Strike Update From ATWT

From Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood:
SATURDAY 4:00 PM: The WGA East's "informational" meeting for membership lasted about 3 hours. Here's more about the NYC confab from a WGA attendee: "The East meeting was insanely civil. Not one chair thrown. I was at the meeting in the same ballroom the second week of the strike, when the same people were sitting up there and were characteristically defensive about why we had gone out and if they knew what they were doing. Today, those same people were not only confident, they were not in the least defensive about the deal -- they were realistic, 180 degrees from the chaos and disarray I smelled three months ago. And they ain't actors. I think if they felt they needed to ram something down our throats, you would have picked up on that immediately. The two big moments for me came very early, when each member of the negotiating committee spoke briefly. Terry George said, 'We have defeated a tradition of rollbacks that began with the air traffic controllers.' That crystallized what we were up against and how far we had come and changing the dialogue. A couple minutes later, soap writer Melissa Salmons said, 'For years, I have lived in fear of that DVD formula, that it would be with me for my life. Now we have a deal that have movement in it.' (Later on, she told a daytime writer that the staff of Days of Our Lives, who had all been fired last week, were getting their jobs back. And that a striking writer, if fired, had to be replaced by a striking writer. Not a scab, and not a fi-core member. Big ovation.) I'll stop short of calling it a love fest, but not all that short. Legit questions were raised and respectfully answered. Again, no defensiveness. There was an informal applause poll, and the room was overwhelmingly in favor of ending the strike before a membership ratification vote."