The Hollywood Reporter
This is part of a series of frank accounts of the strike from Hollywood writers at different levels in their careers.
I guess the AMPTP forgot the first lesson privileged parents quickly learn: Do not short-change The Nanny.
Carol Lombardini did just that, and now SAG-AFTRA will strike.
First, let’s rewind: The pavement was as hard as it’s ever been. The heat, unbearable. Numbers, thinning. The loneliest place on earth, the picket line by Universal’s Main Gate — where the sidewalk literally fucking ends. Paramount was all airpods and sunburns. (Some gracious restaurant handed out lemonade. God bless them.) Even the family-friendly line at Disney felt a little like a chain gang.
Not gonna lie, we knew it would be hard. But by day 72 our souls were cracking. The distant horizon of the strike loomed long and large. But then the AMPTP fucked up. Big time.
Quite possibly the stupidest exec in the business fed Deadline the most monstrous article, in which they finally let the mask slip and said the unsayable: Let the writers starve. “It’s been agreed for months,” the anonymous source confessed. The studios want to break the WGA, drag this out until the writers are “losing their homes.”
“A cruel but necessary evil” to protect their bloated, unjustified C-suite compensation. Those are real quotes. Even Marie Antoinette winced.
Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. Writer Twitter lit up with rumors of a morning-after Zoom where screaming studio heads pointed fingers at each other. Whatever moronic flack allowed that to happen will soon be living thousands of miles from Los Angeles, probably printing up flyers offering 2-for-1 Blizzards at the Bangor, Maine Dairy Queen. The fun, new parlor game on the picket lines this week is guessing who was dumb enough to say the quiet part out loud.
But thank you, whoever you are. Because those quotes turbocharged us. They reminded every writer why we’re doing this. Why we can’t give up — and now, you better believe there is not a single writer who doubts this is possibly the most important strike in the history of our craft and our industry. Nothing unifies like a Big Bad. Nothing makes heroes like an unrelenting villain.
Then, in our darkest hour, amid the first signs of desperation, as the defenders of Helm’s Deep dug in awaiting the AMPTP’s promise of extirpation, a horn sounded out in the wilderness. And over the Hollywood Hills came the freaking Riders of Rohan!
Not Gandalf per se, but Sir Ian McKellen himself! And Meryl Streep. And Quinta Brunson. And Salma Fucking Hayek.
The actors came to give their poor, sweaty writer friends a hand. (They know who writes the quips that make them look good.) The fumbling AMPTP tried to gaslight SAG into another extension and it backfired in their faces. Clearly, Carol has no idea what it means to work on set. Because if she did, she’d know you never force an actor to say a line they don’t believe in. And you definitely don’t bully them into signing a deal that sells their digital soul to a Generative AI Ba’al.
Now it’s real. And now you, AMPTP, through your bad faith and intransigence, have set this industry on fire. All you had to do was make a fair deal. All you had to do was codify the practices that have made this industry a success. But instead, you wanted to break us. Out of pure greed, you fantasized about feeding us to bland, boring chatbots. (Even though that’s a pipe dream fed to you by Big Tech monopolists who ruin every industry they enter, siphoning off the livelihoods of others for themselves so they can build Apocalypse Bunkers to hide in once they’ve finally and fully ruined the planet for the rest of us. Besides, I wouldn’t throw your hat in with Big AI just yet — looks like the FTC might be coming for them.)
Not only that: We caught you red-handed. Because every writer in the WGA will be printing that Deadline article and mailing it to the National Labor Review Board. You see, not bargaining in good faith and threatening employees for union activity is actually a crime. So while the righteous anger tempts me to “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” — and even though part of me wants to go all Michael Keaton/Batman in this moment — there’s a more prudent course of action here. Because we writers would like to go back to making movies, doing our jobs, creating one of America’s most internationally valued exports — so long as we get a fair deal that protects our future and the future of this industry. Since the studios seem incapable of grasping how existential this is for us, I have another solution:
Dear President Biden,
It’s time for the federal government to step in. The AMPTP has revealed it has no intention of bargaining in good faith and would rather let Hollywood burn than engage in rational, mutually beneficial deal-making. If they won’t listen, maybe it’s time for the FTC to break up the vertically integrated media conglomerates that pretend to be studios: that’s what we’ve really been debating on the picket lines. And while we’re talking, maybe they should break up Big Tech, too? Google, Amazon and Meta are de facto monopolies that manipulate markets and crush competition. Also, the nascent AI lobby has already corrupted the Senate Subcommittee on Copyright, as anyone knows who watched Thom Tillis and Chris Coons throw artists under the bus yesterday. Because, even though Silicon Valley may cut everyone’s PACs tons of checks this election cycle, you know what’s NOT a winning political strategy? Just letting Big Tech give everyone’s jobs to robots. That’s how countries collapse, and we like this one.
Sincerely,
The Workers of Hollywood
P.S. If you have time, can you also investigate why the studios have dropped all their diversity execs?
Source: Hollywood Reporter
