The Hollywood Reporter says the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers sat down today for the first time for a series of talks designed at holding off another strike. I wish both sides the best of luck in settling this. If there is a strike however, I sure hope it doesn't beget anything near the disaster last year's Golden Globes inflicted on us. That debacle alone should have convinced the studios to pay up. Without writers, the actors have nothing to say onscreen, but is the inverse true?

When SAG struck in 2000, some believed it caused the current glut of reality TV shows currently making American viewers even dumber. I can envision this time the studios using a more terrifying method I'll call the Sky Captain Method. In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Laurence Olivier gave a better performance dead than most of his living work in the 70's. Technology has also made Fred Astaire dance with a vacuum cleaner against his will, so who's to say the producers won't use it to give our dearly departed actors work in the same movies SAG actors won't do if they're striking? I'm sure there's some kind of union loophole prohibiting this, but only if SAG has good intellectual property lawyers. The verdict's out on that one. Like colorizing, the method that turned B&W movies into coloring books (and Ol' Blue Eyes into Ol' Brown Eyes in Suddenly), Ted Turner can own this functionality too.

Bette Davis claimed American International Pictures censored her F-worded last line of dialogue in Bunny O'Hare, so I bet her ghost will be happy she's cast in the new Judd Apatow movie, along with Bogie and James Cagney as McShootin'. Boris Karloff will show up in Saw 5 and his fellow horror actor Vincent Price will be in every PG-13 rated rip-off of Japanese horror movies the studios can turn out. If the movies are a hit, SAG will give in; if teenagers start asking why the actors are in black and white and the movie is in color, the producers will cave. Hopefully, both can reach a settlement without feeling the other side was coerced into a settlement. But if not, look out for Al Jolson in Madea Goes To Jail.

Tags: alliance of motion picture and television producers, screen actors guild, strike