Late-Night Hosts Deliver Free Waffles, Mindy Kaling, Glen Mazzara Picket
Day four of the writers strike and there’s no sign of slowing down for the writers marching in Hollywood.
Outside Paramount, the likes of Mindy Kaling, Jonathan Nolan and Rachel Bloom were on the picket lines with the casts of NCIS and Ordinary Joe expected as well.
Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of Netflix’s Bojack Horseman, was dancing on the streets as the first week of striking comes to an end. I think the week’s been going great? I mean, we’d all rather be working. We all want a fair contract. It’s not a vacation… but we’re all really energized by seeing each other and believe in this fight and we’re all down to keep doing it for as long as it takes.”
One Chicago co-creator Derek Haas and Chicago PD star Jesse Lee Soffer were also outside the studio on Melrose. Lee Soffer told Deadline, “I’m striking in solidarity because every role I’ve ever played was written by a writer and there wouldn’t be a Jay Halstead without a Derek Haas.”
At Netflix, there was chicken and waffles in the air as the late-night hosts supplied free lunch to the writers. Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver clubbed together to pay for a free food truck that’s been driving around the area. These shows – The Late Show, The Tonight Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night and Last Week Tonight were some of the first shows to shut down.
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There was also a Mariachi band performing to celebrate Cinco De Mayo.
Glen Mazzara, who was showrunner of The Walking Dead, said that there’s no sign of the writers slowing down in the coming weeks. “I was part of the strike in 2007. People did not give up and the writers are unified more unified now than ever before. They will be out here on the picket lines. This is important not only to the writers now but for the writers coming after us,” he told Deadline.
Mazzara’s latest creation is AMC series Beacon 23, which has finished filming and is going through post-production right now. He told Deadline that even though he’s a producer on the show, he’s stopped working on it in solidarity. “I’m no longer getting my weekly I probably could have said, ‘I’m still going to produce’. No, I support the guild. I’m not producing. I’m not in contact with the folks working on my show. I would ask all show runners to stop working on their shows completely. We want the strike to be as painful for the companies as possible so that it can be as short as possible so we can get back to work.”
WHY I’M STRIKING: “These companies make billions of dollars in profits and they are not fairly sharing…” – Glen Mazzara, writer, showrunner, outside Netflix in LA today #WritersStrike pic.twitter.com/xzdgIj5ZuS — Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) May 5, 2023
New Girl and Woke star Lamorne Morris added, “I don’t exist without writers.”
Elsewhere, J.J. Abrams was picketing outside of Fox, stars and exec producers of Ted Lasso Jason Sudekis and Brendan Hunt were outside their studio Warner Bros. Discovery.
Over at NBCUniversal, there was a search on to find the mystery studio PA who showered writers with solidarity and free lunch.
Travis Helwig, a writer on Adam Ruins Everything and creator of scripted podcast series Edith!, which stars Rosamund Pike, revealed in a delightful social media post that a PA was sent out by their bosses at the studio to grab lunch and attempted to return via the neutral gate but was refused entry because they didn’t have the correct badge for that gate. Instead, they got talking to some of the writers after refusing to cross the picket line and handed out lunch.
“This kid, working as a PA, the shittiest fucking job in Hollywood, decided he is going to put his own livelihood on the line to not cross a picket line. He is going to get in trouble with his bosses and he knows it. But still, he decided he needed to honor our picket. And then, because he knew he wouldn’t be giving them the food they ordered, he offered to give the lunches to the picket line,” wrote Helwig on Twitter. “I fucking love that PA and his solidarity with us is something I will remember for the rest of my life. Truly.”
Source: Deadline
