Writers' Guild strike threatens Oliver Stone and Mikko Alanne production

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By Veli-Pekka Lehtonen
     
      United Artists (UA) has announced that as a result of the writers’ strike in Hollywood, it is postponing the production of the Oliver Stone project Pinkville until some point in the distant future, reported Variety, the daily newspaper for the entertainment industry. The scriptwriter of the movie is Finnish author Mikko Alanne.
      Variety noted that because of the ongoing labour action by the Writers' Guild of America (WGA), neither director Oliver Stone nor screenwriter Mikko Alanne can work on the script revisions needed to get the film ready for production, as both are members of the WGA.
     
United Artists planned to begin the production of Pinkville in Southeast Asia at the beginning of next month.
      The camera crew as well as the cast, including for example Bruce Willis, Channing Tatum, and Woody Harrelson, were preparing to leave for Thailand when UA shelved the film on Friday.
      Pinkville is a drama about the investigation of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968.
     
"This has become the second major film casualty due to the writers' strike", Variety wrote. The first occurred as the production start on the Ron Howard-directed Angels & Demons was cancelled on Friday.
      Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks, is a sequel to the Vatican-set The Da Vinci Code, based on the novel by Dan Brown.
      It is possible that the launch of a strike so soon came as a surprise to the Pinkville team, as for example screenwriter Mikko Alanne said in an interview with Helsingin Sanomat just four weeks ago that the WGA would probably call a strike in the summer of 2008.
      The fact that Oliver Stone is a director who likes to make changes throughout the production is bound to make the situation even worse, as with a strike going on, no last-minute revisions are possible.
      At the weekend, Variety also expressed doubts that Pinkville would ever be revived for a restart, as new schedules seldom suit everybody while casts disperse to other projects.
      According to the paper, another reason for uncertainty could be the allegedly unstable financial condition of UA, which was recently revived by Tom Cruise and his associates, albeit with no great success.
     
Only a few weeks ago, the company’s production Lions for Lambs fell far short of the studio’s box office expectations on its release.
      Reportedly, the movie - starring Cruise, Meryl Streep and actor-director Robert Redford - was made to help kick-start the revival of United Artists.
      The planned Pinkville, is likewise a wartime-set film with a political angle.
     
Following a failure to reach agreement by the end of October, American screenwriters went on strike on November 5th.
      The dispute stems from the issue of residuals, or the amount a writer receives each time his or her work is repeated, with one critical issue for the strike being residuals for new media.
      One immediate result has been to drive off the air all American TV talk-shows, such as those featuring Tarja Halonen lookalike Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, and David Letterman.
      It has also brought home to viewers that all the witty dialogue, however spontaneous it is meant to sound, is in fact carefully scripted, and the funny men rely on a small army of joke-writers to keep them in business.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / Adapted from an article first published in print 19.11.2007


Links:
  Variety: Pinkville on hold due to strike
  United Artists news

VELI-PEKKA LEHTONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
veli-pekka.lehtonen@hs.fi