The writers’ union in the United States, the Writers Guild of America, called a strike on May 2. We already told the reasons and Julia Fontana, the Catalan screenwriter living in Los Angeles, explained them to us very clearly in an interview. And, despite the noise caused by the pickets and the stoppage of filming, there was a silence that was not overlooked: how screenwriters such as Shonda Rhimes (The Bridgertons) and Ryan Murphy (Dahmer), in exclusive agreements with Netflix valued at 100 and 300 million respectively, kept a low profile. This is over since Murphy, who has three productions running, has brought down one of the leaders of the strike.
As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, it all started when Warren Leight, former showrunner of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and who held the position of captain of the East Coast strike, explained on Twitter that the workers of the Ryan Murphy series they feared they would be blacklisted if they did not cross the pickets. It should be remembered that if the technicians and team members of a series come across a picket of writers, they have the right not to cross it. Murphy, after reading this accusation, said that it did not make any sense and that it was “categorically false”.
The thing is, after the WGA received a letter from Murphy’s legal representatives, Leight publicly apologized for the “baseless” rumors he had spread and resigned from his role in the screenwriting movement. Of course, the forced decision did not excite the members of the union who are of the opinion that it is time to talk about Ryan Murphy and what happens with his productions.
The issue is as follows: on the east coast of the United States there are currently only four fictions that are still in production. Three, curiously, are by Ryan Murphy: American Horror Story, American Horror Stories and American Sports Story, which continue filming. So, while there are shoots that have had to stop because the actors or technicians refused to cross pickets, others that have run out of scripts to shoot and others that directly prefer not to record scenes without the possibility of touching a word of the text (because right now it is forbidden to touch anything from the scripts), Murphy’s series work normally.
Murphy, for the record, has an alibi to be on these shoots: he has the right to exercise his role as director and producer. If he doesn’t rewrite a single word, he can lead the shoots. “He follows the letter of the law,” they explained from the WGA, and “he is filming scripts that had been finished before the strike began.” At least, this is Murphy’s version of events, and as suspicious as he is, you can’t “condemn someone with a guess.”
Does this mean that Hollywood scriptwriters won’t be wary if you’re breaking the strike rules? Even if it were true that he follows the guidelines of his professional colleagues, his activity and the alleged pressures on the members of his production team are turning him into one of the enemies of the trade: the union would benefit from having the support of the members who profit the most.
However, Ryan Murphy currently has other goals in mind that are related to his way of making a personal profit: he is in talks to sign exclusively for Disney. His contract with Netflix for which he has received 300 million ends this 2023. He will do so after creating hits like Dahmer or Vigilante and more failed projects like The Politician, Ratched and Hollywood that led to questions about whether they justified his astronomical contract and after betraying the content platform.
In fact, he caused controversy by betraying Netflix by taking advantage of the fine print in his contract that allowed him to work on non-Netflix projects as long as they belonged to franchises he was involved with prior to signing. So, while getting paid from Netflix, he announced the resurrection of Feud and the creation of American Sports Story and American Love Story for Disney.
