Writers Voting on Pact to Let Some Back on Job

Striking screenwriters were deciding Wednesday night on an updated interim contract aimed at small companies that would allow more writers to return to work but bypass the producers’ alliance and the central issues in the 18-week-old impasse. Officials of the 9,600-member Writers Guild of America predicted that the revised pact, which includes the union’s proposal for domestic and foreign residuals that the major producers rejected in June, would be ratified during the voting in Los Angeles and New York. But Frank Mancuso, chief executive officer of Paramount Pictures, lamented that the maneuver would “prolong retrenchment at a time when they (the guild) should be seeking a solution.”