WHY THE WGA STRIKE IS IMPORTANT TO YOU - THE AUDIENCE.

Long, long ago, in a Hollywood so far, far away that you can only see it in retrospect if you watch “The Player,” or “Adaptation,” (the one thing “The Player” got wrong was that, back then, when they killed a writer in Hollywood, they left the body walking around), being a screenwriter - whether for film or TV - was a pretty good gig. Writers got married, bought houses “south of the Boulevard” in the San Fernando Valley (i.e., in the hills south of Ventura Boulevard, which used to define the divide between the “dreamers” and “strivers” who lived north of the boulevard and those who had Achieved the Dream who lived in those nice hills to the south), had kids, sent them to good schools, and were able to retire on a nice income.

Just like Real People.

The studios that hired the writers were independent companies, run by people who actually liked movies and TV, and they hired large staffs of “development executives” who met every day with writers in the neverending search for new material. And when the writer they were meeting with used words like “new” or “original” or “a one-time-only story,” those words interested them. “Tell me more,” they would say.

Writers sat around thinking of story ideas for movies or TV shows that actually interested them; they pitched things they themselves wanted to see. And when a development executive heard a pitch that interested them, the writer who pitched it got paid a living wage to go write it.

That world is now more Gone With The Wind than the actual “Gone With The Wind” is.

The change didn’t happen overnight.

Like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises,” it happened very slowly, and then it happened quickly.

The current Hollywood writers strike has drawn international attention to the plight of TV and film writers in the streaming era.

This strike really is Existential.

And how it works out will affect you, the audience for what writers and everyone else here create.

Theoretically, ever since HBO started doing original prestige material with “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Deadwood” and the rest; since the arrival of “Mad Men” and “Justified” and the amazing “Breaking Bad,” the audience has been in a “Golden Age of TV” as studios and networks offered audiences an abundance of well-written, high-quality television shows.

The streamers came along - NetFlix, followed by Apple and Amazon, and then the studios and networks themselves - and offered an abundance of movies that would never be made nowadays for theatrical release. A lot of them were pretty good. It’s where the audience that used to go to the theaters every Friday night to see what was out there ended up.

But not everyone in the industry has equally reaped those rewards. This is particularly true for writers.

While there are certainly more writing jobs to go around, these jobs often pay less and place writers on short-order contracts that deny them the opportunity to seek other work in the time - which is increasingly extended - between seasons on the project they have been hired on.

The demand for more content, as more and more platforms compete for subscriptions, has trapped writers in what can be termed “digital feudalism.” I use that phrase because today’s version of capitalism increasingly looks like the transition from feudalism to capitalism in 16th-century England.

Beginning in the 16th century, the English Parliament passed what were called “enclosure acts.” These abolished the “common land” traditionally open to all in the manor’s village, defining it as private property that the government then reallocated to ownership by the landholding aristocracy (who all voted to do it as the Members of Parliament they were).

The peasants - the serfs - were then kicked off the land where they had lived and worked for generations. Many ended up heading to cities in order to find work. The ensuing oversupply of workers drove down wages, and many ex-serfs couldn’t find jobs or housing, becoming vagabonds. There was a well-known saying that “The man who stole a goose from the commons was transported to America, while the man who stole the commons from the goose was transported to Parliament.”

Out of this, the peasants lost the stability they had previously had in their everyday lives as they were thrust into a new economic system. Precariousness, debt and a lack of stability were the socio-economic result.

Precariousness, debt and lack of stability are once again the dominant themes of the digital economy.

We now have the “gig economy,” in which people can juggle two or three part-time roles to make ends meet. These jobs don’t offer full-time benefits, livable wages or job security. Whether it’s Uber, DoorDash, or Task Rabbit, these jobs are managed through digital platforms owned by powerful corporations that give the workers a pittance in exchange for their labor, while moving the responsibility for such things as liability insurance - which used to be a company expense - onto the workers.

It sounds strange, if we are indeed in the golden age of TV, to say that writers feeling the pinch of digital feudalism, but it’s true.

I’ve been around long enough now to have experienced all three of the strikes that changed things forever (I’m including the current one, which will change thing forever, one way or the other).

The 1988 strike was the first blow. Movies suddenly weren’t just being seen in theaters, and TV shows weren’t just watched in their network time slots. They were available as recordings that could be watched whenever. There was money in all those VHS tapes. The WGA struck to try and get some of that money for the writers who created the shows being sold on the tapes.

It was expected that the strike might last a month at the longest. It lasted eight months. Part of that came when Jeffrey Katzenberg - then a whiz kid at Disney - said that the studios should break the union. The union had to dig in and fight every point.

