WGA and Studios To Restart Negotiations Amid Internal Struggles Among the Writers
WGA West member Kayla Westergard-Dobson speaking in support of unemployment insurance for striking workers in California at an Amazon picket line. Photo via @WGAWest on Twitter.
As we head into Month 4.5 of the WGA strike, cracks are starting to appear on both sides of the table. We’ve reported before on internal disagreements within the studios leading to executives from each of them reaching out to the writers’ guild in private to let them know they would like to settle and agree to most of their points, but now, public disputes within the guild are starting to come up as well. While Chris Keyser and his negotiating team try to put out the fires, they have also reached out to the studios to ask for talks to restart next week.
This is according to the AMPTP, who released a statement on Thursday (via The Hollywood Reporter):
“On Wednesday, September 13, the WGA reached out to the AMPTP and asked for a meeting to move negotiations forward. We have agreed and are working to schedule a meeting next week. Every member company of the AMPTP is committed and eager to reach a fair deal, and to working together with the WGA to end the strike.”
The timing is certainly interesting, as the guild reached out after setting a meeting on Friday with some of Hollywood’s top showrunners, including Sam Esmail, Noah Hawley, and Kenya Barris, who have expressed concerns that the WGA is not actually interested in putting an end to the strike. Of course, these are valid concerns, as four months into the strike, writers can’t afford a living and the guild is willing to die on hills that some of them aren’t even interested in, i.e., the minimum staffing for shows, which people like Craig Mazin may roll their eyes at when he has to hire people to write the second season of The Last of Us. The writers will also have to concede on other points, and streaming residuals might actually be one of them — do people actually want to know how few viewers their shows have?
There are two ways to look at this, and the truth is probably somewhere in between. On the one hand, the guild may have a new counter to the studios’ latest proposal, one that Ellen Stutzman, David A. Goodman, and Chris Keyser may have been working on since their last meeting with the AMPTP and perhaps even upgraded after informal conversations with executives from the other side of the table (it really looks at this point that Netflix is the big holdout — why would Sony Pictures want to sacrifice their fall schedule in favor of protecting someone else’s streaming data? Speaking of which, Disney has already started to share some of theirs.) It’s possible that they will disclose the details of this offer to the showrunners attending the meeting on Friday, and they will leak a positive response to bring more leverage to their side as they head into next week’s negotiations.
On the opposite side of that, though, there have already been reports of yelling competitions between showrunners and the guild’s leadership, which may not be resolved after the meeting on Friday. Members from those showrunners’ teams might even reach out to the studios through back channels, and Carol Lombardini’s (chief negotiator for the studios) staff may even leak the reactions to the press, to add leverage to the studios’ side.
And that’s not even the end of the situation, because this week two daytime talk shows restarted production without their writers — The Drew Barrymore Show and Real Time With Bill Maher have gone back in front of the cameras amid huge backlash from inside Hollywood, and even outside (Democratic New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even condemned both of them when talking to The Independent, per TheWrap: “I don’t support people who break picket lines.”) Of course, this makes for a very good headline, but is not enough to sign the checks for the staff members of both of these shows who can’t make rent because of a fight that isn’t even theirs. All below-the-line workers from Hollywood can empathize with that.
The point is, this is a big mess for everyone involved, and it’s unlikely there will even be any winners from this. But someone will have to break the cycle at some point, or the whole industry will crumble and all we’ll have to watch will be reality shows and Bill Maher.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
