Web posted
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Robe anxious to write again
By FOSS FARRAR
Traveler Staff Writer
reporter@arkcity.net
Mike Robe had just finished writing a first-draft adaptation of a novel for Lifetime television when the Hollywood entertainment writers strike was called last October.
Whether he will get the nod to finish the script is anyone's guess, he said Wednesday.
"We'll see if Lifetime wants to continue, now that we can, with the project," Robe said in an e-mail to the Traveler. "Schedules and interests have a way of changing at the network from day-to-day."
Arkansas City native Robe is a 25-year member of the Writers Guild of America. He said he supported the strike -- along with thousands of other Hollywood writers -- but voted Tuesday to end it.
"I supported the strike, and am very glad a settlement has been reached," he said.
Audiences will begin to see the return of their favorite TV series in April, or certainly in May, said Robe, who has written and directed dozens of movies for TV.
"TV movies may take a bit longer," Robe added, "although some movies were already on the shelf and are scheduled to air between now and the spring."
During the three months of the strike Robe has been out of work as a director as well as a writer, he said.
"I'm a member of the Directors Guild of America, the TV directors union, and was free to work in that capacity," he said. "But directors need a script to direct, and the writers were on strike. So there was very little going on in front of the camera."
As a writer, he had to honor the strike dictum, "pencils down," so he wasn't free to work in that medium either, he said.
Robe's daughter, Blythe Robe, has followed in her father's footsteps. She also is a Hollywood writer and WGA member. She joined her father on the picket lines during the strike.
"The WGA requires its members to picket and sets up a schedule, which would typically involve reporting to a studio like Warner Brothers in Burbank, and picketing in a 3-hour shift each week day," Mike Robe said.
"Sometimes though, a mass picket would take place at just one site. We had nearly five thousand members picketing on Hollywood Boulevard at one point, halfway through the strike action.
"Blythe and I were assigned different sites, but often, particularly at the mass rallies, we would walk the line together. Two generations, kind of cool."
Robe grew up in Ark City in the 1950s and 1960s and is a frequent visitor to his hometown at Arkalalah and for class reunions. He graduated from Ark City High School in 1962, and later earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Kansas.
He said the movie script he was working on for Lifetime before the strike was based on a new novel by Nora Roberts.
"Like most writers just now getting back to work, my future plans are being formed as we speak," Robe said. "My daughter and I work in a career foreign to most American workers.
"We are gypsies, free lance artisans who move from job to job. There is no gold watch for us at the end of 30 years. Then again, maybe we're not so different from most American workers, after all!"
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