On Thursday, Oct. 18, some 200 members of the Writers Guild of America West crammed into a banquet hall at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. "It reminded me of being at a farm workers' union rally back in the 1970's," said the writer and director George Hickenlooper.

"The mood was angry," recalled another attendee.

That same night, about 50 members of the somewhat limper WGA East made a show of solidarity at the Marriott Marquis on Broadway. "Most of our members mailed in their votes," said Sherry Goldman, the faction's spokesperson.

Still, that night the two coasts spoke as one, in historic numbers: roughly 5,500 of an estimated total 12,000 WGA members voted, and 90.3 percent of those were in favor of authorizing a strike (the previous guild record was 4,128 votes cast in the 2001 "minimum basic agreement" contract ratification).

"It is now up to the AMPTP [Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers] companies to begin to bargain seriously," said Patric M. Verrone, president of WGAW, in a statement issued Oct. 22.

"This historic vote sends an unequivocal message to the AMPTP, loud and clear," echoed Michael Winship, president of WGAE. "We will not be taken advantage of and will not be fooled with."

Longtime alliance president Nick Counter maintained a stiff upper lip, dismissing the authorization vote as a "pro forma tactic."

For those fortunate enough to have steady jobs, the prospect of willful, principled unemployment feels, at least at first flush, as giddy as a snow day.

"I'd just like to chill the fuck out for a bit," said Dave Kalstein, 30, a writer on NBC's Bionic Woman. "Two weeks, I think, would make everyone happy. We're already talking about taking a trip to Hawaii. But that's sort of the make-lemonade-of-lemons attitude."

A lot of his cohorts, he said, are talking about finally getting the chance to, you know, make high art. "I'm a big theater fan, maybe I'll finally write that play I always planned to write," said Oscar-nominated writer-director Richard LaGravenese (Freedom Writers; P.S., I Love You).

"But I've written a novel," Mr. Kalstein said. "And you don't make any money."

Money, of course, is exactly what's at stake here. The current MBA contract, which includes a pension plan, health insurance and cushy perks such as first-class airplane tickets for traveling scribes, expires on Oct. 31. Film and television writers are seeking compensation for content reused in new media<a territory just beginning to be colonized, and one from which the writers are determined not to be excluded. As a prime-time writer-producer of one of the hottest shows on the air put it, "The idea where a show is on at 9 p.m. on one night will not exist. It will only be NBC.com or ABC.com, just like there is a YouTube. You'll come home from work and you'll turn on your television set, and instead of a remote, there'll be a keyboard sitting on your coffee table, and you can check your e-mail or Web-browse, but you can also check your television. We're all going to watch higher-quality versions of these little YouTube windows. I don't think there's anybody with half a brain that thinks it could be any different. How could it be?"

The writers are also demanding increased residuals from DVD sales.

Since negotiations began July 16, studios have offered little in the way of flexibility on these points. Indeed, the AMPTP came to the table proposing no new media revenue and offering to restructure residual compensation to only apply after companies had recouped the cost of the film or show—rollbacks, essentially.

"It's a shoot-the-dog proposal," writer-director and WGA East member Andrew Bergman (Blazing Saddles, Fletch, The Freshman) indignantly told The Observer.

"We are the people who create the product, and we feel really exploited in the deal," said a writer-director who attended a negotiation session on Oct. 25. "The belligerent attitude of the producers and their refusal to talk about the future and new media is just basically a red flag to us all."

At presstime, representatives of the WGA East and West, the AMPTP and reps for the individual studios, were still negotiating in a boardroom at the AMPTP headquarters in Encino. Ms. Goldman estimates this was about the 15th meeting since July. "They're still saying they don't make any money off the new media," she said of the studios. "If they don't make any money why won't they give us a percentage?"

"I think in general no one wants to strike," said Carter Harris, a writer-producer of Friday Night Lights, "but I think what's changed in the last couple of months, and especially the last week, is that all of the writers I've talked to, including the ones who originally had misgivings because they weren't sure why we were doing it, are now much clearer about why we're doing it and much more unified. Much more committed to doing what's necessary to get what we think we deserve. I think there's a much more universal willingness to strike among the writers that I know, including myself."

