This story originally appeared in The Ankler.
At times, analyzing the tea leaves in Hollywood, it can feel like you're swallowing your own head trying to discern meaning from the residue at the bottom of the cup.
And then there are times like this when it feels like history has arrived on your doorstep, and despite the attempts to make it seem that nobody is home, history wants to come in.
Whatever results from the upcoming WGA negotiations — win, lose or draw for the writers — the outcome of what happens in the next weeks, with a May 1 deadline set to avert a walkout, is going to set the course for the industry financially and creatively for a long time to come.
Last week, I shared my thoughts on what's driving us to this showdown and some possible outcomes. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback, convincing me that the consequence of what lies ahead can’t be overstated.
Today, I talk to the writers themselves as they are the ones who, if push comes to shove, are going to have to make the leap into the abyss.
I spent a few days working the phones, interviewing 20-plus Hollywood writers. I avoided writers who have been prominently active in Guild affairs, speaking out on social media, etc., as I wanted to hear from the silent-ish middle.
If you talk to 20 WGA members about an issue, you walk away with 150 opinions, so their perspectives don't boil down to an easy takeaway — particularly as the Guild is still formulating its plan and asks. But if I had to pick one word, I’d go with “resolute.” Across the experience spectrum, just about all the writers I talked to seemed determined to see this through.
Brace yourself. Here's a little of what they told me:
The Pipeline is Disintegrating
One writer who described himself as “early career” painted a portrait of his generation of scribes fleeing the profession: “The onboarding to becoming a ‘paid writer’ is pretty broken right now. I think what we are seeing is that there are pathways, like the fellowships and those programs that are fantastic, but frankly, if you do not have money backing you in the past few years, you maybe didn't get the opportunity to make it to being a writer.
“We'll never know the scripts that never got made or developed, because people went away and became librarians, and lawyers, and teachers, doing great positive things for the world. But they couldn't buy themselves another couple years in L.A., or couldn't buy themselves enough opportunities to submit and write and develop the connections and relationships, and spend the money getting drinks, or get by on so little money as an assistant.
“Or they wanted to move ahead with their life, or life came at them and they had a child, and they just couldn't justify it anymore. I know a lot of people who were getting a lot of what would've been enough to mint them as writers in the past — first staffing jobs and second staffing jobs. They did two shows as staff writer and then suddenly there was like, ‘Yeah, but you're just never going to make it to story editor.’
“A lot of people even get that first step, that moment where you celebrate with everyone at a bar to watch your episode of a show or just to talk about it on streaming, and it didn't buy them enough time to get the next one. That has been really, really rough. At this early point in my career, I’m surrounded by the ghosts of the people who have already given up.”
A mid-level writer weighs in: “I don't know anyone who says, ‘I'm going to up and quit,’ because I don't feel like people really quit. What happens is they don't get a lot of work and then they think, ‘Oh, it might be fun to get my real estate license.’ And then they’re suddenly a real estate broker or a copywriter or they’re teaching adjunct screenwriting classes. But I do think people, both above me and below me, are definitely panicking. It’s not clear to them that this is a sustainable career, even if they work really hard and play all their cards right.”
Says another: “In my writers’ room, these mid-level writers were not able to afford their year, and their rent. I bought a nice pair of jeans and they were like, ‘Must be nice!’ I said, you’re a working writer, you can afford jeans! And they said, no, we can’t!”
The Hustle
The nature of who is going into this field is also changing. Says one writer who is just getting started, “I feel like a lot of young writers right now, they’re also performers, they're on TikTok, they’re making shorts, they’re directing, they’re producing, they’re doing UCB and really hustling at that. I'm really not interested in performing or even putting up funny videos on TikTok. So I feel very lucky that I was able to break into the world without having to do stuff that doesn’t feel right for me.
“It’s scary because all rooms end. I think that that’s something actually that they’re going to try and tackle in the strike, is getting rid of these mini-rooms, that your standard television room should be 20 weeks. That’s a good amount of money that can last you through the year. And right now, the money that I’m making from the room I’m in will pay off my debts and pay my taxes for this year. So every dollar is accounted for. So it’s scary to think that I would be entering a couple months without making any money, being staffed again and figuring out how to get a job at the end of the year, or what any of that looks like. I’m hopeful, but I certainly don't feel secure. But I do know that this is my dream job. This is exactly where I want to be.”
Breakdown of Trust
The relationship between writers and studios has never been what you’d call nurturing or harmonious, but the level of distrust that exists today is through the roof. There’s a sense from the writers not just of exhaustion, but of exploitation, making common ground for a potential agreement hard to find.
One “early career” writer complained about the studios’ habit of forcing writers into the lowest-rung position — that of staff writer — and making it increasingly difficult to climb out of that slot. “We have learned that norms can be broken,” this person says. “We've just allowed the studios to set their own obligations in terms of moving past a staff writer. For many years now, we’ve just taken that lying down. The idea that a studio can say, ‘You actually need to do 22 episodes as a staff writer before we'll consider moving you up.’ And it's like, ‘I’m sorry, why did you get to determine that? What is that about?’
“Of course, the pushback to that is, ‘Well, if you make waves on this, then you’ll just never get hired again.’ But the reality of right now, the studio’s defining how many episodes somebody must do, is not great either.
“The other big issue is staff writers not getting script fees (i.e. additional payment for the individual scripts). It never really made much sense. It’s built into the budget that there will be some script fees assigned. The other thing is offering freelance episodes. There is a rule that if there is a show that has 13 episodes, then in its second season, it must offer one story by credit to someone who is not staff writer. I dare say that the idea that it had to be this way for a 13-episode season is why we started seeing 12-episode seasons become so common.
