Present tense

By Leslie Simmons

Wondering what Mandalay Entertainment chair Peter Guber thinks about the writers strike and Michael Eisner's comments that it's "stupid"? Well, wonder no more. Guber appeared on Fox Business Network on Thursday, telling Neil Cavuto, "Michael Eisner missed his career. He should have done stand-up." Guber, the former studio chief of Columbia Pics, said that while some strikes are dumb, this one isn't. Writers, he said, are not thinking about the present, but rather the past and the future. "In the past, they made the negotiation too late for the DVD slice of the pie, and they lived with that as that became the whole pie," Guber told Cavuto. "Now, they look at the future and the pie's not really fully there but they want to have their fork in the pan as it gets there."

Guber also gave the WGA some strategy advice: They could play chicken, telling the AMPTP to make a deal with them now, before the DGA's stop date in March. "They don't want the DGA negotiating for them -- they would say, make a deal with us now or we're going to wait until June and we're going to test whether or not you can really hang in ... and whether you can forgo next year's television series and go to the advertiser without any product, and I think they would be scared by that."