A Breakdown Of The Writers' Strike, Some Of The Craziness That Transpired Last Time, And Loose Recollections From A Year In LA
The Writers Guild of America officially went on strike and began picketing this week. Their hiatus will effectively halt a lot of movie and TV projects in the pipeline across the entertainment industry. As you can see in the short video above, KFC did an excellent job laying out the writers' demands, the issues they want resolved, and how the quality of TV in particular suffered when the last strike happened back in 2007-08.
Basically what's happening is the writers are being taken advantage of with the explosion of streaming content and aren't being paid fair wages on those particular jobs. TV writers rooms are shrinking, and there's more onus on fewer people to flesh out a story beyond the initial pitch and pilot script. Now they're being asked to churn out multiple scripts in the development/preproduction process — and that's before these shows are even guaranteed to be picked up/ordered to air. Following six weeks of negotiations between the WGA and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), no suitable resolution was reached. Hence the strike.
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One particular event KFC highlighted was how late-night talk shows suffered during the prior strike. Conan O'Brien was a notable exception thanks to his extensive writing background and comedy experience. He made spinning his damn wedding ring surprisingly watchable:
Conan is the fucking man. I imagine his podcast numbers are about to skyrocket in the midst of all this as people hope he weighs in. how about this from Steve Carrell during his heyday on The Office:
As for what's happening this time around, I recall a recent interview from Star Wars' Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy, where he explained how he was racing to finish his final script for the show on his flight. That was because Gilroy couldn't do any more writing work once the strike began. Gilroy got it done under the wire. Therefore, production on Andor shouldn't suffer, since they've been shooting for a while and the implication is that all the scripts are in their final form and completed.
Beyond TV, movies are, of course, going to take a big hit on this strike as well — provided it lasts anywhere near as long as the last one. That ran from November 5, 2007, through February 12, 2008.
Most major movie productions aren't so lucky as Andor was with Gilroy when he hit the pre-strike deadline. Especially with big preexisting IPs like Star Wars, or, say, any project in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there are reshoots built into the schedule, along with rewrites that spring from studio executive notes. In other words, the studio gives feedback on the dailies (what's been shot so far) and often filmmakers have to adjust and creatively compromise.
When big-budget tentpoles start rolling cameras as is, the original, intended screenplay can be best summarized by Pirates of the Caribbean's Captain Barbossa:
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You need a compelling-as-hell pitch to sell a movie in the first place. If you see a film that's a piece of shit, chances are it's been creatively butchered and bankrupt beyond recognition.
How the screenplay is ultimately written can change based on studio feedback from the initial pitch. Or it can be ripped away from the original writer and given to someone else to either make heavy changes or do a page-one rewrite. How the "final" script is ultimately executed can depend on the director's sensibilities, budget-related/time constraints and in-production rewrites. How that thing is changed in the edit and/or reshoots can overhaul the entire structure, intended spirit and story of the OG screenplay. Then actors obviously have their own interpretations of the material, may be prone to improvising dialogue, and that can turn out any number of different ways based on who's in the director's chair and who the actor is.
When movie critics blast a script in their negative reviews and cite it as a primary problem, I think they fail to understand how many changes can occur from the draft that was intended to be shot. The YouTube channel Pitch Meeting does a hilarious, phenomenal job of poking fun at this. To be clear: So many spontaneous script modifications turn out to be masterstrokes. It's not a "change something, automatically bad!" situation. It's just that, generally speaking, you're pushing your luck the more you tinker and tweak. Doesn't help not to have the foundation of a great script in the first place either. See? The value of writers!
Among all the chaos that the last writers' strike caused for massive movies in particular, well, get a load of this profane headline from Daniel Craig. Pretty much says it all as he and his collaborators did their best to salvage the highly-anticipated James Bond sequel Quantum of Solace:
"On 'Quantum,' we were fucked…We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers' strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn't employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, 'Never again,' but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes – and a writer I am not."
I can't even imagine the pressure cooker that production was under those circumstances — straight off the smash-hit, franchise-reinvigorating Casino Royale no less!
How about this whopper: George Miller was gearing up to direct a Justice League movie featuring all the big-time DC superheroes before the writers' strike threw a giant wrench in the works.
With filming rights proving elusive to secure in Miller's native Australia, a constantly ballooning budget and a screenplay that wasn't ready to rock, Warner Bros. didn't feel great about it. All those obstacles led to the plug being pulled on the project. It was cast and everything! Among the notables: Armie Hammer to play Batman (wowza), and Adam Brody of The O.C. fame to play The Flash.
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Somewhere out there in the multiverse, George Freaking Miller dropped a Justice League movie right on the heels of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. I'm gonna quote these pieces of timeline fodder from the Batman Wiki page on Justice League Mortal:
"In January 2008, Warner Bros. announced the film was on indefinite hold, allowing options lapse for the cast. The studio felt the script needed perfecting, which was impossible because of the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike. In February, 2008, it was announced that production would go to Canada, despite George Miller's wishes to keep production at Fox Studios Australia. The filmmakers are still adamant for a mid-2009 theatrical release date, and hope to have filming start in mid-July 2008."
Once The Dark Knight changed comic book movies forever on the shoulders of the late, great Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning turn as The Joker, that was a wrap on Justice League Mortal.
Saying all that to say this: The writers and their work seem to be treated by those in the highest seats of power as a means to an end rather than as indispensable pillars of the TV/moviemaking process. You have fat cat studio heads hoarding hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves and not sharing any of the pie.
That's why what Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are doing with their new independent studio Artists Equity feels really important.
