Which would you rather view in gruesome high-definition detail: a man and woman doin' the nasty, or a bloody finger embedded in a dead man's bleeding corpse?

That was just one of the fun issues up for debate after Y&R/Sony's Dreams event, considerately postponed by one night so it didn't clash with our First Boards Awards. Thanks, guys.

For the multi-city Dreams, Y&R invited eight directors - whittled down from an initial pool of 900 - to wield Sony HD digicams and create their own four-minute interpretations of the word "Joy". Kudos to the tech giant for attaching its name to some pretty risky material, even if the content did distract the audience from the benefits of HD.

Most of the post-show buzz circulated around Jeff Darling's in:dex - a reality-framed rapid-fire, vividly brutal piece, in which three people seemingly stranded in the desert fight to retrieve a man's finger from inside a dead body that's bleeding from most of its orifices. Nice.

"Ah," the cognoscenti interjected afterwards, "but did you see the seven-minute director's cut?"

When I quizzed Sony about some of the rather bold imagery used to showcase its products, I was told that yes, they were a tad perturbed - not, as it turned out, by in:dex. Rather, they felt some viewers' moral sensibilities might be offended by Enjoy, a sentimental, sober piece from Traffic's Nacho Gayan depicting a maid spying on a hotel guest "in a compromising situation with a person who is clearly not his wife."

Um, okay. Lest we forget that offensive content is all in the eye of the beholder.

Personally I get more pure joy out of a well-shot, cleverly created commercial. On that note, the west coast was exceptionally welcoming to the unruly Boards gang when we joined LA bureau chief Simon Wakelin last month for the mag's annual celebration of new+cool commercial talent. We also made the rounds of prodcos, post houses and agencies.

So what's the buzz in LA right now, other than the merits of bloody corpse excavation versus adultery? Two words were on most people's lips: Bush and SAG.

One, industry execs say, has manufactured a war on Iraq; the other, industry execs say, has manufactured a war on itself.

Time and time again we heard that SAG's crew rates and the fear of another SAG/AFTRA strike is accelerating runaway production. "We don't want to shoot elsewhere," said one executive producer, "but SAG is leaving us with no choice." As a result, prodcos are offloading production to far-flung locations such as China and South America. Toronto remains popular despite the rabid SARS scaremongering. Hotspots like Vancouver and New Zealand, on the other hand, are just too busy. "On our last shoot in New Zealand," said one prodco exec, "they were shooting three films and we had to fly [our own crew] in."

It doesn't help that union regulations - not unlike divorce papers and cosmetic surgeons' waiver documents - are often complex for mere mortals to fathom. We'll bring you the major SAG updates as they unfold. Meanwhile, enjoy our own directors' cuts for 2003, starting on pg. 23. We can't promise any bloody fingers though.