Chris Pizzello/AP Photo
SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher, seen picketing with the Writers Guild. The actors union is now also on strike.
This article appears in the August 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Members of the Writers Guild of America are striking for most of the same reasons they have gone on strike about once a decade since the 1940s. The studios and production companies are paying astronomical compensation to executives (half a billion dollars to the head of Warner Bros.; over $200 million to the CEO of Netflix over the last five years, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times), even while they’re cutting jobs and demanding writers and most people involved in making TV and movies work harder, and more unpredictably, for less money. Perhaps that’s why actors with the SAG-AFTRA union went on strike themselves on July 13, over many of the same issues as the writers.
The Writers Guild estimates that overall earnings for writers have been declining since 2018. Indeed, pay for the handful of top executives is roughly the same as the total amount paid to all WGA members combined. Executives insist that their nine-figure paychecks are not really so lavish because their pay is tied to stock value and it’s all just profit sharing. But what the writers are striking for now, as in the past, is a very modest form of profit sharing, at a minuscule level compared to the execs’, and rules that allow writers to make a career in the business.
When the strike began in May, the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) were far apart in terms of money, and as the strike entered July, there was still no agreement in sight. But even the WGA’s estimate of the total cost of what it wants for all the thousands of writers in the industry is still less than what the top ten executives earned over the last five years. The fight is now, and always has been, about whether writers will share the wealth generated by use of writers’ work in a new medium—streaming—and about putting restraints on the ability of companies to force writers to work for free, or for dramatically reduced compensation, early in the development process.
In every previous writers’ strike—1948, 1952, 1959-1960, 1973, 1981, 1985, 1988, and 2007-2008—the studios and production companies insisted that the future was too uncertain to enable them to commit to a formula for writer compensation that would enable the writers’ pay to be pegged to the success or profits the companies earned from their work. They have always said the profitability of new media—broadcast TV in the 1940s and ’50s, reuse of movies on TV in the ’50s and ’60s, cable TV in the ’70s, videocassettes in the ’80s, DVDs in the ’90s, and streaming today—was too speculative to agree to any formula to compensate writers except for the time spent on the single job of writing a script. The writers have always insisted that they should be paid not only an hourly or weekly rate for writing a script, but also that some tiny portion of revenue generated from the use or reuse of writers’ work should be shared with the writers. As one writer I interviewed after the 2007-2008 strike said to me, “If they’re making money, they can’t turn around and say, ‘Oh, we don’t know the business model.’ Well, you know what? You got some money in your pocket. That’s your business model.”
Major changes in how screen entertainment is made or distributed have prompted strikes many times before. Toward the end of World War II, as writers saw studios laying off writers and anticipated that the new technology of TV would create many new opportunities for studios to make money reusing old scripts, a group of leading writers insisted that writers should own their scripts and license them to movie studios. That’s the way that playwrights get paid, and it made sense to writers—good scripts created good movies that would be shown repeatedly on TV or would be remade as TV shows. Some of the most successful Hollywood writers—including Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr.—were the biggest advocates of writer ownership. They were driven out of the industry in late 1947 after Congress forced every union to banish anyone from leadership who refused to swear they weren’t a communist, and the studios blacklisted suspected communists. Writer ownership died as a major organizing issue when their names disappeared from the screen.
What makes American TV and movies the envy of the world is that the Writers Guild made Hollywood treat its writers as an essential part of the creative process.
In place of script ownership, writers went on strike for, and won, the contractual right to be paid residuals. In 1953, after striking, writers got a contractual right to be paid residuals for each time a TV program or made-for-TV movie was rebroadcast. In the late 1950s, as the number of movies released annually and the number of writers on contract with the movie studios were plummeting, the movie studios decided to sell their vast catalogs of old movies to TV. This was a boon to TV networks hungry for content and a windfall for the studios, but it was appalling to writers in both media who saw the companies profiting from the reuse of writers’ work with no compensation for writers. So writers struck and won residuals for post-1948 theatrical films shown on TV. (Writers of pre-1948 movies agreed to forgo the payment of residuals, and instead that money was pooled to form the basis of the writers’ pension plan.)
In the days of broadcast and cable TV, writers working on successful shows, or movies that replayed on TV, could expect significant residuals. That would tide them over during the lean times between projects. A writer working on a network show (which typically had 22 episodes per year, requiring about 40 weeks of work) had a steady job that could support a family. And if that show proved to be popular, with lots of reruns, writers shared the financial rewards of the reuse of the work. As one TV writer explained to me: “Residuals reward success. If a show tanks and never airs anywhere else, the company doesn’t have to pay residuals. But in success, the company has to share with the creator some portion of that success, a tiny portion of that success.”
Protecting the right to residuals for distribution of material in new media has forced writers to strike over and over again. In 1981, writers struck for the right to be paid residuals for cable TV. In 1985, writers struck briefly over residuals for videocassette (VHS) sales. They accepted a deal that many writers thought inadequate. In 1988, writers struck again, hoping both to gain some compensation for residuals on VHS, and to ensure residuals for foreign sales. The producers, however, flatly refused to discuss VHS residuals, leading writers to the bitter lesson that once they agree to a residuals formula for a medium, AMPTP will never agree to overhaul it. For many years, companies profited handsomely from VHS and DVD sales, and writers’ compensation did not reflect that success.
