The Squeeze: Writers on 'S*** Money' and the New Gig Economy

'I don’t know how to make a living': Even successful scribes describe struggle and 'despair' amid smaller rooms, streaming, superheroes

Aug 06, 2023

Given recent events, we’re making this Ankler story available to Strikegeist subscribers. This story first ran on The Ankler in Dec. 2022 as part of The Squeeze series, which covered the personal impact on workers from entertainment’s new economics. Other installments covered producers, actors and below-the-line workers, and advice on How to (Maybe) Save Your Job During Layoffs. The rest of this series is for paid Ankler subscribers only. The story has NOT been updated to reflect the strike that followed it; rather, we are sharing it to help illuminate how Hollywood ended up in the place it currently finds itself.

Cole Haddon recalls his early days in Hollywood as a writer for TV and film. It was the late aughts and Hollywood was flush with DVD cash; Netflix was synonymous only with red envelopes; and “IP” hadn’t yet become the town’s Holy Grail. Haddon was just breaking into the business but nonetheless selling two to four projects a year. In some cases, the process was utterly effortless.

“I literally, on occasion, would have an idea in the morning and bring it up in the afternoon at a meeting and get a job off of it,” Haddon says. “My very first sale, Thieves of Baghdad, I’d rewatched the original film from the 1940s a day or two before, and I just brought it up in a general meeting with a producer — what was a very succinct and efficient one-sentence pitch. Within 24 hours I was walking into Warner Bros. and sold it in the room.”

“It certainly wasn’t that easy for everybody,” he went on. “I’m a white man and that was a very privileged position in Hollywood at the time. Competition was very different, so it’s unfair to represent that as a pure golden age. But for very specific people it was functioning (in their favor) and on top of that, the money they were throwing at people was significantly different.

"It was like suitcases of cocaine,” he jokes.

Today, Haddon says, “If I tried to pitch something, and I have, it is an utter waste of time. I don’t even need five fingers to tell you the number of writers who have sold things on a pitch. And the amount of effort that then has to go into writing a pilot or a screenplay on a speculative idea — even then, that’s not enough.”

In 2022, this sentiment is pervasive amongst the many Hollywood TV and film writers I spoke to for this story.

Aside from the one-percenters whose reputations have secured themselves steady lucrative work, it’s safe to say that everyone else is finding the industry both inscrutable and demoralizing — that is, unless they’ve got a project with The Rock starring in a Martin Scorsese film or a limited series based on a comic book sensation. And even then even if it goes into production, who knows if it will be axed (Batgirl; Grendel; Bad Crimes)? A greenlight of proven IP is no longer a guarantee (exhibit A; Wonder Woman 3). Compounding the creative restraints of Hollywood’s exclusive diet of Marvel-like franchises is the financial insecurity of an industry that has shaved back so many mainstays that helped writers survive: residuals; overall deals; robust writers’ rooms that lasted more than a season or two. The result is a general malaise amongst writers and “some level of despair,” Haddon says, “where they just don’t understand if it will ever be fun again.”

Brittani Nichols says for a first re-run of ‘Abbott Elementary’ on primetime, she receives a residuals check of about $13,000. As for streaming residuals, “I’ve literally never received a residual check for more than $70.”

Things may came to a head if the writers’ strike takes place, but even that is adding to the sense of uncertainty of the moment — a time when a Disney chief is abruptly fired one day and his predecessor wheeled back in, AMC Networks suddenly goes CEO-less, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s disappearing division heads feels like a version of its own HBO show, The Leftovers. Of the potential of a strike — the WGA West represents about 10,000 writers, and WGA East represents more than 6,000 — one TV writer says, “It feels like when we first started getting back to work after Covid. I was taking meetings and people were like, ‘Well, we don’t know when (this project) is going to start.’ Everyone’s like, ‘We don’t know.’ A lot of people who used to feel certain about things are not feeling certain. It doesn’t help the uncomfortable feeling in the industry lately. Everybody who used to know doesn’t — which is scary.”

Subscribe to The Ankler

The New Gig Economy

For TV writers, the effective abolishment of residuals is just one way they feel that streamers have done them in. The arrival of not just Netflix, but Amazon, Apple and Disney+ also replaced the 22-episode order with seasons that are eight or 10 episodes, which in turn drastically reduced the size of writers’ rooms. Suddenly it wasn’t unheard of for a show to be staffed by just one or two scribes. As for those multimillion overall deals that made everyone think that TV writers were some of the highest-compensated people in Hollywood? They went to a select number of mega-producers (Shonda, Ryan, J.J.), and, three to four years in, no one expects them to be renewed at quite the same inflated level given that the experiment — even with hit shows, some having more than others — is now facing a penny-pinching reckoning focused on profits. Everyone else, meanwhile, has watched the very concept of an overall deal, even at a far more modest size, evaporate, as studios and networks look to cut corners in a shrinking industry. This, combined with the lack of residuals, means that the money that TV writers relied on to get them through hiatuses and allow them the time to develop new projects is now gone, meaning they are non-stop hustling in what has effectively become a gig economy.

