Films may stutter from prolonged strike

LOS ANGELES - Indiana Jones, Capt. James T. Kirk and other movie heroes may have to toss off more ad-libbed wisecracks next year. By 2009, they could be positively tongue-tied if a strike by Hollywood writers drags on for months.

Unlike television, which felt an immediate impact as some programs shut down when writers halted work in November, big-screen movies have a longer lead time and can ride out the strike with scripts already in hand, at least for now.

Talks between the guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers broke down bitterly last week, diminishing any hope that a quick resolution would limit the impact on movie production to small ripples.

Shooting on a few big films — among them Johnny Depp's drama "Shantaram" and Tom Hanks and Ron Howard's "Angels & Demons," a prequel to "The Da Vinci Code" — has been postponed, with studio executives deciding it was wiser to wait than risk a script impasse without a writer on set to polish up a scene.

Other films due out in 2008 largely have forged ahead as planned, producers taking extra pains as the strike deadline approached to have screenplays as close to letter-perfect as possible, so filming could proceed in the writer's absence.

"I just thank God that I'm not involved with anything in production, because it would be agony to have to stand there and know you could fix something and not fix it," said Akiva Goldsman, who wrote "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels & Demons" screenplays and won an Academy Award for the script of Howard's "A Beautiful Mind."

"But that's what a lot of my brothers and sisters are doing right now. That's tough, because you spend years getting to a movie, and it's like, melodramatically, it's like watching someone you love wander out into traffic."

The key issue for writers, who say they have been shortchanged on DVD revenues, is compensation for programming on the Internet and other new distribution forms. If the strike lingers as long as the one in 1988, when writers walked off the job for five months, it could cause chaos for filming schedules, desperately needed reshoots for scenes that don't work and planning for films further down the road.

"For 2008, the studios are all fine. If anything, they've had too much product in release, so even if they're down a few projects as 2008 unfolds, they'll give themselves a little more breathing room at the box office," said Anne Thompson, deputy editor of Hollywood trade paper Variety. "It's 2009 that starts becoming the issue, especially big tentpole projects."