This story originally appeared in The Ankler.
The abyss draws ever closer, and yet little seems to change. As the final act approaches, the questions grow ever bigger, but answers remain scarce. This is my third straight week covering the writers’ matters — straining the limits of my micro-attention span. But I'm staying on it today and will continue to give it lots of pixels because there is so much at stake in some diabolically complex issues.
And the more you look at the issues on the line here, the more elusive answers become.
“Great people won’t work for nothing We are trying to get the bean counters to provide MORE BEANS. The budget of shows should rise with inflation, rise with success of the show, rise with the profits of the company. Writers are providing the essential building material for the entire enterprise” - a veteran showrunner
Here's a dive into the biggest question marks hanging over the fate of the industry just 55 days before the clock strikes midnight.
1. What will the studios do?
This is the big magilla of unanswered questions; if you knew the answer to this one, you'd have a pretty good sense of the whole pie.
So much of the speculation thus far has focused on the attitude of the writers, but left unexplored is — their attitudes towards what?
We have no idea what the studios will put on the table and how far they will be willing to go to avoid a walkout. Will they show up ready to work together, or dig in to stare down the upstart union? Will they come with real proposals that substantially address the writers' concern, or only token offerings?
If the latter, then it really does seem the path is clear. The writers who feel that the very survival of their profession is on the line are in no mood to accept table scraps or to kick the ball down the road.
If they come with real substantial proposals, however, there are plenty of writers who would be very happy to keep working. Right now, we have zero clue what they plan to offer and that, more than the mood of the writers, is where we should be looking to see how this turns out.
In a better world, we'd be hearing the studios muttering platitudes about wanting to make working in this industry sustainable for all. Or at least: We all have to work together on this.
The fact that we don't even hear anything like that from the studios should be a lot more worrying than the militancy of the writers.
2. Is there division between the streamers and the legacy studios?
This is perhaps the next big question. The studio side hasn't exactly been aligned in their visions for the business thus far, and there remains the suspicion on the legacy side that some among the streamers want to drive them out of existence.
This is a new phenomenon among the studios, and not something they've ever faced in the context of a major labor showdown before. The studios have always been competitors, but pre-streaming, they've never had it as their plan to wipe their peers off the map. Will suspicion reign in the studio ranks that one or another wants a strike to hurt their less-solvent competitors? People talk about writers breaking away from the Guild, but the possibility of a cleavage among the studios seems at least as likely.
How long would Paramount, for instance, tolerate a shutdown to keep Netflix from following the same sorts of practices they have to abide by in most of their company? In month three or four of the strike, what would be the stock pressure on some of these companies, and the temptation to cut their own deal and get their services up and running?
3. Residuals or Regulations?
This is the thorniest issue for the WGA; fasten your seat belts because this is also where the conversation gets the wonkiest.
In my revolving weekly sample, a notable segment of the writers have been alarmed by the talk that the Guild has turned away from imposing residuals and demanding the data from the streamers to a new system of mandatory room sizes, increased span protection, pay scales, etc.
It may or may not be true that the negotiating committee has turned away from the residuals path. It might be that they are still planning for both paths and waiting to see what the studios come to the table with. But the differences between the approaches have provoked debate among writers.
The break from the residuals regime is the biggest systematic, wholesale switch the streaming era has brought on. In the eyes of those who feel residuals should be the priority, they were the system that bound writers and studios together, making them both partners in success, when success occurred.
To some on this side of the debate, the attempt to create a host of new rules is attempting to jury-rig today's entertainment world to recreate yesterday's systems, suited towards yesterday's types of entertainment.
Mini rooms are universally unpopular among writers, not only for their curtailment of a full season's typical earnings, but because they have proven unworkable ("It's not enough time to actually write a season" is a complaint echoed by many.)
Provoking particular contention among the showrunner types I spoke with this week is the proposition that a new Minimum Basic Agreement would mandate a set level of writers be hired for every show, for a set amount of time and set levels of pay.
One showrunner pointed out how much this notion is at odds with the reality of streaming shows today. "It's a mismatch between the moment and the priorities of the guild. Any show that is going to stand out today needs its own unique voice, an auteur, and with 8 or 10 episodes you can do that. If you have more writers, the showrunner is going to end up rewriting it to their voice anyway."