“When I started as a staff writer, it was like (Steve) Levitan owns three houses and has millions of dollars,” says one executive producer who’s worked on several hit cable and streaming shows. “I thought, ‘Once you get to running a show, you get a deal and you’re set.’”

“Now it’s not like that,” she went on. “Everyone’s getting a salary. The big pie in the sky seems like it’s gone... I feel like I’ve worked decades to get to the point where everyone who was 10 years ahead of me got a deal. I missed out on the ’90s and the Friends and the Seinfeld times, when the town was spewing money. Because of that, there were still deals to be had. Not only did the streamers take away residuals and start giving people money upfront in the form of a deal, now those deals are going away.

“Everything you get excited about they’re like, ‘Well, the room is only going to be three people.’ So it feels like there’s so little opportunity. Even the assistant positions, they’re hybrids now. So it’s script coordinator and writer’s assistant. Even when I got hired I was a writer’s assistant and a PA at the same time.”

“Sometimes writers can put a year together where they can do 10 episodes here, 10 episodes there and kind of keep an income stream going. But with a lot of baby writers, they can’t. So if they get one 10-episode order there are things I would think they could afford, like going out to lunch or buying a new pair of jeans. Yet it seems so out of reach for them, because they are stretching that salary over so much time.”

Give a gift subscription

The Residuals Problem

Brittani Nichols, an executive story editor and writer on acclaimed ABC series Abbott Elementary, echoes the financial concerns of her peers. “Having this experience of writing for a 22-episode network show has really made me realize what’s possible,” she says. “I’d written for streamers and for a cable show with a very small amount of episodes. So I’m coming from a place of being a working class to then a middle class writer who was very lucky in that I’ve been able to string together a bunch of jobs in a row. But that shouldn’t be the case that we have to string together three to four jobs a year to be able to qualify for our (Writers Guild) health insurance or to make a very modest, middle-class salary, when so many other people in the industry are benefiting and don’t have those same squabbles.”

As for residuals, she says for a first re-run of Abbott Elementary on primetime, she receives a check of about $13,000. As for streaming residuals, “I’ve literally never received a residual check for more than $70.”

Kyra Jones, a writer on ABC’s Queens, echoed this recently on Twitter: “In case y’all are wondering why a WGA strike may be impending, my first residual check for the broadcast show I wrote on was $12,000. I just got my first residual check for my streaming show…$4.”

But even network shows are no longer the Shangri-La oases they once were. One former writer’s assistant on a long-running network show says that after four seasons in that junior position she left because she realized a promotion would require another several years’ of her life. “I told my manager and agent, I can’t keep doing the assistant gig,” she says. “I was about to turn 40 at the time. I’m a good 15 years older than any other writer’s assistants and, mentality-wise, I wasn’t what you want in a writer’s assistant anymore because I wasn’t willing to do the absurdities that come with the job. I was like, Listen, I know my worth.

There was also the hardship of surviving on the writer’s assistant minimum of $26 an hour. “It’s tough,” she says, “when you’re trying to have an existence that doesn’t involve six roommates in a one-bedroom.” The Writers Guild minimum for a staff writer — the next step up as a writer on a TV show — is $5,069 for week-to-week work. If more work is guaranteed, that number drops slightly to $3,964.

“So I left and its been great for my writing,” she goes on, “but brutal as well, because everything you get excited about they’re like, ‘Well, the room is only going to be three people.’ So it feels like there’s so little opportunity. Even the assistant positions, they’re hybrids now. So it’s script coordinator and writer’s assistant. Even when I got hired I was a writer’s assistant and a PA at the same time.

“It’s only my experience, but there isn’t a ladder anymore. I think a lot of the older male writers of a certain demographic are a little fearful that they aren’t going to get hired anymore. I think it’s a worry they have, so they’re holding on to these jobs very tightly. The tide’s turned and they want diversity in the rooms. Which is amazing and needed, but I think it’s scared people who don’t check those boxes. So nobody’s really leaving anymore.”

“People come up to me and talk about ‘Free Guy’,” says Zak Penn. “They’re like, it’s so good someone made an original movie. I’m thinking, that’s kind of scary that that’s such a big deal — that someone made an original movie.”

The irony of the streamers is that when Netflix first got into developing original shows and movies, it felt to writers like the shackles of network TV were being sawed off. “It was like this Wizard of Oz experience where we were all following this yellow brick road to paradise,” says one TV writer on a hit streaming show. “It was going to be free-flowing creativity, giant budgets, we were all going to make House of Cards or The Crown. As it turns out, they don’t make many of those shows. What’s been exposed behind the curtain are 8-episode orders that take three years to develop.

“So apart from a few of the Shondas, Ryans, David Benioff — but those are, like, five people — the rest of us, we don’t have overall deals anymore, we don’t have broadcast shows with 22 episodes where we’re getting paid millions of dollars. We are basically taking it on speculatively and all the risk is on us.”

