Hollywood Strike II: even more bitter

This could have been Hollywood's golden summer. After years of falling income at the box office, the major film studios have released a raft of movies - Pixar's magnificent animated Wall-E, the fourth Indiana Jones, the action bloodfest Wanted with Angelina Jolie - that have brought people back to the cinema in droves.

And Hollywood is anticipating what the film trade paper Variety likes to describe as a "boffo" opening for Hancock, the new CGI-laden film starring Will Smith, which is expected to take $110 million this weekend. There has even been a hit movie - Sex in The City - for that perennially ignored demographic, middle-aged women.

So why has an apocalyptic gloom settled over Hollywood?

"I wasn't in Saigon before its fall or Berlin before the Nazi clampdown," Variety editor

Peter Bart hyper-ventilated recently with the kind of myopic narcissism that is de rigeur here, "but I wonder if those cities were gripped by a similar sense of helplessness that afflicts Hollywood this week."

Hollywood is grimly waiting to find out if film and television production will be shut down for the second time in a year. A four-month strike by Hollywood writers that ended in February is estimated to have resulted in $2.3bn in lost wages and put more than 37,000 people out of work. Now it's the actors who may strike, after their three-year contract with the studios and TV networks came to an end this week.

Although the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the main union representing actors, has not issued a strike call, a de facto strike has already brought much film production to a halt, with the studios wrapping up most shoots before the SAG contract ended on Monday.

At issue is the same thing the writers fought for - higher payments when their work is shown on new media. Every cent