As the strike extended, the studios announced they would start producing the scripts they’d already developed. Those were the scripts writers pitched to the development executives and got hired to write first drafts of, that then went into what was known as “development hell.” It was the system that saw guild members living middle class lives. The executives discovered what most writers knew - most of the material wasn’t that good, and the stuff that was good needed more development - which couldn’t happen since the writers were on strike.

Out of the 1988 strike, that system died. It was still in the rules, but they were no longer followed. Shane Black wrote “Lethal Weapon” as a “spec” (i.e., “speculative” - written without a deal in place to do so) and the ensuing auction saw it bought for the unheard-of price of a million dollars and change. Thus was born the Screenwriter’s Lottery - the “spec script” boom. Nobody was getting paid to work on an idea they’d pitched. The deal was to present the finished package all wrapped up pretty, and a lucky few might win the Big Bucks. The truth was most writers had better odds of seeing money if they bought lottery tickets on Saturday afternoons at the local liquor store. A few made a lot of money; some made enough to keep going (I was in that crowd); many left the business, unable to make a living.

And unfortunately all those videocassettes that writers got a nickel on each one sold of the movie or TV show they wrote were soon replaced by DVDs, a technology no one had known existed in 1988.

The strike in 2007-08 went for 100 days. The major issue was getting payments from all those DVD sales.

Nobody watches DVDs now because that was followed by streaming platforms like Netflix, Apple, and Amazon, which brought the “golden age.” Starting in the 2010s, they began hiring more and more writers. To lure customers, the streamers needed quality content – otherwise, viewers wouldn’t continue paying the $8 to $15 monthly cost of a subscription. Showrunners from TV with good ideas got crazy money to make new shows for the streamers. Screenwriters whose ideas for movies they wanted to see had been pushed aside in favor of the superhero comic-book movies and sequels, got the chance to make those movies for the streamers.

The deal was they wouldn’t be getting residuals from having the work in theaters, or on DVDs, or on cable. There was a lump sum payment and streamers never let anyone know whether their work was successful or not. It would have been easy to come up with a system at the outset to pay the creators two or three cents per download, which would have paid people for their effort and talent. But the Tech Guys from Silicon Valley who created Netflix, Apple and Amazon didn’t work that way.

As the number of streamers have multiplied - NBCUniversal puts out Peacock, and Paramount does Paramount Plus and Warner Brothers Discovery turns HBO into HBO Max and soon just Max - the gold prospecting has slowed. The number of prestige TV shows seems to have hit a saturation point. We can all only watch so much, no matter how good it is.

The companies took a page from the gig economy playbook in ways that worked against writers’ livelihoods.

Contracts were short - no 22-episode seasons; first it was 12 episodes per “season” back in the days of “The Sopranos” then 10 for a miniseries like “Band of Brothers,” and now “Succession” and the rest only have 8 episodes per season.

And the pay is lower. Most showrunners are lucky to make twice-minimum scale.

The streaming format – more one-off miniseries rather than sitcoms that could run for 10 years - meant there was no more work for any lengthy period of time.

Furthermore, along with fewer episodes per season, streaming shows tend to have larger gaps between seasons, known as “short order.” An eight-episode season of a popular show that has a two-year gap between seasons leaves writers scrambling to figure out ways to pay the bills in between seasons - because they signed a “non-compete” agreement as part of the contract to write that show.

COVID-19 nearly killed everything. People were stuck at home binge-watching TV, but it became difficult to produce the new shows. There was a major backlog in TV production because of the difficulties shooting TV shows in studios while complying with COVID-19 health regulations.

The result was a major slowdown in TV production. At the height of the pandemic, studios closed to limit the number of people inside. With the slowdown of production, there wasn’t the demand for writers.

Writers who live in LA. - where my nice little house on Mount Washington back in the 80s and 90s when I was working regularly only cost $600/month and now goes for $2,500/month - were hard hit. I now live in a neighborhood that isn’t as “hip” as Mount Washington, but it’s a nice middle class place; and the rent for the house that’s the same size as the “nice little house” was, is a “bargain” - only $2,200/month! - thanks to the fact my landlady thinks it’s cool to have a produced/published writer as a tenant (and there aren’t any “cheaper neighborhoods” to move to now - the price here in Encino is the same as North Hollywood.)

Writers want to fix this by raising their minimum wage; they want writers for streaming platforms to receive the same royalties that theatrical film writers get.

They want to end the practice of mini rooms, where small groups of writers hash out scripts but often receive less compensation for a series that may not even get ordered.

This last- the “mini-roomes” - is where things will eventually affect you, the audience. The writers in “mini rooms” come in and write the scripts and they’re gone by the time anything ever goes into production.

