The first time I talked to Julia Fontana, she hadn’t turned thirty but she was already in Hollywood. He had been a script analyst for Lionsgate, which produced Mad Men and Weeds, had worked at the production company of Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) and used the phrase “I’m from Barcelona” to capture the attention of his interlocutors in his professional meetings in Los Angeles. . Three years later, she was already in a scriptwriters room: that of Lucifer, the series where the devil himself helped the police solve crimes.
He had ended up there after participating in a FOX young talent workshop. “We are in a meeting room surrounded by blackboards where we write down the ideas that we like,†he revealed about his daily dynamics as a screenwriter. He was a staff writer, which was the equivalent of a private, but even so he had the honor of writing two episodes per season. The mechanics of the job was based on exchanging ideas, going home with the other writers’ notes, writing his chapter and then receiving new instructions from both the production company and the studio, until he attended the filming of that material in Vancouver.
This model of making television, however, is in danger of extinction. This was denounced by the writers’ union in the United States, the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike for six weeks and with no plans to return to the keyboard to write episodes of series in production. Or to attend the filming to improve what doesn’t work. Or to finish developing those series that the platforms have for the coming months.
This time Fontana, who remains in demand in Hollywood (this year he has signed three scripts for Fire Country on CBS, one of the most watched series of the season on free-to-air television), spoke to La Vanguardia as a striker to help to understand why the future of audiovisuals depends on this claim or what are the battered mini-rooms so often mentioned by American scriptwriters in recent weeks.
How are your days now that Hollywood is stopped?
I help the union. I participate in informative pickets in front of the studios in shifts of about four hours a day. There are those who stop productions but these pickets are usually organized at dawn. I have three small children and at dawn I am not there to stop trucks because I have to prepare breakfast. I also dedicate time to writing my own projects so that they are ready for when the strike ends and I am moving a couple of projects in Spain. As these would be covered by the Spanish union, they do not conflict with the strike.
Can you develop from home? Won’t the union get mad?
You are authorized to write. Anything that does not mean being in negotiations with studios or production companies against whom we are on strike, or writing for them, is allowed. If I want to write a play, a pilot or create a series, I can do it. What I can’t do is go and sell it, I can’t even send a message to my representatives: I’ve cut off all communication with them.
The other day you criticized the mini-rooms for writers on Twitter after having participated in one of Apple. What are the so-called mini-rooms and why are they so hated?
A mini-room is a room for the writers to meet before the show is greenlit. The project is not yet in production. What does this mean? That there is no time limit. For example, if I work for Fire Country, I am clear about the deadlines: I know what date I am writing for, when it will be shot, with which actors, where and with what budgetary conditions. On the other hand, in a mini-room everything is ethereal, theoretical, nothing is tangible. You can be going around and around the same idea and the platform gives you notes that are often contradictory because they want to try now this and now that. And at the end of the day, these managers judge the series they want or stop wanting based on an unfinished document developed in less time than it should.
Explain yourself.
A script is not a finished work: it is a working document. It’s like an architectural blueprint. Imagine choosing your house off plan without knowing what materials will be used or even where it will be located. In the mini-rooms you create a creative vacuum that is very frustrating, even executives find it disconcerting and in 90% of cases the series is not produced.
I understand that the hatred of mini-rooms also has to do with working and economic conditions.
Yes. You’re paid union minimums for each week of mini-room work, and if the show doesn’t get the green light, you have absolutely nothing to prove that work. Then there is an abusive practice: when the mini-room ends, they ask you to write a script without receiving your minimum weekly salary, which goes against the norms established by our agreement on what a scriptwriters room should be. It must also be taken into account that there is no time limit. You turn in an episode and eight months later they may still be asking you for rewrites for the same price.
How are these scripts paid for?
The studios pay you the script-fee, which is what you charge for the script. But these rates had been calculated with a formula that contemplated that, in addition to the price for the script, you received a weekly salary as a scriptwriter for the production. And, to top it off, the platforms that make use of these mini-rooms usually pay the minimum set by the agreement for that script-fee.
The precariousness of the sector, therefore, involves eliminating one of the income inputs from the creative process with the creation of these mini-rooms that replace the usual scriptwriters’ rooms.
On Lucifer, for example, each week I charged my weekly rate on top of the price of the script. As you promote yourself, this fee increases: you have more experience, you are more valuable to the study. Due to the precariousness of streaming platforms, if before there were a third of the scriptwriters who worked for the minimums set by the agreement, now they are half. Before you could think that that third were the screenwriters who were starting, but half of the professionals are not starting. The normal thing should be to charge the minimum during the first two years and then already negotiate the rate.
They make you self-employed, which for many companies is synonymous with paying the worker less for the same work.
They are trying to make us self-employed with the aggravating circumstance that we do not own what we do. Do you want me to be autonomous? Fantastic. So I risk my time and my resources but in return I later have a greater reward. What cannot be is that by agreement I surrender my copyright (a right that in Europe is inalienable and non-transferable) and does not have a consideration. They pay me and I automatically lose all ability to exploit my intellectual property beyond giving it to the studio. Therefore, if I am not the owner of what I write, I must collect and work according to my status as a salaried employee.
With the platforms, the performance after the fact of the contents has changed. Before, a scriptwriter charged for each replacement of one of his episodes. With the Netflix model, this no longer happens.
