Business Affairs Exec: How to Truly ‘Preserve the Writers' Room’

A top suit's solutions to end the strike's impasse on mini-rooms and minimum staffing

(credit: wwing/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

We’re making this Ankler story, which first ran on July 26, available to Strikegeist subscribers. A well-known senior business affairs exec, whose first Ankler piece was Confessions of a Business Affairs Exec, returned to write about solutions to the writers strike. This person is anonymous as they are not authorized to speak by their employer.

We’re now in the midst of the long-anticipated WGA/SAG-AFTRA Double-Strikepocalypse of 2023, and the only clear thing about this crisis is that there is no clear end in sight — no cooling in the white-hot emotional climate that pushed these work stoppages from likely to unavoidable, no clear articulation of when or under what conditions negotiations will resume, no discernible vision of what a final compromise might look like, and no mutually trusted figures with the gravitas and expertise to mediate the conflict to its conclusion.

So it’s going well.

I do not pretend to have all the answers. But I do think that ending these strikes finally requires shifting our collective focus from the problems to the solutions. That is, of course, true in the negotiating room, where deals are built out of solutions, not problems. But it’s also true in the public sphere, where most everyone would benefit from a little more confidence that there’s a resolution to this dispute that doesn’t involve burning one side or the other to the ground.¹

Two weeks ago, I explored in this newsletter what power business affairs executives have (and don’t have) to drive industry policy and practice on major collective bargaining issues. I did so by tracing the backstory of the AMPTP and WGA’s standoff on mini-rooms. And I closed the piece by arguing that business affairs executives could play a critical role in crafting thoughtful, nuanced, and sustainable solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

The problem with building your argument around saving the writers’ room is that nobody but writers really cares about writers’ rooms… And the AMPTP, which has refused to bargain on the issue… to look past the form of the writers’ proposal and engage with its underlying substance.

But, as some critiques I’ve heard about my column have pointed out, I stopped short of actually offering any such solutions (despite being the nearest available business affairs executive).

So here I am to heed my own call and discuss:

• The classic negotiating mistake made by the WGA

• Why the WGA erred in adopting the preservation of the writers’ room as one of its core collective bargaining goals

• Why the AMPTP is particularly resistant to the WGA’s proposals on the issue

• How to reframe the debate to align the parties’ interests and set them down the path toward a deal

• A few creative dealmaking tools that could help the warring sides reach an agreement (at least on this one issue)

Why tackle just a single issue relevant only to the WGA, and why this specific issue? Beyond the fact that no one person has the answers to everything, I hope to show how thoughtful, creative and empathetic dealmaking can potentially overcome even the most intractable-seeming impasses.

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Let’s Stop Talking About ‘Preserving the Writers’ Room’

Since the start of bargaining in late March, “preserving the writers’ room” has been one of the WGA’s core themes. The phrase appears as a topic heading in the WGA’s published summary of open issues.² Negotiating Committee member Adam Conover repeatedly called out “the preservation of the writers’ room” as one of the key drivers of the strike. Former WGA West President Howard Rodman cast the battle over writers’ rooms as “a fight for working conditions that extend and enrich human lives” in a guest column forThe Hollywood Reporter.

I don’t doubt the sincerity or the significance of the WGA’s concerns here. As my last piece described in detail, the industry-wide boom in mini-rooms is a product of fast-evolving norms in television production/exhibition colliding with well-meaning new rules meant to mitigate the pay dilution of the early streaming era.³ These changes have strained the capacity of working writers to maintain a decent standard of living in Los Angeles, while also largely depriving them of the opportunity to develop the producing skills that will be critical to their future success as series creators and showrunners.

Unfortunately, however, in waging its campaign to “preserve the writers’ room,” the WGA has elevated these issues from challenging, even under ideal negotiating conditions, to seemingly unresolvable.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that the WGA’s focus on writers’ rooms makes the writers solely responsible for this impasse. Under the best circumstances, addressing the structural impacts of mini-rooms is a complex task that demands far more careful and creative dealmaking than is required by data-supported financial haggling exercises. And the AMPTP, which has refused to bargain on the issue, has failed (or willfully refused) to look past the form of the writers’ proposal and engage with its underlying substance.