The slowdown of development is making people stretch paychecks even further. Because streaming doesn’t adhere to the very structured and fast-paced network schedule, where there’s pilot season, staffing season, etc., which allows writers to plan out their year, projects can drag on for years. The writer on the streaming hit says she’s been developing an 8-episode series for more than two years now and has just turned in a polish. “So I’ve had to take a pretty good salary that they gave me, it was like $275,000, and stretch it over almost three years. Normally that would take six months or a year. But this has taken so long, I can’t afford my kids’ private school tuition. So I had to take a bunch of other writing jobs.

“And I’m lucky to get them,” she adds.

Yes, $275,000 may be far above the median income in the U.S., but working as a writer in television, a $260 billion industry, was never sold as a median-income type of profession. For writers who have grown up in the industry and have been able to live comfortably as they moved along in their career, the feeling is that now the bottom may be dropping out. “I have a friend on a broadcast show who said, ‘I don’t know how to be a TV writer anymore. I don’t know how to make a living,” says the streaming hit writer.

“I honestly don’t understand how there is any middle class that’s going to remain in Hollywood,” says Haddon. “Because either you’re so cheap, because you’re single or you haven’t been married or had children… Or you don’t have a family, you have no obligations, you don’t have a house — so you can take shit money. That makes sense. You’re excited and you want to build your career off of that.

“Or, you’re unbelievably successful. Everyone is already invested in you. You’re the 50-year-old, not quite the heavyweight, but you’re valuable. And you’re not going anywhere. But everyone in between — how do you have any type of normal life in Hollywood when they won’t pay you anymore, and they’re not buying specs the way they used to?”

Zak Penn, who wrote Free Guy and Ready Player One, and the story for The Avengers, is one of those lucky ones, whose resume is so strong the work is still there. But even he laments how the industry has changed, particularly in its seeming contempt for original ideas. “People come up to me and talk about Free Guy,” says Penn. “They’re like, it’s so good someone made an original movie. I’m thinking, that’s kind of scary that that’s such a big deal — that someone made an original movie.”

Free Guy was released in theaters, but far more projects are straight to streaming, which presents another dilemma for filmmakers who fear watching their projects get swallowed up in the ever-changing Netflix queue. “It’s one thing to write a TV show for a streaming platform where arguably it’s going to sink or swim based on how people react to it,” Penn says. “But for screenwriters, the idea of working on a movie for two years and there’s no guarantee that anyone’s even going to see it — it might just come and go on a weekend — look, it’s a good problem to have, the opportunity to turn that project down. But it’s a little bit harder to understand— so why are we doing this?

“Everyone thinks that all everyone does is just driven by money. That we all just do what makes us the most money. That’s true when you’re starting out. But if you’ve had a successful career, believe it or not, I know for me, I care a lot about… I’m not a young man anymore. I don’t want to work on something that I’m not going to want to tell people about, as crazy as that sounds. It doesn’t appeal to me when people say, ‘Oh, what did you do?’ ‘Oh, I spent a year working on a thing that came out and you’ll never see it.’

“Look, if it’s really interesting people, I’ll definitely consider it. Sometimes it’s stuff that’s presented where you have to accept that one of the most viable opportunities to sell the project might be exactly what we’re talking about —streaming. So you’re not going to say, No. I refuse. I’m not Paul Thomas Anderson. I can’t say, ‘There’s no theatrical, there’s no discussion.’ I’m just a writer.”

As for selling a spec or pitch in a room, Penn says, “If you talk to any agents they’ll say if you’re a screenwriter, at any level, your best bet is putting together an entire package. And obviously that’s a hell of a lot more work and also requires a lot more cooperation from talent, agents and directors than just going in and having something that they’re already sold on the idea and they’re just looking for a writer to write it.”

One of the biggest examples of a recent package sale was Red Shirt, an original pitch (a “spy thriller”) by Simon Kinberg (Mr. and Mrs. Smith; X Men: Dark Phoenix; Sherlock Holmes) which is starring Channing Tatum and being directed by David Leitch. Amazon bought the pitch in a bidding war and is paying Kinberg $8 million.

Kinberg’s payday raised eyebrows around Hollywood. Although many say good for him — get it while you can — they also point to the fact that to get that kind of pay out you A) have to be at Kinberg’s level and B) have to be entrepreneurial and line up people like Tatum and Leitch. As one writer puts it, “That seems like a fuckload of effort.”

Leaving Hollywood

As for Haddon, he moved to Australia in 2016, not specifically to flee the industry, but he says he’s now able to work more in the international market, which is less franchise-obsessed. “I don’t know many people in the U.K. or Australia who aren’t working on things that don’t feel personal to them and that they aren’t deeply invested in,” he says. “IP isn’t as important in these markets. You might adapt a great book, but that is not the driving force of the arts in these places.

“As a creative, it depresses me that the mark of success” — in the U.S. —“isn’t writing three or four original films that people love. It’s to create something that people react to enough so that you can be given your chance to write a Marvel series or a Star Wars film. That is now the pinnacle in some ways. That’s where the money is, and that’s problematic.”