Well, the strike is now rolling into its sixth week and the Asshole Fuckfaces are just piling up and staring at me with doughy eyes, hoping for the nod. Most of the honors will go to the studios, because they are truly being Asshole Fuckfaces of the highest caliber. Plus, it was our Lord Jesus Christ who first said, “Man, the studios are such Asshole Fuckfaces.” Eleven dudes nodded. One DID NOT!

A little over a week ago, the studios revealed their stunning new plan for our business. It was exciting and fresh! They dropped it on the table late on a Thursday and immediately sent out press releases, in which they basically blew themselves for being so awesome. The proposal was called the “New Economic Partnership.” It offered writers a whole $250 a year for streaming Internet use of television programs. It was an awesome deal.



Oh, also, if they label the program as “promotional” then they can air it in its entirety and not pay the writer a dime. And that $250 was for an hour program. A half hour program is worth $139 a year! Weeeeee!

When the studios dropped the proposal on the WGA, they said it was only half finished and the other half would come after a long weekend – on Tuesday. It would cover Internet downloads! The studios then picked up their phones and told the press that the WGA had walked away from the table until Tuesday after they made an offer worth $130 million dollars. Wha? But you…second half…long weekend...$250 dollars…I don’t…

Tuesday rolled around and the studios did not present their other half of the deal. Then Wednesday and still no second half, but they promised to stay in the hotel and work through the night to have it done in the morning.

Members of the WGA then went down to the parking lot and staked out the studio negotiators cars. Rather than staying all night, they jumped into their cars and were all gone by 6:45 pm. Huh.

Thursday, no second half of the proposal. On Friday, the WGA decided to go ahead and start negotiating other demands they had been making for years. Literally, years. The studios were so offended that the WGA had brought up proposals they had been talking about for years that they walked away from the table. The studios immediately posted an amazingly well crafted press release on their website. What was really amazing about it was that it appeared to have taken quite a bit of time to write and yet it posted literally three minutes after they were horribly offended.

The poor bastards are running the show, with all the money and holding all the cards. Did someone ask the guys with everything for something? Must have been devastating.

The post then went on to list lie after lie. One gem was this one:

Really? There is a writer named Micah Wright, who a couple of years ago attempted to organize Nickelodeon into a Guild channel. Micah is now blackballed from writing animation ever again, as are many of the other writers who were involved. The shows they were writing on were immediately cancelled. I guess that is considered “choosing” not to join the WGA. I mean, what writer would want pension, health coverage and residuals when they can enjoy life without pension, health coverage and residuals?

The studios end their nonsense post with this gem:

“Come back to the table?” Uh, you just left table in a huff, like a high school teenage girl who had just been told she couldn’t get a tattoo. In truth, the studios gave the WGA an ultimatum. Drop six important demands or they would no longer talk to us. Hey, we dropped nine out of our 25 important demands to get them to the table in the first place. If we drop six more, then we are down to 15 out of 25. Then they say something like, “Drop eight more” and on and on we go. I have another solution: How about the six media moguls gently take my cock into their mouths, one by one for a minute each, rotating until I shoot my load. Sound good? (I promise to shoot it in Peter Chernin’s eye.) Because my deal is about as reasonable.

When we first met the studios at the table, they made this demand:

Wanting to get talks started, the WGA leaders took DVDs off the table. The studios responded by doing NOTHING. And now they have given us an ultimatum to take these six demands off the table:

Oh, so just everything we are striking over. Great. Then we can negotiate about nothing. I‘m very excited!

Another couple of Asshole Fuckfaces in this mess are a couple of guys who apparently call themselves“ The Masters of Disaster." And they do so without thinking they are retarded.

The Masters of Disaster are Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane. They
are PR guys who have worked with Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and Michael Moore. They even worked for the Screen Actors Guild, which paid them $10,000 a month to craft a message to help SAG in their fight against… their new employer, the AMPTP.

The studios hired Fabiani & Lehane, at a crisis fee of around $100,000 a month, to battle the WGA members driven PR machine. They did so early in the week, which was another telling sign that they had no intention of making a deal. You don’t need “crisis PR” when you are doing the right thing. You hire “crisis PR” when you are going to walk out of talks and blame the other side for ruining Christmas. So, Lehane and Fabiani, longtime Democratic PR guys, have decided to switch sides and do some union busting. I guess they have come a long way since 2002.

Their first move was apparently coming up with the name, “New Economic Partnership,” which screams, “I work for politicians and am stuck in the recent past.”

