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LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) -- They're called "the story department." They slave over treatments and final drafts. They agonize over storytelling techniques, character development and plot twists. But are they writers?
The answer is yes if you ask the 12 staff producers on the reality hit "America's Next Top Model" who went on strike July 21 to win recognition as members of the Writers Guild of America. The "Top Model" dozen have been walking a picket line outside the West Los Angeles offices of the show's executive producer Ken Mok ever since.
"Say you're watching a ('Top Model') scene with six girls standing around talking," says Kai Bowe, a striking "Top Model" associate show producer. "And then you switch to a girl in (a one-on-one) interview, and then you go back to the girls talking but with a few lines of voice-over from the interview. We're the ones who choose all of that, line by line."
Adds Bowe's fellow striker Sara Sluke, "It's not like it comes out of the camera that way."
As show producers and associate show producers, they slog through an average of 200 hours of raw footage to assemble each 41-minute episode. They shape the story lines in each episode and the overarching drama for each cycle of competition. They determine how the characters are portrayed -- and they find the "red herrings" to throw in to keep things from getting too predictable, Sluke says.
The "Top Model" labor action marks an escalation of the union's efforts to organize in the reality TV arena. That push has drawn criticism from some in the industry who view it as a costly effort waged on behalf of nonmembers who are employed by the very shows that are taking jobs away from existing members.
Observers also say the union's drive threatens to raise jurisdictional issues with the Intl. Assn. of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) over how the work done by the targeted employees is defined.
Mok has said he respects his associate producers' right to seek Writers Guild representation but has told them the process should be administered by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The guild calls that a stall tactic that could take months when all 12 producers performing what the guild views as writerlike functions on the show are eager to join up. The striking producers point to the unionization last year of the "Top Model" editors by IATSE through a mail-in election overseen by a neutral arbitrator, not the NLRB.
The other side counters that the NLRB is the appropriate forum for holding an election and determining whether the Writers Guild is the appropriate union to represent the associate producers, among other issues.
All in all, the situation is a hornet's nest that reflects primetime's changing economics and the precarious state of labor relations in Hollywood. For Sluke and Bowe, however, the campaign is all about getting the health and pension benefits that guild membership affords.
Some say that is doable but that the Writers Guild has come on too strong in asking for too much all at once. Industry insiders cite the deals the Directors Guild of America has cut to organize more than 100 reality shows (though not "Top Model") on terms that acknowledge the revenue limitations of unscripted programming compared to traditional scripted series.
Writers Guild spokesman Gabe Scott says the guild is asking for recognition first, and then good-faith negotiations.
"We don't have health care," Sluke says. "Our counterparts on other shows do. It's not right."
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