Today marks 141 days since the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike last May, making it one of the longest strikes in WGA history, only a few days short of the 1988 record of 153 days. Not only does the length make this strike special but the participation of the
Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the solidarity shown from many other individuals and organizations, which has not been seen in 63 years. Movies and TV are a mainstay in our culture, they are all written by writers, directed by directors, and acted by actors, plus all the other jobs that employ around 2.4 million people in total, according to the Motion Pictures Association. The strike has affected, and will affect, any TV shows, late night shows, as well as highly anticipated movies. What do the writers want and why do they refuse to work?
The WGA is a very broad guild of writers, representing 11,500 people. These writers could be writing scripts, revising scripts or being a part of a project’s writing room. According to a Washington Post article, the WGA claims 50% of writers are paid minimum wage and many who aren’t have seen their pay decrease. While big studios and producers, since the beginning of streaming, have seen their revenue increase at a dramatic rate based on a report from the LA time.
The strike has been going on since the Second of May, 2023. It started as negotiations with Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP, a trade association representing almost all major Hollywood studios) hit a stand-still. Then, on the 14th of July, SAG-AFTRA joined the strike, taking two major jobs out of the industry, putting the entertainment production to a grinding halt. A lot of the SAG AFTRA demands align with the WGA demands especially on the issue of residuals and the shift to streaming as a whole. Macleay Bolgatz, a senior here at Boulder High School as well as an actor, stated that when filming “writers are often on set, writing the shows, writing the next season, they are making adjustments. Writers are not clearly on camera but just as crucial as actors and that is what makes their strike so powerful”
What about your movies and shows? The strike has put a stop to almost all major American productions, and will likely continue until a settlement is reached. We will likely see the aftermath of this strike long after the picket lines have cleared, similar to how modern reality TV came about from a lack of writers during the 2007 WGA strike.
Residual payments are another big issue for the WGA. It is a form of royalty payment given to writers, actors or more, if their works reruns or is highly popular. MacLeay Bolgatz (12) said in an interview, “most actors are not A-listers, there is time between jobs, and so to continue to do what we are doing, we need to be able to survive. We need to be able to pay rent and we got that through residuals… I know people who are recurring or leads on these shows, from these streamers, and they make less than ten dollars annually… These shows and films are bringing in tons of revenue on streaming sites, and we’re not seeing that on the back end.” Cable television gave clear boundaries and definitions to how these payments should be but with streaming, it has muddied the waters and a lot of big streamers refuse to inform writers on their work’s viewership numbers, and thus how valuable their labor was.
Writer’s rooms are a standard practice for most tv and movies, which involve a group of writers collaborating with each other on a certain project. Studios recently have been implementing mini writing rooms, employing 3-4 people instead of the usual 7-8. Not only are workers carrying a larger work load, they are getting paid less and are not as involved with production as they once were. Writers in production are very important; they can help make adjustments and rewrite scripts if complications in production present themselves. To defend these practices and the rooms, the WGA is negotiating for a minimum of 6 writers in a room according to the Washington Post.
AI, like ChatGPT, will not only be a problem for schools, it could destroy a writer’s career and replace human writing with an amalgamation of 1s and 0s from silica and copper. Naturally, WGA would make assurance of AI technology to not take over their livelihoods, one of the core pillars of the strike.
They also feel that the entertainment industry that “Disney, Amazon, and Netflix are positioning themselves to be the new gatekeepers of media, growing through acquisitions and using their increased power to disadvantage competitors, raise prices for consumers, and to push down wages for creative workers” per this WGA West Report. This is a pretty hefty antitrust acquisition but it is not unreasonable to assume such, with large mergers and acquisitions by these companies in the last couple of years; think of the 21st century Fox-Disney merge, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Amazon merge. These are not small companies, these are huge! They are the original movie studios, when silent films, and black and white films still played in theaters, now worth billions of dollars. WGA, in the same report, says that this monopoly will not only make living off of writing extremely hard, it will also affect us. WGA predicts subscription prices will only get higher, quality will get worse, and diversity in options will diminish. The new landscape streaming has become a wild west of unregulated industry, full of uncertainty and everyones rushing to the gold. What the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and many others who stand in solidarity, aim to accomplish with this strike is for regulation to finally catch up with these changing times.