Six Degrees: Rob Kutner gives an in-depth review from the picket lines

Television Without Pity has posted a lengthy interview with The Daily Show‘s Rob Kutner, who describes the circumstances surrounding the strike, shares some thoughts on its estimated duration and speculates on the position of scabs, both during and after the strike ends.

Ask A Striking Writer

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Sars: Changing the subject slightly — since The Daily Show was one of the very first shows to go dark, and because the viewing audience starting feeling the effects of that immediately with shows like Daily Show and Colbert, what was that like, knowing that as soon as you guys did go pencils down, that —

Kutner: What was it like? . . . I don’t know that there was directly an impact on us, like in terms of — basically anyone we knew, knew that this was coming and what it would mean. I mean, the very small thing that was kind of sad for me was, I had arranged for tickets for people to the show and I had to start calling and emailing people — this is people who came in from out of town, or someone’s birthday, they won an auction, I was like, “Sorry! No show.” So that was one thing. It was probably different for us in terms of, versus the scripted shows, the episodic shows, because they have a longer timeframe to go on the air; it takes about a month from scripting to on the air, at the very least, so they have sort of a messy situation where you have the writer-producers having to figure out whether they’re gonna go in, because they have episodes that are written, or partially written, or written and ready to be produced, or partially shot, you know, so for us it was kind of a clean break, is what I’m saying. Like, we basically are daily, so we went in on [that] Friday not knowing what was going to happen, but sort of — we prepared some material, we basically wrote enough material for, to do a show Monday…we had enough material ready, so we were basically proceeding as if we were going to, and then obviously when we got the call, we just…didn’t go into work, and that was sort of the end of it. So it’s a little spooky, in a certain way.

. . .

Sars: But The Daily Show…I mean, I got a call from a reporter, I think [that first] Wednesday, who was doing a story on people who get their news from The Daily Show.

Kutner: Right, right. My favorite canard.

Sars: Right, that their primary source of newsy information is The Daily Show and what are these people gonna do, and how soon are we gonna see the effects of their…increased ignorance, or whatever. I’m not exactly sure — I get my news from online, so I was kind of a short interview on the subject, but I guess what I was driving at was —

Kutner: What do I think people are gonna do about it?

Sars: Not so much that, but whether it’s a canard or not, you must hear these sort of grand pronunciamentos that people make about The Daily Show and its role in the culture, so —

Kutner: Well, first of all, it is certainly a canard, because I think our audience gets their news elsewhere as well, because otherwise they wouldn’t get our jokes, or why our angles on them have a satiric, comedic value, they wouldn’t get it if they didn’t understand what was going on, so that whole idea, I’ve always thought it’s a little bit overblown ’cause it’s a favorite meme of the media.

Sars: Right.

Kutner: That being said, it’s interesting because we always had this sort of recourse when things were happening in the political, or the international or the national sphere, we could go on the air that night and set the record straight, or state our opinion, or just respond to or try to counteract whatever we think is problematic that’s happening in the world in our tiny little way, or at least make a poop joke about it, which, you know, is equally powerful, I think . . . So it’s a little weird to not even have that kind of platform, so right now, a lot of us along with our fellow writers are sort of pointing our expressive abilities, such as they are, into stuff on the web in terms of videos and that sort of thing, to get our case across. It’s a little weird because suddenly I’m not reading the newspapers to the same extent — you know, I’m basically reading United Hollywood and Deadline Hollywood Daily and all the blogs and stuff, in a kind of scary, obsessive fashion, really, hoping there’s an update every time I refresh or something like that. So I guess we went from having sort of a very broad focus of the world to having kind of a very narrow focus.

Sars: Now Jon Stewart is covering you guys for two weeks’ salary, did I read that correctly?

Kutner: It’s not exactly correct — Jon is paying the salary of his production staff. So, basically everyone but us, which is not, you know, in any way a malicious thing but just, you know, we chose to strike and the other people didn’t, so, you know Jon has been very concerned all along with the people who are going to get caught in the middle. So that’s what that was, actually.

Full interview available here

Rob Kutner was also quoted in the Los Angeles Times yesterday. He noted:

Two strikes, old school and new
By Josh Getlin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 17, 2007

As they marched in a barricaded pen outside Viacom, writers quietly handed out leaflets to passersby and raised fists as motorists in Times Square honked in solidarity. Rob Kutner, the strike captain and a five-year veteran of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” tried to find a bright spot amid the gloomy weather: The strike has brought writers together who might never have met one another, he said. Recently, he and other “Daily Show” scribes met their counterparts at “The Colbert Report” for the first time. On Wednesday night, Stewart treated his writers to dinner at Katz’s Deli — made famous by Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm scene in “When Harry Met Sally.”

“I’ll have what he’s earning,” cracked Kutner, recalling the dinner with Stewart. But then he got more serious, describing what the strike was all about: “The entertainment industry says this is a transforming moment for the business, and they’re right. All we’re saying is that we want to be part of that transformation too.

“This is a dispute between content providers and content distributors,” Kutner added, referring to payments writers want for material that is downloaded onto cellphones, streamed through the Internet and the like. “Everybody in the entertainment world wants more eyeballs on the screen. But nobody really knows what this world is going to look like when the strike is finally over.”

Full text of article

Stay strong, everyone. I know I’m not alone in saying that your fans are hoping for your success.