But the problem with building your argument around saving the writers’ room is that nobody but writers really cares about writers’ rooms.

The writers made a classic negotiating error: they made the argument that was most persuasive to themselves, rather than to the people they actually needed to persuade. The battle cry to “Save the writers’ room!” may have played a vital role in galvanizing the WGA membership around a potentially protracted strike, but it just doesn’t resonate for most other audiences.

The parties are ‘allowing themselves to be trapped by one of the oldest and most reductive of negotiating maxims: never negotiate against yourself. Which, on this subject, has pretty much meant not negotiating at all.’

That’s not to say the studios are intentionally trying to do away with the institution of the full writers’ room, as some writers contend. Rather, they’re essentially neutral to the concept — great if the showrunner demands it, you can afford it, it seems helpful to creative success, and the network approves it⁴; otherwise expendable. Plenty of great shows were born and thrived in the creative crucible of the writers’ room. Plenty of others did just fine without it.

In fact, the studios and writers value writers’ rooms so differently, at least two studio executives have — to my shock and confusion — expressed to me their conviction that the WGA’s proposed staffing requirements are a disposable red herring, meant only to provide the union with leverage to extract additional economic gains, which the studios would be perfectly happy to offer once the writers get off their high horses about all that nonsense.⁵

Not that the WGA’s argument fares much better with studio executives who (correctly) take the writers at face value, many of whom view the WGA’s focus on saving writers’ rooms as a naïve effort to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving future by desperately clinging to the institutions of the past.⁶ At the same time, many studios and platforms simply would never allow a collective bargaining matter to materially compromise their general authority over creative and production matters, or allow the WGA (or anybody else) to effectively dictate hiring or spending decisions without regard for specific circumstances or need — especially in the apparent absence of a consensus among creator/showrunners on the matter.⁷

All of which leaves us where we are today: with the parties unable to agree on the very premise of the disputed issue, while allowing themselves to be trapped by one of the oldest and most reductive of negotiating maxims: never negotiate against yourself. Which, on this subject, has pretty much meant not negotiating at all.

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Reframing the Debate

The WGA has made at least one other crucial misstep in its focus on preserving the writers’ room: it has confused means with ends.

Writers’ rooms shouldn’t be looked at as a good in and of themselves. Rather, much as Rodman argued in The Hollywood Reporter, they should be looked at as a tool to address what’s really motivating the writers here: the justifiable fear that prevailing hiring practices, combined with the looming threat of AI, may soon — if it hasn’t already — render the career of TV writing unsustainable for mature grown-ups who maybe want to raise a kid and buy a house in Los Angeles one day.

But we can do even better than that to reframe this debate in terms that fundamentally align the interests of the AMPTP and WGA: we need to build a system that attracts and retains talented writers to/in the profession and secures the pipeline of competent writer-producers to create and run the next generation of shows. No matter how you feel about writers’ rooms or how much you sympathize with the plight of the young professional writer in 2023, you can probably get on board with that.⁸

Defining the issue in terms of preserving the sustainability of the writing profession, and therefore the sustainability of the industry that relies on it, does more than just align the interests of the warring parties: it also opens the door to new approaches. The writers have argued that preserving the writers’ room is the only way to achieve that sustainability. The studios should respond by making the case that there are other, better means to achieve that shared end.

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First, Disclaimers; Then, Solutions

I’m offering a toolkit here. I don’t contend that any individual suggestion below is or isn’t necessary for a deal, though I don’t believe that any one of them would suffice on its own. I don’t expect everyone to like every proposal. If you want to leave a comment about how much you hate one of these ideas, I guess I can’t stop you, but you’d really be missing the point here. I acknowledge the argument that a multipronged approach adds complexity to an already wobbly negotiation, but I believe the benefits outweigh the drawbacks in this case. Some of these ideas would require negotiating numerical thresholds, percentages, or minimums. For the most part, I’ve withheld my opinions about the appropriate numbers because I don’t want this column to be used to support any specific bargaining position.

