After Henry by Joan Didion

Author:Joan Didion
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

During the five months of the dispute many people outside the industry had asked me what the strike was about, and I had heard myself talk about ancillary markets and about the history of pattern bargaining, about the “issues”, but the dynamic of the strike, the particular momentum that kept several thousand peo­ple with not much in common voting for at least a while against what appeared to be their own best in­terests, had remained hard to explain. The amounts of money to be gained or lost had seemed, against the money lost during the course of the strike, insignifi­cant. The “creative” issues, the provisions that touched on the right of the writer to have some say in the production, would have been, if won, unenforce­able.

Yet I had been for the strike, and felt toward that handful of writers who had declared their intention to desert it, and by so doing encouraged the terms on which it would end, a coolness bordering on distaste, as if we had gone back forty years, and they had named names. “You need to have worked in the in­dustry,” I would say by way of explanation, or “You have to live there.” Not until July of 1988, at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, did the emotional core of the strike come clear to me. I had gone to Atlanta in an extra-industry role, that of “re­porter” (or, as we say in Hollywood, “journalist”), with credentials that gave me a seat in the Omni but access to only a rotating pass to go on the floor. I was waiting for this rotating pass one evening when I ran into a director I knew, Paul Mazursky. We talked for a moment, and I noticed that he, like all the other industry people I saw in Atlanta, had a top pass, one of the several all-access passes. In this case it was a floor pass, and, since I was working and he seemed not about to go on the floor, I asked if I might borrow it for half an hour.

He considered this.

He would, he said, “really like” to do this for me, but thought not. He seemed surprised that I had asked, and uncomfortable that I had breached the nat­ural order of the community as we both knew it: di­rectors and actors and producers, I should have understood, have floor passes. Writers do not, which is why they strike.

— 1988

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