LOS ANGELES- The Grammy Awards will be in full voice next month, with the striking writers guild agreeing Monday to allow its members to work on the show.
The Writers Guild of America gave its blessing last week to a picket-free Grammys.
Now that the guild’s board of directors has decided to sign an interim agreement for the Feb. 10 ceremony, the Grammys will escape the fate that befell this month’s Golden Globes.
The Globes were stripped of stars and pomp when the guild wouldn’t agree to an interim deal and the Screen Actors Guild encouraged its members to boycott the ceremony, which was reduced to a news conference.
The agreement allowing guild-covered writing for the Grammys is in support of union musicians and also will help advance writers’ own quest for “a fair contract,” the guild said in a statement.
“Professional musicians face many of the same issues that we do concerning fair compensation for the use of their work in new media,” Patric M. Verrone, president of the guild’s West Coast branch, said in the statement.
Payment for projects distributed via the Internet is a central issue in the contract dispute between the writers union and the alliance that represents studios.
Informal talks began last week between the union and several studio chiefs in an effort to resolve the nearly three-month-old strike that has disrupted movie and TV production.
Formal negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers broke down in early December.
During the impasse, the Directors Guild of America reached a tentative deal with the alliance that addressed new-media issues and created pressure for the writers to resume talks.
The guild has agreed to allow next month’s NAACP Image Awards to proceed with guild support, a courtesy also granted to Sunday night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards.