Conan is back, and so are the picket lines
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NEW YORK — About 20 Writers Guild members picketed in front of NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza this afternoon in the stinging cold while inside, Conan O’Brien taped his first show since the strike began in early November.
Tourists gawked and snapped pictures as the bundled-up scribes marched on the sidewalk in front of the NBC Experience Store, where boxes of “The Office’s” Michael Scott bobblehead dolls were piled high in the window. Conspicuously absent from the line: writers who work on O’Brien’s “Late Night” program, along with the other late-night scribes who have been a constant presence on the New York picket line for the last two months.
WGA officials, who acknowledged that the situation was awkward for those writers, said they decided to hold a narrow, targeted picket today after much internal discussion.
“Of course there’s been debate about whether or not we should picket these shows,” said Michael Winship, president of WGA East, as he leaned against the metal barricade set up to cordon off the strikers. “But I think in the long run, the decision was we had to think about it in the context of all 10,500 members in the union and what our overall goals are. It’s important to make the point, especially on this day when these shows are going back on the air, that we’re still out here, we’re still on strike, we’re going into our third month and we’re just waiting for them to come back to the table.
“It’s a different kind of picket,” he added. “It’s a small picket, because we’re not protesting Conan as an individual. Conan has been supportive of the strike, so we’re in no way out here to criticize him as an individual. We’re here to have a picket line so people will not cross it to appear as guests on the program, so you don’t need a lot of people for that.” (Of course, the multiple entrances to the building made the guild’s picket largely symbolic, Winship admitted.)
Gina Gionfriddo, a writer/producer on “Law & Order,” said that even though most of the late-night hosts were crossing the picket line to go back on the air, she felt buoyed by the deal that the guild struck last week with David Letterman’s production company.
“I’m hoping that it’s going to illustrate that what we’re asking for is completely reasonable,” she said. “If David Letterman can meet our demands, I think the rest of the industry certainly can.”
As for O’Brien and the other hosts, “we feel they’ve stood behind us, they’ve paid their staffs out of their own pockets, and we don’t have any doubt at all that they want to be back to work with writers,” Gionfriddo said. “I see this picket line as an effort to help them get their writers back.”
As they headed in to watch the “Late Night” taping, audience members Oscar Alfaro, 18, and Amauris Pacheco, 19, said they fully backed the writers.
“The under-30 crowd definitely understands, because, I mean, I watch most of my shows on the Internet,” Pacheco said. The strike “definitely affects me,” he added. “I’m a big TV watcher, and all these reruns, man.”
Still, the two community college students said they couldn’t resist the chance to see a taping of O’Brien’s show and arrived at 6 a.m. to get standby tickets.
As for what kind of program it will be without writers, “Conan is a very funny guy,” Alfaro said. “I think he can come up with some good stuff.”
No word on whom O’Brien’s guest would be. The students said the ticket office wouldn’t tell them. But they said they were resigned to the prospect that he wasn’t able to persuade an A-list actor to cross the picket line and appear on the show.
“On the ‘Tonight Show,’ Mike Huckabee is the person they’re interviewing, so obviously they couldn’t really get a big-name celebrity to come out there,” Pacheco said.
-- Matea Gold