Feel free to call or email Hillary Clinton and ask her why she is in business with Asshole Fuckfaces like Lehane and Fabiani. (I would call them union busters in the message.) Or if you are in California, you can email the Democratic group Californians for Fair Election Reform and ask them why they are working with union busters.

Californians for Fair Election Reform

Hillary Clinton (213) 908-0190 or socalhrc@hillaryclinton.com

My favorite Asshole Fuckface of the week is by far the head of the IATSE.

Meet Tommy Short, a grown man who calls himself Tommy without feeling any shame. He is the head of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, a union he took over through mob connections and with his daddy’s help. He consistently fucks over his own members and aids the studios every chance he gets.

Last year he totally fucked over the Camera Operators in his union with a new contract and then took the moment to make new friends.

Hell yeah, we want a union with shitty pension and health and members who do the same job but are paid wildly different amounts. But none of his actions are surprising because the IA used to be run by Al Capone and Tommy is just keeping the tradition going.

Tommy has enjoyed doing business in interesting places, according to one former union board member.

Tommy does not mind using his fists.

He is an awesome family man.

Tommy was gifted the presidency of IATSE in 1994 when the union’s general election board selected him four days after the death of the previous president. Interesting thing about IATSE, once you are on a board or are the president, you never lose an election. Never.

So, what does Tommy have to do with the current situation? Well, he can’t keep his little anger hole shut. On Friday, Short teamed up with his studios buddies and sent out a press release at the EXACT MOMENT the studios walked away from the table. Turns out Tommy also was offended and jotted down a press release in one minute.

In the press release, Tommy called the WGA leaders “a huge clown car that’s only missing the hats and horns.” He went on to call the WGA irresponsible and then ranted about the guild trying to steal his members. He neglects to mention that he destroyed a WGA attempt to unionize America’s Top Model, by making a deal with the studios and swooping in at the last minute. Now those lucky “story editors” don’t have health insurance. He also doesn’t mention that animators hate his union and desperately want the WGA to cover them, because they like health insurance and pension.

Tommy Short attacks other unions because they fight for their members and he wants to distract from his total lack of concern for his members. Tommy Short is a studio bitch. Anytime you hear a word out of the IA, know it is coming from the mouth of an enormous Asshole Fuckface who put a cigar out on his kid’s head, beat his wife, was not elected to his position, is a drunk and was arrested for stealing money from the union.

And finally, I was walking the picket line the other day with a writer for "The Simpsons." I have known a few guys who have written for the show over the years, but I never knew that the show has never turned a profit. Yeah, you read that correctly. According to Fox, "The Simpsons" has never turned a profit. Fox has kept a show on the air that has been losing money for 18 years. Pretty generous of them, isn’t it? The reason the show has never made a profit is because if it did, they would have to pay people, like writers, money.

That is why the studio is so upset about those six demands. Check out number six:

A third party would really fuck up the Asshole Fuckfaces accounting practices. One thing writers can be thankful for, is the AMPTP's continual lack of understanding of the Internet. Turns out when the AMPTP set up their website, they bought the domain AMPTP.org. But they forgot to buy AMPTP.com. So a writer grabbed it and made them look like fucking fools.

Congrats to all of this week’s Asshole Fuckface Roundup’s winners! You will receive nothing. And I want a cut.

Since Hollywood writers like myself went on strike this week, I thought I would share with you the biggest Asshole Fuckface studio heads of the week. They are inherently Asshole Fuckfaces, but during a strike we can shine a light on their hideous acts of greed and inhumanity.

Studio fat cats Les Moonves and Peter Chernin are Asshole Fuckfaces of the highest order. Chernin is just a straight up douchebag because he works for Fox. Moonves is best known for the brilliant move of losing Howard Stern to satellite and being a failed actor. (Maybe if he had been able to get a job here and there and actually received residuals, we wouldn’t have to deal with his cunty moves at the negotiating table). Anyway, Les and Pete managed to pull a move so deceitful and idiotic, that it may prolong the strike far longer than anyone could have ever anticipated.

Les and Pete “deliberately duped” the Guild by making a backchannel deal and then pulling out of it at the last minute. On Sunday, the two told WGA negotiators that if writers gave up DVD residual demands, then the studios would give a little on Internet downloads. Since that is what the WGA is after, the negotiators went for it. When the WGA arrived at 10 am Sunday morning, they took their 4 cents DVD increase demand off the table. The studio heads then went off to discuss how to respond.

