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(l-r) Moderator: Jordan Levin, Panel: Richard Weitz, Greg Daniels, Kevin Reilly, Kenneth Ziffren, Sandra Stern
by Chris Davison, davison@intellcap.com
….any road will get you there. Seeking to prevent this statement from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, a panel of Hollywood experts gathered together on March 25th for the first post-strike HRTS panel, tasked with the job of divining the road ahead. Moderator, past HRTS President and Founding Partner & CEO, Generate, Jordan Levin welcomed Richard Weitz, Partner at Endeavor and Head of TV Packaging, Greg Daniels, Executive Producer/Showrunner of “The Office”, Kevin Reilly, President of Entertainment at Fox Broadcasting Company, Ken Ziffren, Co-Founder and Partner at Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca, Fischer, Gilbert-Lurie, Stiffelman, Cook, Johnson, Lande & Wolf, LLP, and Sandra Stern, EVP & COO of television for Lionsgate.
This HRTS panel set a new post-strike precedent: small pieces of content from many individual creators. In other words, for the first time many of the questions asked came from the audience, submitted by email and/or text message before and during the event.
 Levin’s first question was an overall look, asking if the strike was an inflection point, how the panelists would describe this period of time. Daniels said that it was a hard time for a lot of people but the business had been changing slowly before the strike and the strike really forced everyone to pay attention to the changes. On the upside, Daniels said that they have a new framework for “The Office” and it’s working. Reilly concurred, saying that sometimes you have to take one step back in order to take two steps forward and that while the new WGA contract sets some precedents for the future, it’s only a start.
 Can the members of the Hollywood Radio & Television Society still be considered as producing television or is it content distributed via multiple media? Sandra Stern answered the bell strongly, saying that industry folks have made the mistake of defining what we do by the device on which we watch it. She went on to say that the more important question is not what device is being used but rather what is it we’re making? Can the business be defined by virtue of what it is we’re making and not how we’re watching it?
 In so far as the agency world is concerned, Levin wanted to know what concerns agents the most going forward. Weitz said that agents represent content, on whatever platform it appears, and so traditional boundaries are becoming less useful. Levin asked a quick follow-up question, causing Weitz to pause for a moment and then get the biggest laugh of the afternoon when he said “I feel like that woman from Miss America, just jumbling everything”. Weitz also added that he doesn’t think his clients or the studios or networks will make up the money lost during the strike, it’s lost and so we all have to move on.
 In terms of moving forward together, have things returned to normal? what is normal? Reilly said that he thinks “business as usual is going to go on” and that “the vast majority of what we do will be the exact same”. Far from any expected post-strike writer/executive antipathy, Levin asked how “The Office” had been successful in its early days, prompting Daniels to address Reilly and say “you gave good notes”.
 So where do we go from here? Ziffren said that the major gains for the guilds came in the area of expanded jurisdiction and that while business models will continue to change and re-negotiations will happen, the guilds have set the precedent of expanded jurisdiction in new media and they will not lose it in the future. As to the road before us and how a potentially crippling SAG strike might be avoided, Ziffren said "if the parties involved in the negotiations stay in the room instead of going to the press, they'll get it done and they'll do it well".
All photos courtesy of Michael Buckner, Getty Images
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