small organization that was, most likely, entirely funded by a deal with one of the big studios. Once upon a time, the film industry ran on the studio system; now it runs on deals. And all the deals, ultimately, go back to one of the big studios. (Disney, Sony, Time Warner, NBC/Universal, Fox and Viacom. That's six right? I think that's all of them.)

At this point in the story, I tend to use Mr. Cuba Gooding Jr. as a hypothetical individual with a hypothetical deal which perhaps his studio would like to terminate, rather than continue to pay him millions of dollars for such films as "Snow Dogs." I mean no offense to Mr. Gooding Jr. I'm sure his contract is in good standing and no one has any interest in releasing him from his deal.

And now, at long last, the relevant information. Futon Critic has a list here of Very Nearly All the TV Deals There Are. It doesn't even scratch the surface of the various film deals. From what I can see, 50 deals were canceled in the last week -- and that's just on the TV side.

Quite a lot of the details are fuzzy, but for example, Liz Astrof, who worked on "Welcome to the Captain" in some capacity, is rumored to have had a two year, seven figure deal. That means, minimum, she was going to make a million bucks a year. But not anymore, because her deal has been canceled.

Now, multiply those savings times the other 49 canceled deals on the list and that, dear friends, is why the AMPTP wasn't in any hurry to wrap up the strike. A month of "House" reruns is a drag, but it's nothing compared to saving several hundred million bucks in contractual payments.

We can only hope that, having thinned the ranks somewhat, the studios are now in the mood to actually make a deal.