Another concern is that if the new agreement mandates a higher level of staffing, would that end up just coming out of the budget and out of the creators' shares? In this thinking, the Guild can't mandate the total budget of the show, so if the show is required to have more writers, the studio can just say to the showrunner — okay, you've got to hire more writers. Find the money where you have to. Good luck.
The whispered concern here is that if you go down this road, instead of getting the studios to give more to writers, you just end up taking money from the show runners to give to the rank-and-file writers, essentially pitting the union at odds with its most influential members, and potentially threatening Guild unity.
A veteran showrunner and Guild stalwart friend rejects all this. "We are trying to find ways to increase the writers’ budget. Show business is famous for budgeting fixed costs. We want our staff size, salaries, credits, and production duration to be a fixed cost. Under this plan, mini rooms will cost as much as regular rooms. Staffs will stay on long enough to actually write a season of TV. We will do it every way you can imagine and cover as many bases as we can conceive of to prevent loopholes. Will they take it out of Shonda and Dick Wolfe or Greg Berlanti's salary? Doubtful. The big guns can’t be lowballed. They have too many options. Will it come out of the rest of the production? Doubtful. They have already nickel and dimed vendors and crews to their bone. Great people won’t work for nothing We are trying to get the bean counters to provide MORE BEANS. The budget of shows should rise with inflation, rise with success of the show, rise with the profits of the company. Writers are providing the essential building material for the entire enterprise, and we can’t be replaced with Chat GPT quite yet so they need us."
That is just scratching the surface of the debate, but there are some of the basic contours.
What both sides agree on, however, is there has to be more money for writers who aren't brand-name showrunners to do their work, so this debate shouldn't be taken as a sign of true division as much as a difference in approaches to the same problem.
Charlie Kaufman’s now viral sensation accepting the WGA’s Laurel Award last weekend and speaking to the place of writers in this industry.
4. What is the David Young Factor?
The sudden departure of Chief Negotiator David Young for medical leave with what we hear is a fairly serious but unspecified condition, just as the negotiators prepare to hunker down, is a plot twist whose implications still remain to be sorted out.
It's hard to imagine a more polarizing figure in Hollywood than Young who evokes everlasting scorn from his opponents and unshakable loyalty from the stirred-up troops at the Guild. Love him or hate him, think he's a strategic genius or an inflexible Trotskyite, today's militant WGA West is his creation and to have him step away on the eve of battle is unsettling.
His acting replacement, Assistant Executive Director Ellen Stutzman, came out of Young's organization so there's not much question of a change in priorities. How she will fare however going head-to-head with Netflix, Amazon, Disney, etc. in her first outing as a lead negotiator is to be seen.
5. If it comes to a strike, do the other unions back them up?
Lots of supportive words at this point. The directors stood back and let the writers take the lead. But how long in these tough times would the other unions support the strike? Hollywood has a long and venerable tradition of throwing writers under the bus when times get tough. But on the Guild side, if the issues vary from union to union, everyone is feeling the pinch and the disruption brought on by the streaming age and everyone is hoping some sort of new way through it can be found. While it seems like the writers are doing that, they will likely find a reservoir of support.
6. Is a strike, especially a brief one, good for the studios?
This is the traditional bugaboo held over the heads of the writers, harking back to 2007 when the studios used the work stoppage as a pretext to force majeure their way out of a generation of contracts.
However, things are a little different this time. If you haven't noticed, we're in the midst of a streaming war. And while there is cost cutting going on, and no doubt a shutdown will lead to some of that, the studios all need a ton of new things to fuel their fledging services — none of which can just coast along for one. No doubt there's a handful of contracts here and there that they regret, some shows that aren't shaping up as well as promised, and would take the chance to dump, but by and large, they signed deals with these people in relatively recent history because they need their work.
These aren't legacy cable networks that can just fill their airwaves up with Duck Dynasty reruns and float along on carriage fees forever. These are services still desperately trying to build and maintain their audiences, fighting not just with each other but with Tubi, YouTube, TikTok, SVOD — a world of other entertainment choices people can turn to the second their service starts to look a little stale.
The notion that they would take this opportunity to clear the decks of their creative ranks seems less likely now than at any time in Hollywood history.