The way to go is to be a kick-ass writer and director, right? But to get to that point is an uphill battle to say the least. With streaming entering the equation for both TV and movies, the wages are much lower. Building a career from the ground up is even harder. Way more content. More competition. Smaller writers rooms. More workload to pull. Less pay than before.
And oh yeah, write your own shit on your own time, make connections wherever possible, hope you get lucky enough to pitch something and nail it! Even then you're more than likely to be rejected, see your passion project change hands, or watch it languish in development hell until the rights lapse.
It's a mess. You can start to see why writers are taking to the streets in protest. Then there's the whole AI thing. That sounds like a bad science fiction flick. Not even gonna touch that one. Pretty much runs counter to any form of creative human expression.
Now for a little story time, followed by more from the striking WGA writers.
This will hopefully illuminate how hard it is for many folks to be a writer in LA. I lived there from 2015-16 with one of my buddies. I had vague ambitions to continue my pursuit of acting/screenwriting while still working a full-time job. But this ain't really about me. It's what I saw my friend go through in chasing his dream of being a screenwriter.
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Prior to moving out to the City of Angels, my pal worked as a research assistant on a would-be movie that eventually turned into the Apple TV+ limited series Five Days at Memorial. High-powered producer Scott Rudin purchased the rights to the story back in 2013. It premiered this past August. About a decade of development hell. Miniseries storytelling and the birth of a new streaming service finally gave it life. Ah, the double-edged sword of the streaming era, eh?
Anyway, my guy had connected with accomplished screenwriter David Kajganich and worked as a writers room assistant on a show called Goliath for AMC. Not the Billy Bob Thornton-led show on Amazon Prime Video. This particular Goliath was being simultaneously developed alongside either one or two other shows. It was a Darwinian survival of the fittest. AMC would only pick up one of the multiple projects. Goliath wasn't chosen after months of hard work and story development everyone involved was proud of. I did say "loose recollections" so I may be off on a finer detail or two but that's how I understood what was going down.
Quick aside: Kajganich is one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet in the industry. After a short film screening at United Talent Agency, he was telling me the story about how he was originally attached to It and several other Stephen King adaptations for that matter before the execs went in different directions. It's nuts how hard these writers work to get the green light for production — and to even get due credit for a project when it is made. It's a minor miracle a competent, good movie or TV show is ever assembled.
Kajganich's big break was a spec script he wrote and sold in 2003, which was originally titled Town Creek. It wound up releasing in 2009 under the title Blood Creek with Joel Schumacher directing and stars like Michael Fassbender and Henry Cavill in the cast. It had already been rewritten and went through at least one director in the meantime, hence not looking anything like the draft that helped Kajganich get a foothold in the industry. We're talking about a very successful, accomplished writer here!
Anyway, it took some hustle for my roomie to find another gig once Goliath wasn't picked up. He found a role as a freelance reader for a production company. He was the first line of defense to read a manuscript, pilot or screenplay. It was on him to decide if it was a "yes", "no", or "maybe". He'd help determine whether the story should make its way up the flagpole to however many other people who needed to approve buying the rights.
It's a pretty damn grueling job to be a reader, believe it or not. Think about how long it takes you to read a novel. Or if you had to sit down and rifle through a full movie script. My understanding is most of those jobs are freelance, so the more you do, the more money you make. Then think about how many of those, at the initial litmus test level, are shitty scripts. It can mess with your mind to read bad writing so often.
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By the way, the rent/cost of living AIN'T CHEAP in LA especially when you factor in how often you have to drive and spend valuable minutes or hours sitting in parking lot-style traffic. On top of all that, my roomie was writing his own screenplays on his own time. And helping me as a scene partner with my successful audition into graduate school. And, you know, trying to have a life and stressing about where the next writing-related work would come from. Last I heard he's crushing his job at an agency, has finished multiple other screenplays over the last several years, is working steadily as a voice actor and has written multiple episodes of a Netflix series.
The story I shared isn't meant to be some all-encompassing, one-size-fits-all experience of an LA writer. It's more of a glimpse into one of many unique perspectives. In short: ain't easy to break in out there. Even when you're really, really talented and a good human being.
To think it's only gotten harder since the several years I was out there a while ago, too. Even writers who've "made it" have serious challenges. They're more or less hired guns, viewed as disposable or recyclable. You have to prove yourself all over again on every single job. You get your heart broken all the time over false starts and scrapped projects. Even when you're working on a hit, it's not all sunshine, rainbows and swimming in pools of money. The Bear writer Alex O'Keefe had one hell of a story that should never happen to anyone. Worth singling out.
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In the years since I was in LA, streaming has exploded with the launches of Disney+, [HBO] Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, Paramount+ and I'm sure I'm missing more off the dome here. It's like everything is growing so fast that the antiquated ways of doing business and brand-new/work-in-progress metrics by which streaming is measured are only magnifying the writers' struggles. Creates an exploitative power dynamic. That's self-evident at this point.
Again, I don't mean to make any blanket statements on a writer's life in LA. Everyone's experience is singular. But like…when you see firsthand how hard it is for someone to chase that dream down — and then the WGA goes in depth about all the bureaucratic bullshit that trivializes their importance and insults them with substandard pay, it's not hard to see something really needs to change. We're seeing a lot of individual stories from WGA members adding up to a categorically unfair working situation.
Seems like pretty modest and reasonable demands are being made overall.
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Some pretty great usage of humor to lighten up the mood and deflect from the harsh reality from the likes of Brett Goldstein and Brandon Cohen, too.
Shoutout to all the entertainment writers out there fighting for what they deserve. Cool to see actors, The Animated Guild and other allies step up and get in the mix to bring about necessary change.
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This was a behemoth of an issue to tackle and I can only hope I did a modicum of justice to it.
Twitter @MattFitz_gerald/TikTok