“It's just some of the fundamentals that have been in place for so long that worked in a world where that broadcast stuff stayed pretty stable. And right now, just the fact that that’s not the case has broken so many things. A domino effect is breaking a whole bunch of norms and systems a long way down the line.”
Says a top-level TV writer: “Now I'm at the part of my career where in the olden days, it would have been, who wants a deal? That is laughable and hysterical now. Now it’s like, who wants a pay cut? I've heard that happen a bunch of times — writers on a show being forced to take a pay cut.”
A showrunner says: “In terms of what they are going to come back with, we just don't know what we're dealing with. It used to be we know our producer and the TV production companies. We don't know the tech companies, and we don’t know these giant guys [that are part of] the mega-mergers.”
The Issues
Ask what the Guild should focus on, you get a long list of major issues and pet peeves.
But at the core there are two basic routes the studios could go down to make the writing profession sustainable again: either institute residuals (the fees generated from repeat viewing of a show) or raise the pay scale and the number of people working on the shows. Opinions differ strongly which of those paths would be the best.
Says one mid-level writer: “So the things that traditionally get dealt with in the MBA (minimum basic agreement) are weekly minimums and script minimums. Now the problem isn’t really weekly minimums. For television writing, roughly speaking, there are two minimums. There's the staff writer minimum, which at this point is, I think, $5,000 a week. And then there’s the ‘writer with additional services minimum’, which is anyone who's called a story editor or above, and that's somewhere around $9,500 now. It depends on how many weeks the contract is for. So it hovers around those numbers. And then variety shows I think are somewhat less than that $5,000 at minimum.
“And there were carve-outs for cable and stuff, but if I could work steadily for the rest of my life at $9,000 to $10,000 a week, and I could be on a show every year that was a 10-episode show, so it ran for 20 weeks, and then I’d make that $200,000 roughly, and then I’d write probably two scripts on that show, each of those script fees is about $35,000. So that’s another $60,000 or $70,000, plus some amount of residuals. That's fine. That's great. That's like 200-and-something thousand dollars.
“The thing is, it’s very hard to actually to sustain that, because there really is this crunch on mid-level staff jobs. If you look at the credits, on most shows you'll see three or four or five co-EPs and then one or two staff writers or story editors.
“On the demands, is there an idea that we’re going to try to increase staff sizes? I don't know how they’ll do that. I would love for them to be able to, that would be a big win.
“Increased residuals is certainly important, because the less you work, the more important residuals are. So those are things that they could do and connect to other issues like span (the rules protecting above scale pay ). One of the reasons that upper-level writers are not that more expensive than mid-level writers is because they can be hired for a 10-episode cable show and be expected to work 40 weeks for their 10-episode fees. You shouldn't be able to make people work 40 weeks a year for a 10-episode show. And there are now some protections.”
Says a top-level writer: “Between residuals and mini-rooms, lack of streaming residuals is the biggest issue. They took away the benefit from success.”
One very established writer puts it simply: “Streaming residuals, streaming residuals, streaming residuals, and maybe... span.”
If The Strike Comes
“I think what's going to happen in the prolonged strike is you are going to see a lot of people get into debt upon debt. I think a lot of people will probably take this as a sign that they should leave the industry,” says one early career writer. “A prolonged strike is going to impact all the support staff and all the development assistants who are going to be told that their production companies are tightening their belts. It’s going to be affecting assistants all through the industry who are barely getting by anyway.
“They’re going to be the first ones. I mean, if you think a VP’s going to salary sacrifice, even $15,000 to make their assistant get a livable wage… they’ve always been able to do that, and they haven't yet. I think what’s interesting is this strike is probably going to hurt a lot of the people who are going to vote for it because they're like, ‘Well, if [change] doesn’t happen now, it won’t happen.”
Optimistic or Pessimistic
Asked how they felt the profession would look coming out of this process, opinions varied. Says one: “I'm optimistic that we’ll get some gains, whereas I was pretty agnostic about the last strike and about the agency action. I feel like whatever the table looks like on May 1st, we can probably improve that offer by going out on strike. I'm not necessarily optimistic that we’re going to get back to the point where this looks like a sustainable career for thousands of people.
“I think it’s going to continue to be tricky, but hopefully a little bit easier, unless there’s some big innovation on the part of the Guild. The problem is the tools that we have, residuals and minimums basically, aren’t necessarily the levers we actually need in a sense. So I don’t know if I’m optimistic or pessimistic. I don’t think it's going to destroy the industry. I don't think a strike will be long if it happens, but I think we’re talking about incremental gains in a tough atmosphere.”
Says another, “I'm fairly optimistic. I’m also a strong believer that every time we go back to the table, we are making incremental progress on some things and then we’re in a position to start great new conversations about changes to be done in the next one and the next one.
“We have resolve. We're going to create new systems that are adaptations and ones that are also going to improve the situation moving forward. I’m delighted by the creativity and ingenuity of the Guild and their willingness to take on things that were previously seen to just be inevitable forces of industry.”
A writer breaking-in says: “I go to the meetings, and they definitely think that they’re going to strike. They think that they're going to win. Yeah, obviously they’re strikers; they’re positive about it. They’re all excited and amped up.”
And one more: “My gut feeling is this is an existential threat. It couldn't be a worse time for the most necessary strike. When the directors said, we’ll let the WGA go first, I felt the whole town is like, it’s on! We're going for this!
Final Thought
So this is all just a random survey of some very top-level feelings about the showdown. Beneath the surface of this, there are myriad issues and complexity. Not discussed here for instance: the fate of feature writers who face very different questions, namely: whether original writing exists as well as differences with the WGA in how it treats feature writers versus television writers.
We're off on a long march, where we’re going to have a lot of time to go deeper into some of these pockets, so stay with us. But overall, my impression from a week on the phone with writers was a strong determination to take this all the way this time, with not a lot of ambivalence to be found.