It is the question that no one in Hollywood wants to ask: who will write the speeches?

With only two months to go before the Golden Globes on January 13, and the Academy Awards following a month later, an escalating writers’ strike threatens to bring Tinseltown’s gong season to a halt before it even begins.

Although many actors write their own speeches – including the obligatory nods to Grandma, God and Harvey Weinstein – much of the Oscars telecast is scripted. This includes the opening monologue by the host, on this occasion the comedian Jon Stewart, who successfully campaigned for the writers of his Emmy-award winning Daily Show on the Comedy Central channel to be unionised.

Like every other nightly news-talk show on American TV, the Daily Show is off-air because of the strike, and it remains unclear whether Stewart will be able or willing to write the Oscars telecast if there are still picket lines in February.

Gilbert Cates, the producer of the 80th Academy Awards, said that he was not yet worrying. “I’m going to wait until the New Year to start getting nervous,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s like politics: four months is a very long time.”

Production of the most successful TV shows in America continued to shut down yesterday, the latest casualties being Grey’s Anatomy, 24 and Desperate Housewives.

So far actors have demonstrated support for the often well-paid men and women who put the words in their mouths. When filming on the set of Desperate Housewives was disrupted on Tuesday, the actress Eva Longoria took out pizza to uniformed picketers who stood outside the studio gates waving placards. Elsewhere, the talk-show host Jay Leno handed out doughnuts.

“This is the weirdest strike I’ve ever seen,” said one picketer, who did not want to be named. “At the union meeting the other day, you couldn’t move in the parking lot for Audis and Porsches.”

The writers – who often live on royalties cheques while developing new concepts, which may or may not be sold – are demanding to be paid for shows broadcast on the internet, while the studios argue that the online format is not yet developed enough for such a deal. A writer on a late-night talk show would typically be paid $150 (£70) when a show is repeated on TV, and nothing if it was shown online, even though online broadcasts now include paid-for advertisements.

The writers, represented by the Writers Guild of America, also want to increase their royalty share from DVD sales from 3 cents to 8 cents. The last strike was in 1988, when they walked out for 22 months. During that time network TV viewership declined by 10 per cent – it never recovered – and $500 million was lost. This time the strike is expected to cost at least $1 billion.

It will take longer for film production to be affected, because scripts were stockpiled by studios in advance of the strike and unionised writers play a less crucial role in the production of films than they do in TV, where writers are also often the executive producers and keep tweaking scripts on the set.

After the failure of a federal mediator to bring the two sides together Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Governor, is now getting involved.

“I’m talking to the parties that are involved because I think it’s very important that we settle as quickly as possible, because it has a tremendous economic impact on our state,” he said.

The governor was for many years a member of the Screen Actors Guild, which is also expected to strike over internet royalties, along with the Directors Guild of America.

Mr Schwarzenegger added that he was more concerned about Hollywood’s blue-collar crew members being put out of work than any suffering on the part of the studios or writers.

British writers have been told that strike-busting could seriously damage their careers. Bernie Corbett, the general secretary of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, said: “Strike-breaking would at best be a short-term payday but would have a devastating long-term effect on a writer’s US career.”

However, there is nothing to stop American studios from buying more material from Britain and simply importing it, as they have already done with Spooks, which was renamed MI-5 when it was broadcast on the A&E network.

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