Today, sharing the wealth from successful shows is yet again a central sticking point in the negotiations because the companies refuse to share crucial information about the current new medium—streaming—with the WGA. Streaming services like Netflix refuse to say how much they make even from hit shows, so writers have no way of really knowing whether the residuals they receive for internationally popular shows reflect their success. An Emmy-nominated writer of Bridgerton on Netflix, which has reportedly been watched by 82 million accounts for a total of 625 million hours, told the L.A. Times that she and the other writers on the show have received relatively little of the financial rewards of that huge hit. The WGA has proposed, but the companies have refused to negotiate over, a viewership-based residual arrangement that rewards the writers of programs with greater viewership. The WGA also seeks an increase in the residuals paid on the number of streaming service subscribers, especially for high-budget shows streamed overseas, but at last report the parties were far apart as to what those residuals should be.
But the current strike is about more than money. Residuals are not just about writer wealth; they are about the ability of writers to make a career in the industry. Over several decades, the industry has increasingly forced writers to be far more entrepreneurial about their careers than they were in the heyday of the movie studios, when writers were salaried employees bound by long-term contracts. TV writing, which used to be a relatively steady job working on 22 episodes over about 40 weeks a year, punctuated by an offseason to find a new job if necessary or desired, is now an endless series of short-term gigs, writing just 12, or 8, or 5 episodes.
Writers on the Emmy-nominated ‘Bridgerton’ have received relatively little of the financial rewards of the huge hit.
On top of that, the companies now want to avoid paying writers for all the work that writers have historically done to create TV. The companies have long sought, and the Guild has long prohibited, having writers work for free to develop an idea and see if it sells. Today’s version of that involves gathering a few writers for a few weeks to develop an idea for a series and to write several episodes. After the writers are dismissed, the executives decide whether to give the green light to make the show. If the show gets the green light, the scripts will be filmed and the writers in these “pre-greenlight” rooms will not get the opportunity, long cherished by writers, to be involved in production.
Television has long been a medium in which writers play a role in producing episodes; they don’t just hand in a script and then wait to see what turns up on the screen. They traditionally have worked with the cast, the directors, and the many creative and technical production workers in bringing the script to life. That work teaches them how to write effectively for a show depending on the size of the budget. One writer told me that he’d learned while working on an action show to avoid writing scenes that call for a character to fall into the water because it’s expensive to hire a stunt double, and even more so if the scene has to be shot several times so the actor has to dry off between takes. This kind of experience is crucial to writers in developing the many kinds of specialized knowledge required of showrunners, who are the writers in charge of creating and producing shows.
Writers worry these “development rooms” (writers call them “mini-rooms” because so few writers are employed) will become the norm and erode the pay and standards across the industry. So the WGA has demanded that the number of writers hired and the term of employment be comparable to what is done for shows that have already gotten the green light for production. The companies, predictably, cite artistic freedom and flexibility, and have refused to discuss any minimum number of writers in a pre-greenlight room or the number of weeks of work they will be guaranteed. Nor have the companies made any counteroffer to the WGA’s proposals that guarantee a certain number of writers will be employed through the production process or in postproduction. The parties are still far apart even on the minimum compensation to be paid to writers employed on pre-greenlight projects, although the companies have agreed to an increase in the weekly pay if three or more writers are employed for ten or fewer weeks before the first season of a new series.
Finally, there is the threat that companies will use AI rather than people to write scripts. The WGA has proposed that AI cannot be used to write or rewrite scripts, or as source material, and that scripts covered by the WGA contract cannot be used to train AI, either. The AMPTP says only that it will meet to discuss AI. While it may be fanciful today to think that AI could write a script, it may not be long before AI could churn out scripts for established shows, especially if it is trained on decades’ worth of WGA writers’ creativity and hard work.
The stakes in this current round of negotiations are high because the WGA has learned from experience that once a compensation formula or work rule is written into the contract, the AMPTP is extremely reluctant to negotiate any improvements. The bad deal writers accepted for VHS residuals in 1981 prompted two further strikes in 1985 and 1988, but the writers never gained back the ground they lost. The 2007-2008 strike (which was about residuals for streaming) lasted 100 days because writers feared that whatever they got then would be the best they could ever get. Even though the companies can no longer claim that the streaming business model is untested, they still resist sharing the wealth.
For as long as there have been TV and movies, the companies have found reasons why writers had to give up ownership and control of their scripts and do more work for less money. The Writers Guild formed in 1933 when studio execs claimed that the Depression made pay cuts essential for everyone (except themselves, of course). The Guild was compelled to abandon many of its claims in January 1941 under the exigencies of the war, and in 1947 because of the alleged communist threat, and in the ’50s because TV was a mortal threat to the movies, and on and on. Despite all that, by virtue of its many strikes, the Guild has been able to win just enough power for writers to ensure that the industry’s products are both popular and, every now and then, classics. As one writer told me, what makes American TV and movies the envy of the world is that the Guild made Hollywood treat its writers as an essential part of the creative process, and pay them enough to enable them to make a career, rather than burning through an endless number of underpaid recent college or film school graduates.
This strike, in short, is about preserving that creative system.