Eleven hours later they returned. Eleven fucking hours. Coincidentally, eleven hours later is exactly what time the strike was supposed to begin on the East coast. Here was their answer:

Uh, what? The Guild made a back channel agreement (the way all negotiations are handled in Hollywood), took a massive demand off the table and then you told them to fuck off and now you are asking them to suspend the strike? How big off assholes can you be? Oh, it turns out they can be bigger assholes.

The timing just happened to coincide with the news cycle. The studio heads fired off a press release claiming they were making progress but the WGA refused to call off the strike. (Because all writers are banging away at midnight on a Sunday) The WGA was completely shocked and was not prepared to send out a press release, so the next day it appeared that the WGA had fucked the negotiations by being stubborn. In reality, they had Les Moonves’ fist crammed up their assholes.

Had the producers actually responded to the WGA’s removal of the DVD demand, then the strike could have been called off. A deal at that point could have been days away. That is what happens when you actually negotiate. Now the WGA refuses to meet until the producers offer something.

In the meantime, as you watch your favorite shows die off and thousands lose their jobs, remember two names: Les Moonves and Peter Chernin. They are top notch Asshole Fuckfaces.

The studios obviously are attempting to break the union, thinking they would split us when we were told that the negotiating committee had removed DVDs and gotten nothing in return. The problem is they use press releases to make their points. Hey grandpa, there’s this new thing called the “Internet” and on the “Internet” there are bloggers, reporters and email getting the real story out. So you keep at it with your “press releases,” by the time we read them, we already know the real story.

Next up, there are the little guys, toiling away behind the scenes and some of them manage to be tremendous Asshole Fuckfaces.

On day one of the Writers Strike, a very nice man I know was run over by an Asshole Fuckface who works at one of the studio lots.

Now, that doesn’t sound that out of the ordinary; a guy gets hit by a car. Happens all the time. Maybe it was a mistake, right? Nope. After speaking to several of my friends who were working with Tom, it turns out the vehicular assault was deliberate. The driver pulled up in his amazing Honda Element, got out of his car and yelled:

He then got back in his car and floored it. There was no way for Tom to avoid the vehicle. (If you saw Tom you would quickly understand. He is far from athletic.) The car struck Tom and dragged him for a bit. The driver then attempted to drive away but other writers descended upon him and took away his keys. He was then escorted away by studio security.

Johnson's black tennis shoe was still lodged under the front passenger tire as he was taken away in an ambulance.



Tom spent the day in the hospital. He now has one leg that he cannot bend at all and another that is a complete swollen mess. Thankfully, neither leg was broken, but a lot of things can go wrong in a leg.

Not surprisingly, the driver was an editor. They are a mole-like people who spend hours in dark rooms in front of monitors and they hate writers. Why? Because we have a vision of how we want things and we tell them how to do it. They often think they know the right way and they are just as often, sadly mistaken. The fact that an editor ran over a writer will go down in editor folklore, told to their children and their children’s children.

Most surprising of all, the editor was not arrested. Apparently it is the policy of the Los Angeles Police Department not to arrest people who attack picketers. If any of the writers had attacked the driver after he ran over Tom, well, that would have led to an arrest. Which leads me to my next Asshole Fuckface: The WGA.

The Guild has been using Tom as a publicity piece. They made sure to mention him at a rally Friday in an attempt to appeal to the member’s unity. They have sent out emails explaining what happened and saying Tom made a great sacrifice. They have had members at all picket lines sign cards wishing him well. His attack is being used as a pawn in a game of chess. What the Guild has not done in this case is protect one of their own. They have not approached the mayor’s office, the District Attorney’s office or the police department to question why a man can run someone down after making a threat and not be arrested. A far as FearTheReaper is concerned, it is more than disgusting of the people who are supposed to be protecting him during this time.

Finally, every studio head gets the label of Asshole Fuckface.

The studios began firing assistants from shows two days into the strike. They made sure to tell every low wage employee they fired that it was the writer’s fault. On DAY 2. Yeah, the studios had lost so much money on DAY 2 that they had to let the people making the least amount of money go. Gotta stop that DAY 2 bleeding, and the only way to do it is by letting the guy who makes four hundred bucks a week go.

Classy move. It would be like me getting into an argument with another guy and then going and punching his baby, then telling the baby it’s his Dad’s fault. You chose to fire them, you rich Asshole Fuckfaces and it’s on your head.

Finally, I’d like to end with a January 2007 quote by Les, a man who today claims he doesn’t know how CBS will make money on the Internet.

None of this week’s Asshole Fuckfaces will receive a prize because they have all the money.