The main union of screenwriters in Hollywood, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), has been negotiating since March 20 with The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to clarify what should be the working conditions in the cinema and television. television, and the way in which writers fit into an industry revolutionized after the expansion of streaming. However, it could be a matter of hours until a strike is declared in the sector and the American audiovisual enters a phase of uncertainty. Here are the keys to the impending Hollywood writers’ strike that, for now, seems inevitable.
The Writers Union of the United States published a report in March where they reported that, with the advent and proliferation of streaming platforms, the quality of life for screenwriters had diminished: there may be bigger budgets and more project announcements but, As a general rule, the average screenwriter has worse salary and working conditions. One reason, for example, is the reduction of episodes and seasons by the platforms, from the 22 episodes of the traditional seasons to seasons of 6 to 8 episodes. While each writer did not sign every episode, it did allow for more stable employment.
Writing rooms have gotten smaller, which means breaking into the industry as a screenwriter is getting harder: there are fewer opportunities, and with such intimate settings, the jobs tend to go back to business as usual. In addition, scriptwriters find themselves with a major problem: platforms often tie up talent, preventing them from working on other productions while the project is being placed or is in production. In other words, less annual income but more contractual obligations and in more precarious conditions: since the 2013-2014 season, scriptwriters working for the professional minimum wage have gone from 33% to 49%.
Royalties must be added to all this. Writers used to get a piece of the pie from reruns and episode sales to third parties, but in the streaming era, these residual earnings have become more anecdotal. The fact that studios like Warner Bros. Discovery have chosen to delete content from the catalogs or not release them, does not help the sense of security of industry workers either, who come across works that will not directly generate residual income.
“One of the specific challenges (of the strike) is finding the balance between getting an opportunity, working on first-runs and getting in front of the right people, but also being compensated for those efforts,” the WGA reported. And it is that, in the last decade, the average salary of a screenwriter has been reduced by 4%, which, when taking inflation into account, means an impoverishment of 23%. Theoretically the series were not at their best?
Among the issues that must be resolved for scriptwriters to write again are the mini-rooms for scriptwriters, which in theory should serve as a complement to productions and have become a way of saving costs. Salaries are worse than in traditional scriptwriters’ rooms, production functions have been separated from scriptwriting to save on related costs and for scriptwriters to have less weight in the project and, furthermore, this affects the scriptwriters’ ability to climb in the industry: mentoring, under these conditions, has ceased to exist.
Another important issue is redefining the compensation of the scriptwriters for the residual benefits, since at the moment they charge less for each script and on top of that they get less cut in the long term. And, ahead of events, they want to lay the foundations for how the industry should relate to Artificial Intelligence: now that it is speculated that it can cause layoffs in practically all trades, they want to make sure that a part of their work is not outsourced to these systems .
“What we’re asking for is less than 2% of every dollar these companies make, as long as we benefit from our hard work and are paid well by them,” says Susan Hurwitz Arneson, who has worked on the Preacher series and is preparing The continental, the television prequel to John Wick. It will also be important that they don’t lock screenwriters short now that jobs are more temporary than ever and therefore need more flexibility to combine projects.
And what will they take into account during the negotiations? That, while companies like Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix or The Walt Disney Company will argue the problems to make streaming services profitable, they have been offering astronomical contracts to the industry’s star scriptwriters for more than five years and making the budgets of their productions more expensive. How can it be that while series have become the Holy Grail of entertainment, creative craftsmen have become precarious workers?
When there was a writers’ strike in the 2007-2008 season, the consequences were palpable: the weight of traditional television fiction in the global world was significant and the viewer found many series without season finales. Now, on the other hand, with shorter seasons in the open and with a greater volume of production in streaming, the possibility of having unfinished series is less likely.
Just in case, free-to-air channels in the US have renewed their main bets with time. Duty Court or Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, for example, they have rooms of active writers with two clear tasks: to make sure the season finales are ready and, in addition, to write the first episodes of the seasons that will begin their broadcasts. in October.
Thus, if the strike is prolonged, they will have new material for the 2023-2024 season and, with a bit of luck, that the writers return to their work routines in time so that the viewer does not notice any stoppage. The anecdote? That the showrunners can exercise their production tasks but not the script: they will be able to participate in the filming but not touch a word of the text, unless they want to make enemies with the union.
It must also be said that the platforms do not usually stick the end of post-production to the launch of the episodes, with which the release schedule for the coming months may not be affected. However, four months without scripts will have its consequences: in the medium and long term, the volume of releases would be affected. Therefore, platforms such as Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV, Disney or Amazon Prime Video may want to ration their releases in order to hide the decrease in premiere content in the future.
Let us remember that in the 2007-2008 season, television chose to give priority to reality television. The same could happen on the platforms: a boom in reality shows to compensate for delays in the development of projects.
This May 1, if the actors’ union WGA on the east coast and the one on the west coast have not reached a new agreement, they have the power to declare a strike. The support is practically unanimous: 78.79% of the members voted and 97.95% gave authorization to the union to make the decision. Therefore, the declaration of a strike is imminent.
It is expected that this strike could last four months, partly due to the discontent of the profession and also due to the position of the studios, channels and platforms, which are in a process of restructuring and seeking profits in the world of streaming. And what is the industry’s nightmare? The directors’ union, the DGA, and the actors’ union, the SAG, must also renew their agreements. What begins as a writers’ strike could turn into a macro-strike by the three Hollywood unions.