In the 2007 strike it was understood that the digital issue was the future and should be covered. The studios claimed that it was an undiscovered business model, that they didn’t know how they would monetize it, but they are clearly monetizing it, and it’s a good thing we covered it. The problem is that the benefits derived from streaming are very residual. If I write for Fire Country, which is from the CBS channel, and they sell and resell the series to international channels, I get paid. Every time the episode airs, I get paid again. But Netflix pays you a flat rate and has Lucifer in all territories of the world in perpetuity or until they want to remove it. There is not even a difference between writing for The Bridgertons or for a series that nobody watches. Our success must be financially rewarded. It’s common sense.
We are adding. They take away your weekly salary for working on a production, you charge the minimum possible for the script and then you don’t have the subsequent financial return. But I understand that the labor ladder has also been broken. Are the new scriptwriters no longer able to train?
It is the nature of the mini-rooms. Let’s give an example. They hire you to participate in a mini-room to develop a series with other writers. Netflix gives the green light to the project after the ten weeks for which they hired you. So the showrunner is left alone in the face of danger with the scripts written by the rest of the writers, who send them to him, and having to rewrite all this material with the Netflix notes. The platform signs up the directors, assigns a budget, decides where to shoot, and the showrunner is the only one who stays there as a scriptwriter. He doesn’t get the opportunity to train less experienced screenwriters so they can go through the entire pre-production, production, and post-production process. Those who are starting do not have the opportunity that I had to learn the trade. In fact, we are already running into a shortage of qualified showrunners.
When you were a writer on Lucifer and we talked, I got the impression that you were learning and that being in the writers’ room was important to prosper.
In Lucifer I was in the writers room, in the notes with the studio and with the network, in the preparation of the episodes, they sent me to Vancouver to produce my episodes on the shooting set. There are things that can only be learned through experience.
Are the scriptwriters essential in filming?
Think of Succession, which everyone now loves. There were always two or three writers on the set. How do you get that density of jokes? Well, because the writers are there, because they can work with the actor to give him more lines, because they see the location with their own eyes and can adapt the text to that location. The script, as I said, is a guiding working document: you then get there and you must contribute to making it realistic.
And what about artificial intelligence? Is it really restless among the writers?
Yes. It is an issue that came up at the last moment when we called the strike, but we decided that we had to protect ourselves. When the subject was brought up in the negotiation, the studios responded that they did not want to limit a technology that could be useful to them in the future. His proposal was to convene annual meetings to discuss how AI is evolving. We said that we wanted to address this issue now. We want the agreement to make it clear that every project must have a scriptwriter and that this scriptwriter must be a human person. It sounds absurd to have to clarify this, I know. We also want to prohibit that our work can be used as a training mechanism for these artificial intelligences and we refuse to be asked to rewrite material generated by an AI.
It would be the umpteenth way to pay less because you would not even be the authors of the idea…
Exact.
When negotiating, I imagine that the studies argue that all streaming services except Netflix give losses, that this is not the time to ask for improvements or give in…
Well than executives, the David Zaslavs of life [the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery] earn 60, 130 or 190 million for their work as managers. There is money, or that is what our employers have been telling Wall Street. They tell their investors that they project million-dollar profits; to us, who have nothing to pay us with. They were? If the business model doesn’t work out for you, I totally understand. If Amazon doesn’t want to produce movies and series, don’t do it. If our minimum rates seem bad to you, if our working conditions seem unaffordable, don’t dedicate yourself to this. If they do, they have to do it without exploiting the workers.
Are you afraid that the series from the catalogs will disappear? It is ironic that it is such controversial behavior on the part of the platforms when the series had always been sporadic: either you were in front of the television to see the episode or you had missed it.
I have read a proposal to negotiate that states that, if a platform removes a series from its catalogue, those rights can be reverted to the original studio or platform, so that they can exploit it in some way. It’s dizzying, but actually it seems totally logical to me. It seems good to me to return to a model in which there is less content because this exponential and infinite growth is unsustainable. The hours in the day are limited, so it is inevitable that there will be some sort of sieve over the years: it is time to rationalize the content catalogues. And it’s time to reward success.
For years it has been impossible to take the pulse of fiction…
What I like most about fiction is that it helps you connect with people. If we are all watching the same series and have the same referents, we can talk about it. But what used to be an infallible way to start a conversation with a person, now no longer works: you see 18 series that your interlocutor does not see and your interlocutor sees 15 series that you do not see. It’s good that everyone can find their ideal series but it also generates fragmentation. I miss the potential of fiction to leave a mark on the collective imagination.
Have we missed something, Julia?
I just want to say that this strike is an existential battle. If we lose this battle, we have lost the war. The screenwriting profession will not be accessible to anyone who is not extremely wealthy and extremely privileged. We need a sustainable profession, one that can embrace anyone with talent and something to tell, and who can make a living from it. Right now there are very good writers turning down jobs because it doesn’t pay off. They prefer to work as accountants than scriptwriters due to the precariousness of the sector. Now they pay you three weeks of work for a mini-room and you don’t know when the next one will be. And we also fight for our ancestors: all we have is thanks to their sacrifices and their strikes. Without them we would have no residual benefits, no minimum prices, no pension, and no good medical coverage.
