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TV viewers in Baton Rouge may be upset that The Daily Show, Desperate Housewives or The Office have been in reruns for months, but one local official says the Writers Guild of America strike shouldn’t have too much of an effect on this city’s growing film industry.

According to the Governor’s Office of Film & Television, 50 major movie and television projects filmed in Louisiana last year, including 11 in the Baton Rouge area. Amy Mitchell Smith, executive director of the Baton Rouge Film Commission, says our studios and work force won’t be hit nearly as hard as those in Los Angeles and New York.

“The first six months of 2008 will be solid for us,” Smith says. “But worst-case scenario, in the second half of the year we’ll have to focus more on the micro-budget indie films in Baton Rouge. But there are a lot of those. Our best bet is to use this time to train crew and build up our ranks, especially on non-union shows.”

The current dispute stems from the WGA wanting to renegotiate the residual agreements it signed in the late 1980s that did not foresee the popularity of DVD and Internet down-

loading, two huge moneymakers for the industry, but not so much for the writers themselves.

Everyone has felt the effects of the strike, from laid-off, below-the-line crew trying to feed their families to Family Guy creator Seth McFarland, who watched the studio continue his own series without him. In Baton Rouge the strike has sparked one resident to be more outspoken than most.

“For domestic residuals on a $20 DVD the writer gets 4 cents, so all we’re asking is to go up to 8 cents,” says Mari Kornhauser, an LSU screenwriting professor who has written and directed films starring Nicolas Cage, Peter Sarsgaard and Marisa Tomei. “And yet, it makes it sound like we’re breaking the bank. It’s incredibly unreasonable on behalf of the studios because the content creators are being left out of the picture.”

Kornhauser estimates the strike could last

several months until the Screen Actors Guild joins ranks and forces a compromise with the studios. She plans to fly to Hollywood soon and join the picket lines herself.

“Our voices aren’t being heard as a country because we aren’t standing up,” Kornhauser says. “From our veterans not getting the care they need, to bridges collapsing, to the lack of response during Katrina, to writers having to fight against these huge conglomerates for fair pay, it’s all the same machine. Everybody’s tired of this not being the country we expected it to be.” wga.org