Hollywood Braces For a Strike

Without a deal by May 1, production of dozens of shows and movies may come to a standstill

- Thomas Buckley

On March 5, one week before the Academy Awards, Hollywood’s screenwriting elite gathered at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel near Beverly Hills for their own love fest: the 75th Writers Guild Awards. In what augured an enviable sweep at the Oscars, the absurdist, genre-bending film Everything Everywhere All at Once from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert won the night’s most coveted honor, best original screenplay.

Accepting that accolade, Kwan doled out thanks to an unusual recipient: his “picket captain,” a colleague overseeing preparations for a potential work stoppage by the writers behind virtually every American show, movie and streaming series. “If you don’t have a captain yet, go find one,” Kwan told the crowd in the hotel’s ballroom. “Let’s give ’em hell.”

The Writers Guild of America, a union of 25,000 film, television and radio writers, will start negotiations on March 20 with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios. The WGA’s key complaint is that the rise of streaming services has led to a drastic reduction in the earnings of the folks who craft the scripts the studios need. Before streaming, writers could count on hefty residual payments—recurring royalties—from films and TV episodes rerunning on cable. A scribe’s work is now judged by metrics such as the number of clicks a film or show gets, or whether it breaks into the top 10, and streamers in many cases have gotten away with paying writers a flat fee with minimal bonuses for superior performance— typically far less than what they stand to receive from a big theatrical hit.