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labor strife on lankershim

Picketing Princes,

The Writers Guild of America has struck. Who knew that the scruffier half of my bachelor party had it in them? Or that Ryan Murphy would get to declare himself “the new-new Caesar Chavez?” (OK I made that up.)

I’m writing because I want to connect with you all, not because I have much to offer – if I ever do. So there’s no big hot take here, just a whole bunch of thoughts about the strike for you to refute…

--I’m having COVID déjà vu. Yes, we were warned, but now that it’s here… jeeeesus. I feel like I’m living under new conditions, with no sense what my working life will look like.  

--It’s also a little like COVID in that it feels potentially endless and fucking existential. Or at least it does to me. And I’m not even on strike!

--One more COVID similarity: if the strike is long, class privilege will become glaring.

--I’m reminded of Charlie Kaufman’s speech at the WGA Awards: “They can’t do anything of value without us.”

--In retrospect, the guild should’ve struck immediately the first time Reed Hastings said “content.”

--The streamers will settle the moment Wall Street gets nervous, because their top execs’ compensations are essentially just functions of their stocks’ prices. The problem is, we have no idea when, if ever, entertainment companies’ stocks would meaningfully drop. Wall Street is an irrational actor, or, perhaps more generously, a hive of heat chasers, not unlike a talent agency at an endless festival.

--If the guild could convince just a few Wall Street analysts that the streamers were vulnerable here, the guild would get a killer deal stat. Y’all should start a hyper-targeted influence campaign / psy-op for the media stock analysts… Max is here to consult…

--In the short term, producers are more financially-aligned with the studios, because producers only make money when cameras roll. In the long-term, producers want success-based residuals in streaming too… and producers don’t have a guild, or really any leverage over the streamers. So, as always, producers are entirely indebted to writers. Thank you.

--Am I the only one who cringes when the super wealthy writer-producers get real mad? The strike will be hard for the writers who are already most vulnerable, so the guild should center their voices. Those writers are persuasive to me. But it’s writer-producers who everybody knows are super wealthy who have the megaphone. They are often seeming… not disingenuous, but more like… intellectually-engaged? Perhaps excited to play the role of the little guys?

--I don’t think the guild has really landed on a killer way of communicating their wide range of demands. One of their lines -- “The studios are trying to turn writing from a profession to a gig” -- feels good-not-great to me. I don’t know why it doesn’t click. Hollywood writers aren’t supposed to be salarymen. Since the collapse of the old studio system, screenwriting has always been gig-to-gig – albeit vastly more dignified and more fairly-compensated than it feels today.

--I have said to every writer who has asked me for years now that staffing-as-a-career is dead. I hope the strike can reverse that, somehow. But my sense of the reality is: Unless you are the sort of social animal who can talk your way into getting studio feature assignments despite being a shitty writer, you need to come up with commercial ideas on your own to have a successful career out here. Sure, you can bounce from show-to-show for a few years, but I don’t see that being sustainable for lots of people who aren’t also demonstrating their solo voices too.

--The rules for writer conduct are stricter than I had anticipated. NO GENERALS ALLOWED! I imagine that writers’ adherence to those rules will be a little like how Los Angeles dealt with COVID lockdowns. Different bubbles with different norms will emerge.

--The guild’s demand that studios hire a minimum number of writers per show isn’t sitting right with me. Trust me, I want there to be as many jobs as possible for writers, and I love the idea of my writer friends getting chill jobs too, but I’m struggling with this one. The guild’s leverage is in the incredible value of writers’ work. The streamers can’t make the sorts of shows that actually attract subscribers without writers. Their work should be very highly paid. But the guild is proposing the creation of jobs – lots of jobs – that may not be necessary. If Mike White wants to write The White Lotus all by himself, it just feels ridiculous to me to have a room. Long-term, does the guild want writers to have jobs that devalue the profession?

--Part of my discomfort with this proposal comes out of my experience of reading samples for years and years from writers who’ve staffed on well-regarded shows. No matter how fancy a writers’ staffing resume may be, the odds are pretty good that their solo work will disappoint – or at least disappoint me. I’m sure some of those writers improved their shows. But anybody who has been in the vicinity of a big writers room knows that there’s dead weight. And that’s OK. I have been dead weight in certain workplaces too. It shouldn’t be cause for losing your health insurance! But an institutional requirement that creates dead weight strikes me as beneath the profession and bad for its bargaining leverage long-term.

--It isn’t just the streamers’ greed that has killed the writers room. It’s also a creative thing, with no one to blame. Series look more like movies and are often made more like movies too. Procedurals and sit coms, which often require yuge staffs, are still popular. But there are so many other types of series – limited series dramas, voice-y comedies -- that tend not to require yuge staffs.  

--Kaufman, again: “They can’t create anything of value without us.” …Or can they?! If you had told me six months ago that you thought AI could ever write an episode of TV that would be watchable, I would’ve told you to “Go back to Palo Alto!” But now? I have no idea. I’m of two minds. On the one hand, writing is fucking impossible, and AI today is zero threat. Its output is always an average of the data its trained on, and as such, it’s no surprise that AI-generated text has a thin veneer of grammatical correctness on top of… it isn’t even dreck. It’s nonsense. But AI is accelerating, compounding its power at a rate I can’t track anymore. Now I assume AI will replace readers (who write script coverage), paralegals, and many VFX artists. I don’t think AI will ever replace Charlie Kaufman. But by this time next year, could AI be uncomfortably helpful in, say, proposing storylines for the sorts of shows of that typically have had big writers rooms, like procedurals and sitcoms? Guild proposals be damned, I assume that every beat sheet of certain legal procedural series has already been fed into GPT-4. And to be clear, it’s no threat now. But what is GPT-6 going to be able to do with those templates and all the prior knowledge about the characters? Or what about GPT-16? I don’t think AI is ever going to write The Verdict, but I can foresee AI proposing premises and plot twists, like a kind of a left-brained, frequently off-base, but eagerly encyclopedic and useful writers’ assistant.

--Big picture: Streaming devalues art and artists, and that’s why the writers had to strike. In the pre-stream era, theatrical & linear treated movies & shows like a la carte menu items, wherein each project had a clear economic value i.e. you knew how much money the movie made. A streamer is a sweaty buffet that just serves lots of crap, all-you-can-eat, for a flat price. So streaming has obscured the economic value of individual project – it’s impossible to say what Squid Game was really worth to Netflix -- and in turn, the streamers don’t care as much about individual projects and so have tried saving money by mistreating writers, which in turn has only made their movies & shows worse.

--The guild and the studios are very far apart. The leadership of both sides seems unflinching. What would it take for a quick resolution? There’s an opportunity here for agents to be heroes. Agents can have difficult conversations with buyers that writers and even producers can’t. To level with the studio, backed by their three-letters, while also being trusted enough by the client to come back with the real-real. My experience is that agents get better as the dollar amounts go up. They actually do their jobs. And that’s what needs to happen here: Jeremy Zimmer or Bryan Lourd should be paying a staff of third-party labor lawyers to propose compromises that they can bring to both sides. They should be competing with each other to be the guy who pulls it off and gets credit. Because after the last big labor action – when the writers fired their agents in 2020 – the business rolled merrily along. Agents appeared useless. Perhaps this crisis will be their redemption.

Hollywood Forever Y’all,

Max