THREE STRIKES

Brian Finkelstein: Reluctant Activist

Three Strikes is on show at the PICA Performance Space as part of the Summer Nights program, from Tuesday, January 31, ’til Saturday, February 4. Bookings can be made via blueroom.org.au.

American writer/storyteller Brian Finkelstein believes that “everybody has one good story,” and to prove his point he’s here in Perth to help aspiring writers discover and craft their tales, and share a few of his own.
“Everybody has a heartbreak story, or a travel story or a death story or a birth story or something like that. Some stories pull on heartstrings and make small things interesting,” he shares when asked about what constitutes a good yarn.
Here in Perth to stage Three Strikes, a conversational performance piece about his involvement in, you guessed it, three strikes - including the 2009 American Writers’ Strike, during which he was employed as a writer on the Ellen DeGeneres Show - Finkelstein is looking forward to talking about a subject which is often overlooked.
“There are certain things I feel like people don’t talk about and I think those topics are getting harder to find for me because between the internet and cable TV there’s so many things people talk about now. The Writers’ Strike was a politically charged thing because of the unions and the politics of television and I felt like nobody was talking about it. I went on strike as a writer and it was crazy and I still don’t really know what happened. I thought it would be fun to do a show about that because nobody else seemed to be doing it.”
Though he engaged in industrial action alongside his fellow writers, Finkelstein wasn’t thrilled about not being able to do the job he loved, and feels like very little was achieved by the three month stand.
“I would say I was a reluctant activist. When the Writers’ Strike happened it was kind of fun because writers aren’t violent - they’re pretty nice, slightly chubby people who eat donuts. So the strike wasn’t aggressive. I felt loyalty to my job and the union so I was conflicted about what I should do. After everything you believe in falls apart as you get older, knowing what the right thing to do is becomes hard.
“I picketed for the entire strike. We would chant ‘what do we want? A contract! When do we want it? Now!’. Everyone would show up and make the joke that ‘hey, as writers we should come up with better chants’ but nobody did, we’d just joke about it, which is the nature of comedy writers – to joke about it and not fix it.”
During the strike Finkelstein ended up getting to know talk show host Jay Leno, who visited the picketers to show support for his writing team, so Finkelstein was understandably appalled when Leno changed his tune and ‘scabbed’.
“Leno would bring lunch for his writers and also give us lunch so I got to talk to him a lot, he’s a crazy bastard. It’s hard because I don’t want to make it too specific or political but what happened was some shows went back on air and Jay was critical of that but then as soon as David Letterman went back because his company signed a deal with the union, Jay, without a deal, scabbed – he went back to work. He flip flopped and changed his opinion when it became about him which I think is a wimpy move. He’s kinda like a giant hypocrite. He sat there and bitched to us about the other shows… The union came out and said he was in contempt but then nothing happened. To me that’s the whole thing – if I went back to work I would have been in trouble but Jay Leno got away with it. It seems to me that striking is an outdated concept.”

_EMMA BERGMEIER