Reasonable minds can and will differ, and a compromise should always be findable so long as the parties are aligned on the underlying concept. I also don’t have reliable insider information on the substance of the parties’ proposals, or any proposals that were soft-floated but never formally put forward, beyond the WGA’s and AMPTP’s respective PR-oriented summaries of open issues, so it’s possible that these or similar ideas have already been part of the private, if not public, dialogue.

Now, Some Solutions

With that, here are some potential approaches that could help finally bring the parties together in one of the areas where they have long been farthest (and most loudly) apart:

• First Opportunity to Supervise on Set: As I’ve argued, one of the major externalities of the industry’s reliance on mini-rooms is a generation of mid-level “writers/producers” who largely lack producing experience because they’ve never been kept on payroll long enough to supervise production of their own episode(s), or because travel and expenses for writer set visits were a casualty of the budget trimming process. Writers could gain a non-waivable first opportunity to travel to set, with appropriate studio-provided transportation, accommodations, and expenses, to supervise their episode(s) for the full length (or, on shows with complex schedules, the most meaningful continuous period) of pre-production and principal photography. Because protracted production periods mean many writers will have taken other jobs by the time their episodes go to production, those rights would be subject to the writers’ then-prior professional availabilities. Those subsequent employers could be required to use reasonable, good faith efforts, without undue hardship to their own productions, to temporarily release writers (on an unpaid basis) to allow them to exercise such first opportunity rights.

• Single Designated Mid-Level Run-of-Show Producer: Consistently sending writers to set to supervise their own episodes will provide them with a lot of very valuable producing experience that they aren’t currently getting, but it doesn’t represent a complete training program — lots of producing takes place in pre-production for the season, and/or in the office (rather than set) throughout the course of production. I am still operating from the premise that promoting these sorts of skills and experiences, at least among the most promising writer-producers, has long-term benefit to the studios as well as to the writers themselves. While the WGA’s proposal that at least half of the writers in a room be employed through the end of physical production (and at least one through the end of post-production) will never gain traction with the studios, more incremental requirements may be achievable. For instance, the WGA Basic Agreement could require that at least one mid-level producer (e.g., from co-producer to supervising producer, inclusive) be employed for the run of physical production, with at least one guaranteed trip to set per year (which could be used on the writers’ own episode). Let’s call that person the designated “run-of-show producer.” Lots of details the parties could play with here. This could be considered a complement to the above idea about “First Opportunity to Supervise on Set” (as I’m sure the WGA would have it), or an alternative (as the AMPTP would no doubt feel). Writers may or may not be required to accept the designation of run-of-show producer, if offered. If they are not so required, the studio may or may not be required to offer the slot to back-up choices until someone has accepted or there are no qualifying mid-level producers left to receive the offer. Studios/showrunners could be required to designate a run-of-show producer at the time the room is initially staffed, though this would likely work better for everyone if they could make the decision within a few weeks before the end of the initial engagement, so that the choice could be informed by the experience of the writers’ performances in the initial room. There may or may not be some form of preference for mid-level writers who have never previously been designated a run-of-show producer. Span protection may or may not apply, or may apply differently, to the designated run-of-show producer.⁹

• Limit Freelance Assignments: In early May, creator/showrunner Bill Wolkoff tweeted “One of our DreamWorks execs once told me he thought that the ‘writer conference’ model was brilliant and that all shows should be written that way. With no regular writers’ room, just occasional daily conferences with scripts freelanced. A gig job.” WGA member-negotiator Conover retweeted Wolkoff with the warning, “If we do not preserve the writers’ room by codifying it into our contract, this is our future.” But there’s a much simpler way to avoid a future in which all episodic scripts are freelanced: limit the number of episodic scripts that can be freelanced. Again, there are a lot of variables the parties could work with to craft an elegant deal — basing caps on percentages of total episodes per season or on a table of specific minimums for each size of production order; potential distinctions between new series and returning seasons, and/or between broadcast and streaming; whether to capture scripts that are assigned while a staffed writer is receiving weekly fees but delivered after they end, and/or scripts that are assigned to a staffed writer after weekly fees have ended; etc. Writers get reassurance that studios who aren’t in the David E. Kelley or Mike White business can’t turn away from writers’ rooms altogether. Studios retain the discretion to work with their showrunners to figure out the optimal staffing plan for each individual production.