Back when I was hired by John Sacret Young to work on the first season of “China Beach” because I was a Vietnam Veteran who could provide a “dose of reality” in the writer’s room, the writers were present through the production. The directors came and went; the non-regular cast actors - the “guest stars” - came and went. When these “day players” and “temp workers” came to the show to work, they needed backup, guidance and help to get up to speed on what was what of the ongoing story, and how their work would fit in that. The writers had all that information - they’d created it. That’s why in TV writers run things, unlike film where the writer and their work is at the mercy of the “auteur” director. They’re the story editors and the supervising producers and such. They started as the newbie who got to have input on story development, who was around and saw what everybody did, and who eventually over a few seasons learned to do it themselves; they became the supervising producers. And if they had a good idea, they could sell it to the network and become the showrunner of their own show. You can’t learn any of that in film and TV school, or reading books; it’s a hands-on process. Experience is the teacher.

And a beginning writer lucky enough to end up in a mini-room (increasingly unlikely) now has no chance now to learn all that. I took what I learned to Hope Street Productions and ran three shows. There’s no way to do that now. There’s no way to be David Milch (my candidate for Best TV Writer Ever) and start as a staff writer on “Hill Street Blues,” then move on to creating “NYPD Blue” and then to his crown jewel, “Deadwood.”

That’s going to affect you, the audience, because today’s showrunners aren’t immortal.

And there’s nobody getting a chance to come up through the ranks to become the new David Milch. Or Shondra Rhimes. Or Vince Gilligan. Or any of the others.

Another important key demand is to limit the use of artificial intelligence in television production.

Writers fear that studios will use AI to hire workers, select which shows to produce and, in the worst-case scenario, replace writers altogether. Interestingly, limits on AI have been the one point of contention that studios have been unwilling to even discuss.

It will be interesting to see whether the writers will be able to claw back some of the financial security that’s vanished across many industries, or if the larger economic forces that have powered the gig economy will work in studio executives’ favor.

When the WGA struck in 1988, they announced that the average guild member made $50,000 per year. All the money paid to writers, divided by all the members of the union. A more telling statistic was that at any given time, 85% of the membership qualified for a year of health insurance - it was a plan commonly described as “solid platinum”, and it was! - having been paid the equivalent of a 30 minute sitcom at Guild Minimum ($18,000 then) in the previous quarter.

$50,000 was a middle class income then. I made $50,000 that year from writing. I moved from an apartment in the Fairfax to my “nice little house” on Mount Washington and bought a brand new car (a Honda Accord). My girlfriend moved in with me and I told her she should go full-time at “making it” as the professional actor she aspired to be, because that income was enough to support two.

I remember a conversation I once had with one of the guild staff, and somehow in the conversation how I lived came up. That person said something I’ll never forget:, “I’m always surprised when I talk to a writer whose name I know because of their work, and I find out how modestly they live.”

In 2007, the next strike, it was announced that the average Guild member made $80,000/year. That was nearly 20 years later. By then $80,000 didn’t cover the lifestyle I have described above, and the amount just arithmetically hadn’t kept up with inflation. And the number of who was getting health insurance was down to 50%. And that was for a “platinum-plated” program.

I still “play the game.” COVID stopped the negotiations for sale of my book “The Frozen Chosen” as a 10-part miniseries on HBO.

I was just talking last week with my good friend, the young writer I know whose work when I first read it impressed me as much as mine impressed Billy Wilder 40 years ago, who I asked to collaborate with me on a screenplay adaptation of “Frozen Chosen.” I made more money last year from my non-fiction books than he did from his excellent screenwriting. And the health care plan I have with the VA after surviving that “year in hell” is a helluva lot better than the “platinum-painted” plan the guild has now. The one that only 35% of the membership qualifies for, having been paid $25,000 for a minimum-wage screenplay.

I can remember when I thought making $25,000 was great - and it was! - it was a middle class income. That was before most members of the guild today were born. It’s not a middle class income now.

Back in 1988, I argued against the strike because we had a good deal that was worth not risking its loss. I was right.

But I was wrong in thinking that was when the Goose Who Laid The Golden Eggs got killed.

The goose who lays the golden eggs is the person who walks into a small room and sits down in front of a blank screen and creates Something Out Of Nothing. I always laugh at myself, that the first time I had an opportunity to “go to Hollywood” I turned it down in the belief that everyone there was a magician, and I thought I was nowhere close to that. And then it turned out when I finally did that I joined the Guild of Sorcerers.

But if we can’t keep a roof over our heads and the utility bill paid to power the computer, you’re not going to be seeing much on that big screen TV in your living room.

It’s that simple, folks.

David Zaslav says the strike will end when the writers realize how much they “love writing” and come back to work. I hate to tell the $250 Million A Year Man that he’s wrong, but he is.

It turns out you can’t eat love.

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