That said, if they slow down production for a bit, and still have shows churning their way through the pipeline, they can eke out a very good-looking quarter or two, that would no doubt make Wall Street happy. Until the bottom falls out.
7. How do feature writers fit into this?
Notice the arguments about which direction to go in the negotiations? What do both paths have in common? They have nothing to do with feature writers.
This is shaping up as a bit of a wild card in the WGA mix. The film writers I've talked to in the past weeks have largely expressed befuddled indifference to the negotiations, noting that the big issues on the table don't seem to really touch on them.
What's more, in the features guild caucus there's a minor grudge towards the Guild that's been festering for years and what with all the agitation could make its way to the foreground now, just when the Guild needs all the unity it can muster.
The grudge concerns how feature writers are assessed for their Guild dues versus the top-tier TV writers. Basically, since screenwriters are hired just to write, their entire fees are subject to 1.5 percent WGA dues. For TV writers of the showrunning level however, much of their compensation comes from work as "Producers" which is not subject to WGA dues.
Now 1.5 percent isn't the end of anyone's world so I wouldn't call this a top tier issue, but the disparity rankles screenwriters I spoke to, who wonder why they are called on to cover more of the Guild overhead than their TV brethren.
All that said, the WGA film writers caucus is small and growing smaller compared to the bustling ranks of the TV writers.
8. What about the agencies?
As you may recall, the WGA just came out of a major showdown with the talent agencies. The year-long standoff lead to a complete capitulation by the agencies, seen as a major victory for the Guild and Young at the time.
But some writers I've spoken with have expressed surprise that agents — their representatives — aren't standing up publicly in support of them. Wasn't the whole point of that action to get us "aligned?" is a question I've heard.
Well, that might have been the idea, but feelings still aren't aligned from that fracas. On the agenting side, you'd find more people wearing MAGA hats in the CAA foyer than standing up in support of the writers guild. The wounds remain very fresh and if I were the writers, I wouldn't count on their representatives visiting them on the picket lines with cookies and care packages this time around.
9. How are Netflix's international shows affected by this?
Short answer: they aren't.
Somehow a certain service is just at the tip of the spear every time with these things.
So not only are Netflix's international productions not subject to the minimum basic agreement with the WGA, they've been doing a ton more international shows as part of their ongoing world domination efforts. Shows like… Squid Game (you might have heard of).
There are a couple ways you can look at the impact of this on the WGA talks. One is that because their shows are less exposed than they might have been they can settle quickly because it will change a bit less for them. The other is, because they are less exposed they can let a strike go on much longer without feeling an impact.
10. Will the writers learn to communicate?
One constant of every Writers Guild dispute is that the other side — whoever they are — runs circles around the Guild in the messaging war.
Like people who are too smart for their own good, the writers from a communications standpoint seem to have a very hard time dealing with the world as it is and spend their time building Aaron Sorkinesque castles in the air about how the public conversation will play itself out. Being writers, they always feel they can script the public discourse and the rest of the world will just... learn their parts and stick to the script.
The writers’ proclivity for hard-edged tough-guy-workers-struggle rhetoric doesn't help them present their case in a more endearing or flexible light. While the other sides — whoever they are — talk to the press, present their sides and talk down the Guild, the writers refuse to respond to questions on or off the record, sulk about why reporters aren't naturally on their side, questioning whether they've been paid off, and conducting witch hunts for leakers in their own camp.
Writers Guild: the Bolshevik routine neither impresses nor wins over anyone, particularly in its borderline psychotic Twitter incarnation. These issues on the line here are extremely complicated. Explaining them to the community at large is going to take finesse. Counting on the press to repeat your handouts as written is not a communications strategy.
But these issues are important. As I've written, nothing less than the fate of civilization hangs on you turning things around here. So do us all a favor: hire a communications firm –—Hollywood's got a lot of them — and then actually listen to what they tell you.
11. When does everything go to hell?
Maybe the biggest question of them all. And it depends. I've heard estimates from two months to six months.
Problem is: Hollywood was already producing at full capacity. Even as everyone knows this is coming there's very little room for anyone to ramp up anything.
So we'll see when it actually happens. The May 1 deadline (The Abyss!) could well be pushed back if talks are continuing. And once a walk-out happens, it depends what other unions stand with it.
But make no mistake, this is an industry still healing from one cataclysm. A second isn't going to be just a flesh wound.