• Premium Freelance Script Scale: Under the existing rules, the applicable scale minimum for an episodic script varies depending on production budget and platform, but there is no distinction between episodic scripts that are assigned to staffed writers and those that are farmed out to freelancers.¹⁰

  In order to incentivize studios to assign episodic scripts to staffed writers, and to better compensate freelance writers who don’t get the benefit of more substantial weekly or episodic fees, true freelance script assignments¹¹ could be subject to a higher scale minimum than script assignments to staffed writers.¹²

• Prohibit Applying Pre-Greenlight Weekly Writing Fees Against Episodic Fees: Under the current rules, studios can negotiate to apply (or “credit”) a writer’s pre-greenlight weekly fees, in whole or in part (but usually 50 percent), against the writer’s total episodic compensation for the season should the series be ordered to production. Not every studio even tries this. I don’t personally know of any that strictly require it. And the math to account simultaneously for scale minimums, span calculations, and applicability can be tricky, such that in some cases, the studio gets no functional benefit from this right. But it’s odious to writers and their representatives, and while I admit to having happily and successfully negotiated for this many times, it now strikes me as petty and unnecessary.

• Higher Scale Minimums for Pre-Greenlight Rooms: Okay, I admit the parties are already negotiating on this issue. But that’s good, because it feels like a no-brainer — it’s just a matter of setting the premium. The union has sought a 25 percent premium on weekly scale for writers in all pre-greenlight rooms, including between seasons, while the AMPTP has (at least according to the WGA) offered a 5 percent premium for “development room” services, applicable only when three or more writers (including teams) are hired for 10 or fewer weeks before the premiere season of a series. If that’s accurate, I tend to think the right result here looks a lot more like the WGA’s proposal than the AMPTP’s. I also suspect this is an area where the studios have reserved some space to maneuver once negotiations resume.

• Revisit Span Protection: As I described in my last column, the introduction of span protection for writing deals made after May 2, 2018 inadvertently but inevitably gave rise to the employment conditions at issue in this strike. Nevertheless, the parties have given minimal attention to span protection, simply officially extending it to limited series (which many studios had been doing already) and increasing the total seasonal compensation cap above which span protection no longer applies from $400,000 to $450,000.¹³

  But there are other ways to try to restructure span protection to better fulfill its initial purpose with fewer unwanted side effects. A modest tweak would be to revisit the 2.4 weeks per episodic fee multiple for streaming series. A more ambitious approach would be to limit span protection to the period of time covered by the episodic guarantee, with extension weeks freely negotiable between weekly scale and the applicable pro rata span rate.¹⁴

  To be clear, I don’t have the data necessary to properly evaluate these options — or any of the many others I haven’t identified. And given how thorny negotiations already are, and how tentative the parties would likely be about this subject given recent experience, everyone might be better off saving this one for 2026. But if span protection effectively requires multiple overlapping rules to shape and mitigate its effects, it seems worth asking if we want to try solving these problems, at least in part, by going back to their source. ¹⁵

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Conclusion (or, One More Disclaimer)

I know this article goes incredibly deep on just one of the many major issues affecting only one of the two striking unions. Nobody’s getting back to work until a lot more hard work is done on minimums, residuals, and AI (at the least). And no one point will be negotiated in a vacuum — every issue is more or less linked to every other.

But the sustainability of the writing profession¹⁶ is certainly one of the most important, and to date most fraught, issues in the negotiation. Reaching an agreement on it, or even just finally coming to the table on it with a productive mindset, would be a huge boost to the momentum of the negotiations and to everybody’s morale — not the morale to indefinitely sustain a painful strike, but rather, the morale that comes from believing the other side might not be so crazy or evil after all, and therefore, that this could still all end reasonably well.