WGA membership is still smarting over concessions made during contract negotiations in 1985, when they accepted a paltry 1.5 percent of home video residuals for the first $1 million of gross, and 1.8 percent of profits thereafter. The AMPTP argued that manufacturing and distribution costs were prohibitive, and that they needed time to develop this "unproven business."

They've been laughing all the way to the bank ever since.

Three years later, the WGA went on strike for over five months. "I was the head writer on the Letterman show," said Steve O'Donnell, currently the head writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. "And we were picketing ABC in Manhattan, and Susan Lucci came out and brought us all decaffeinated coffee while we were on the picket line. And I thought, How different is this labor action from the days of Homestead and Pullman! No tear-gas canisters, no national guardsmen with banners fixed."

With a long résumé of steady work behind him, Mr. O'Donnell can afford to be cavalier. Still, he said, "It is one thing to have two or three weeks off, but another thing to have two or three months, and see your savings dwindle away."

Television writers, whose day jobs will be suspended immediately should a strike begin, will be affected more than feature film writers—many of whom subsist on selling a screenplay every few years anyway—who can continue to write "spec" scripts that have not yet been commissioned by a studio or one of the guild's "signatories." However, they will be prohibited from shopping their scripts or soliciting funding from the suits.

But for viewers, a strike will translate into a lot of bad television. The first to suffer will be daytime and evening talk shows, which depend on the days' news events for comic material. "Certainly our two late-night shows—The Daily Show and The Colbert Report"—whose writers only recently joined the guild after concerted organization by writers—"would be the most impacted," said Steve Albani, vice president of corporate communications for Comedy Central. "I'll tell you—what we're hoping for is that it doesn't get that far. We're still hoping for a resolution. It is getting down to the wire, yeah. So we're certainly planning for it. We're figuring out what our contingency plans will be."

Asked for specifics, he said: "We're not going to get into that right now. We don't need to get into those plans, we don't want to discuss what they'll be in the event that we never have to use them."

And what of the big dramas and comedies—Heroes, Grey's Anatomy, Friday Night Lights, The Office and Lost? They would probably be O.K. until early next year, since December is usually a dark month.

"I think that this word we've been saying all this time, OEstrike'—no one has associated it beyond, ‘I'm going to get a couple of weeks off and then the studios will cave and give us what we're asking for,'" said a writer-producer of one of prime time's hottest dramas. "It's like I now understand why Hillary Clinton has been back-pedaling so much. She voted for a resolution to continue the weapons inspections, but the only way she felt that they would accomplish weapons inspections would be to authorize the military action and then suddenly it's like, OEOh wait a minute, what the fuck did I vote for?' S Everybody felt very strongly, we had a 90 percent strike approval. But now everyone is like, I didn't know if my vote was going to go for immediate military action! I hoped that would just sort of goose the opposing side and help the negotiations."

"It is difficult," said Friday Night Light's Mr. Harris, "because the attitude—which is understandable—from the public and the industry of people who are not writers is, OEWhat the hell are they complaining about? They make so much fucking money, stop whining and stop complaining and keep working.' It's all relative. From my perspective, there's a trickle-down effect to this stuff. You have to send a message about what you're willing to stand for.

"This is a feast-or-famine business," he continued, "because it's so unpredictable because of employment. We run a certain amount of months a year, and the chances of a show going or staying on the air is so rare and slight that writers, more than most professions, tend to be in and out of work a lot. And because you are often not working, you rely more on the money you made, the savings you've built up to get through hard times. Also on the residuals on the work you've done, to get you through periods of unemployment. And the other thing is that the retirement rate for writers is a lot earlier than many other professions. It's not because we want to retire early, it's because we're forced to retire early. It's an ageist business we work in. You have to be relevant and a certain age to get work. You got to save up some money so that by the time you're 50, you could be out. "

The real problem for television watchers will come if the strike drags out as long as it did in 1988," said a prime-time writer-producer. "An executive from the studio will end up editing our show. They have no choice! It's naïve to think that they will not take material that we have written and shoot and edit it. Will America care that I'm like, OEUh-oh guys, we didn't do episode eight'? No one will give a shit. No one will remember when they watch it later on DVD."