Dear Gossips,

Let Bartlet be Bartlet!

This probably doesn’t mean anything to you if you’re under 30 years old but once upon a time there was a show called The West Wing and it won a lot of Emmys and some of us still cling to it fondly, even though, you know, F-cking Sorkin!, but he wrote a fairy tale and in this fairy tale Martin Sheen played the president, Josiah Bartlet, and he was surrounded by a beloved team of misfit idealists and yesterday, most of them showed up at the National Day of Solidarity rally in support of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA where Martin reprised his role as the “acting president of the United States” and gave a speech that brought us all back to the Bartlet White House.

That was before the WGA met with the AMPTP and there was initially some hope that resuming negotiations would move them closer to a fair deal. By the end of the night though, it had all fallen apart, signalling that we are probably nowhere near an end to this strike.

Because according to the writers, it seems as though the AMPTP was more interested in PR than they were in actually sitting down with them to work out an agreement that would protect creatives by releasing their proposal to the media, so as to look like they were operating in the spirit of reconciliation when it fact, per the WGA:

“…this wasn’t a meeting to make a deal. This was a meeting to get us to cave, which is why, not 20 minutes after we left the meeting, the AMPTP released its summary of their proposals. This was the companies’ plan from the beginning – not to bargain, but to jam us. It is their only strategy – to bet that we will turn on each other.”

Looks like this has backfired, with the WGA quickly calling out the AMPTP for their disingenuous performance.

This is why solidarity is so crucial. The solidarity is a major problem for the AMPTP – the fact that the writers and the actors are standing side by side on this, thousands of industry creatives aligned seeking fairness and respect for their work against the corporate f-ckery that’s hurting the creative community – and so they’re trying to find ways to crack that unity. And rescue their public image. So far, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA seem to be consistently two steps ahead of the companies’ war strategy. They’ve said all along that they are prepared to dig in for months on this and have committed to not being conned into a deal that ultimately serves the studios.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey

Martin Sheen Gossip

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