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Today in Strike News

• Amid the dual writers-actors strike, more than 11,000 L.A. workers — including sanitation, hotel, and airport employees — will go on a one-day strike as they look to “shut down” the city with an enormous rally. (Washington Post)

• More than 50 on-set Marvel VFX workers have petitioned for an election to unionize under IATSE, with crew members asking for a vote as soon as two weeks from now. “Turnaround times don’t apply to us, protected hours don’t apply to us, and pay equity doesn’t apply to us,” says VFX coordinator Bella Huffman. “Visual effects must become a sustainable and safe department for everyone who’s suffered far too long and for all newcomers who need to know they won’t be exploited.” (Vulture)

• Season 40 of Jeopardy! will open with contestants from Season 37, as the trivia show will act in accordance with the strike by giving second-chance contestants previously used questions or questions written before the strike began. (Variety)

• IATSE has budgeted another $2 million for members experiencing financial hardship as a result of the ongoing work stoppages, for a total of $4 million in available funding. (Deadline)

• After saying at a charity event Thursday that she doesn’t “like the rhetoric on both sides” of the negotiations and that she hopes she “can be Switzerland in all this,” Jamie Lee Curtis clarified her position Saturday night, posting on Instagram a photo of her holding a picket sign and declaring her full support for the strike. (Vanity Fair)

• Max Greenfield, Yvette Nicole Brown and Darren Criss attended a summer party Sunday night hosted by the Motion Picture & Television Fund, where hundreds of guests raised money through raffle tickets, a silent auction and ticket sales. The MPTF has been receiving 10 times more calls per day for financial assistance amid the work stoppages. (The Hollywood Reporter)

• Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish addressed the strike on the company’s earnings call Monday: “We’re saddened that as an industry, we couldn’t come to an agreement that would have prevented this. Our partnership with the creative community is critical to the health of our industry, so we remain hopeful for a timely resolution, and we are committed to finding a path forward. At the same time, we have a responsibility to minimize disruptions to our audiences and other constituents.” (Deadline)

• One marginalized group that historically supports union workers: the Jewish community. “East Coast Jews of a certain generation, whose parents were born in the first part of the 20th century, were all big union advocates,” says The Nanny and Will & Grace TV writer Janis Hirsch. “You were just brought up to support workers… Look how unions and the Jewish community turned out to support the victims and the families of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911.” (Moment)

Additional reporting by Matthew Frank.

1. And, thanks to what looks like some dangerously clickbait-y reporting from Deadline, confidence that burning the other side to the ground isn’t the point altogether.

2. Specifically, the WGA has proposed that pre-greenlight writers’ rooms be required to staff a minimum of six writers (including four writer-producers), while post-greenlight rooms would require one writer per episode up to six episodes, then one additional writer for each two episodes thereafter, up to a cap of 12 total writers (including five writer-producers). In addition, the WGA has proposed requiring that writers in pre-greenlight rooms be guaranteed a minimum of 10 consecutive weeks of employment; while in post-greenlight rooms, writers would be guaranteed at least three weeks of work per episode (up to a maximum of 52 weeks), half of the minimum staff would be required to stay employed through the end of physical production, and one writer would have to be employed through post-production.

3. Specifically, the WGA has proposed that pre-greenlight writers’ rooms be required to staff a minimum of six writers (including four writer-producers), while post-greenlight rooms would require one writer per episode up to six episodes, then one additional writer for each two episodes thereafter, up to a cap of 12 total writers (including five writer-producers). In addition, the WGA has proposed requiring that writers in pre-greenlight rooms be guaranteed a minimum of 10 consecutive weeks of employment; while in post-greenlight rooms, writers would be guaranteed at least three weeks of work per episode (up to a maximum of 52 weeks), half of the minimum staff would be required to stay employed through the end of physical production, and one writer would have to be employed through post-production.

4. Which is no small thing for independent studios, given the very aggressive way that streamers tend to exercise their budget approval rights on licensed original productions. In general, there’s a lot more that could be (and has been) said about the dynamics among the various AMPTP members, whose disparate business models mean their interests are not necessarily very well-aligned on some of the critical issues for the unions.

