Word: picket
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...thought I had the picket fence.' CHRISTIE BRINKLEY, supermodel, testifying during her divorce trial about discovering husband Peter Cook's affair...
...appears to be cracking in Hollywood's long, cold winter of picket lines, shuttered productions and canceled award shows. As early as this week, the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike for three months, may be presented with a new contract. With two key industry events fast approaching - the Academy Awards and TV pilot season - the writers and the studios have had plenty of incentive to return to the negotiating table and get past the rancor that doomed the early talks. Thanks to a deal hammered out by directors, they have also had a road...
...meetings and negotiations continued. But when Shore wouldn't budge, the comedians, in March 1979, walked off the job. Pickets appeared, with placards bearing slogans like NO MONEY NO FUNNY and THE YUK STOPS HERE. All but a few of the regulars refused to work. Even Letterman - though he felt indebted to Shore, who had taken him under her wing when he arrived from Indiana with his wife in 1975, making him an MC - joined the picket line after he finished a stint as guest host on the Tonight Show. "This was the umbilical cord for a lot of guys...
...poverty-stricken comics were far less prepared for a long walkout than the relatively well-heeled writers today. Shore closed down her club, then reopened it, using the few loyalists willing to cross the picket line and some neophytes who saw an opportunity for some stage time. When she made a compromise offer to pay the comics $25 a set only on weekends, some of them, like Garry Shandling, thought it was fair and went back to work - a blow to the comics' shaky solidarity. "I think there was a lot of good that was accomplished by that strike," says...
...Tensions between the strikers and the nonstrikers grew. One night, the bad blood got out of hand as one of the antistrike comics tried to drive a car through the picket line, brushing some of the comics and knocking Leno to the pavement with a loud thud. Dreesen ran over to him, panicked that he had been seriously hurt. Leno gave Dreesen a wink; he was only feigning an injury and had thumped the car with his hand. But he got hauled off to the hospital in an ambulance anyway, and the incident seemed to sober up both sides...