Grammys Make Deal with Writers Guild

The board of directors for the Writer’s Guild of America made the decision Monday to allow its striking writers to work on the upcoming February 10th Grammy Awards. The interim agreement will ensure that the union writers will be working their magic behind the scenes of the music awards show, set to be televised live on CBS, and not on the picket line as musicians make their way up the red carpet.

Avoiding the dressed-down Golden Globe Awards that took place earlier this month, the Grammys are set to provide all the glitz and the glamor promised by Neil Portnow, the president of the Recording Academy. Mr. Portnow appeared to take the writers strike in stride by ensuring fans that the Grammys would go on with or without union support, before talks were in the works that settled the final interim agreement.Patric M. Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America’s West Coast branch, in a statement stressing the issues faced by both union writers and musicians remarked, "Professional musicians face many of the same issues that we do concerning fair compensation for the use of their work in new media."
 
 The three-month-old strike over pay for the distribution of Internet projects has not only adversely affected the Golden Globes, but also thrown Hollywood television and motion picture projects into disarray. Tentative agreements for the NAACP Image Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards have been struck, but the writers union is standing firm against such an agreement for the February 24th Academy Awards.