5. This strikes me as so naïve that I can only conclude that these executives are so consumed with their perceptions of the writers collectively (and occasionally individually) as entitled narcissists, they are — consciously or otherwise — punishing them by declining to do any deep thinking about what this whole “writers’ room” thing might actually be about.

6. Admittedly an institution that seemed pretty fun as workplaces go. But it’s only in the last few years that both the creative community and the studios have finally been forced to reckon with how writers’ rooms can also sometimes foster some pretty problematic and even abusive behavior — a reckoning that is still very much in progress.

7. I am sympathetic to creator/showrunners who largely eschew writers’ rooms but nevertheless resent their creative preferences being weaponized against their brethren without their consent. I am also realistic that the distastefulness to the creative community of this studio argument does not make it any less meaningful or sincere on the part of the studios.

8. This statement captures, and should functionally subsume and replace, existing conversations or headlines on both sides about “preserving the writers’ room,” “mandatory staffing,” “duration of employment,” and/or “development rooms.”

9.  If span didn’t apply at all, then the writer’s total episodic fees could be amortized over a longer work period, subject only to weekly scale (i.e., how things worked pre-May 2018, including the fact that this person would be making less per week but working so many more weeks that they would still almost certainly end up earning more in the aggregate). Alternatively, the designated run-of-show producer could be subject to entirely new span rules, like the approach outlined in footnote 14.

10. Somewhat confusingly, staffed writers still usually sign contracts called “Freelance Television Writing Agreements” for their assigned episodes.

11. And, as with the limit on freelance assignments, consider whether or not to capture scripts that are assigned to staffed writers after their weekly fees have ended (probably?), and whether or not to capture scripts that are assigned while the staffed writer is receiving weekly fees but delivered after those fees end (probably not, though maybe include a squishy good faith requirement to discourage potential manipulation at the margins?).

12. The AMPTP writes in its May 4, 2023 summary of open issues that “the companies agreed to pay writers employed before a firm commitment has been made to produce the series a 15 percent premium on script fees and increase fees for a pilot script by 50 percent for high budget SVOD series.” The former concession is a good start, but probably needs to be applied more broadly (as described here) and with a higher premium than 15 percent. The latter isn’t much of a give — the 50 percent premium on scale for pilot scripts has long applied to linear television, and though that wasn’t formally the case for high-budget streaming, many studios and streamers have long voluntarily acted as though was. It’s also much less significant than the applicable scale amounts for episodic scripts, because a substantial majority of pilot scripts are written at overscale prices anyhow, whereas virtually all episodic scripts are paid at scale, regardless of the stature of the writer.

13. $375,000 for basic cable.

14. Imagine a writer’s deal pays $36,000 per episode for a 10-episode season, a total of $360,000. That’s under the $450,000 cap, so span protection applies. Therefore, the writer’s $360,000 buys out 24 weeks of work (based on 10 episodes x 2.4 weeks per episode). Under the current system, additional weeks would be payable at the same functional rate as the writers’ initial 24 weeks, i.e., $15,000 per week (based on $36,000 per episode / 2.4 weeks per episode). An alternative structure might allow each of those additional weeks to be payable anywhere between scale (TBD but $10,000-ish) and $15,000 per week. Some writers will protest, why should we allow the studios to pay us less for additional weeks when the whole point here is to be getting paid more? To them, I ask: when was the last time the studio picked up your extension weeks, and how many did they pick up? Right now, these incremental weeks are typically considered more expensive than they are worth, and therefore never utilized. Limiting span protection to only the initial guaranteed period still protects writers against the dilution of their fees to scale, at least for the bulk of their working period. Ending it for the post-guaranteed period opens the door to deals that will make extending writers more cost-efficient and therefore much more likely to happen than in the current system.

15. And by remembering not to blame each other or accuse one another of malfeasance when we accidentally create some new problems that will need fixing in 2032.

16. As opposed to “the preservation of the writers’ room.”