THR Illustration / Adobe Stock
This is part of a series of open reports on Hollywood writers on strike at various stages of their careers.
I guess the AMPTP forgot the first lesson that privileged parents learn quickly: Don’t let the nanny down.
Carol Lombardini did just that, and now SAG-AFTRA is about to strike.
First, let’s rewind: the pavement was harder than ever. The heat, unbearable. numbers, thinning. The loneliest place on earth, the picket lines at Universal’s main gate – where the sidewalk literally ends. The focus was on Airpods and sunburns. (Some friendly restaurant was handing out lemonade. Bless them.) Even the family-friendly line at Disney felt a little like a chain gang.
I won’t lie, we knew it was going to be tough. But on the 72nd day our souls collapsed. The distant horizon of attack loomed long and wide. But then the AMPTP failed. Big time.
Possibly the dumbest executive in the business provided Deadline with the most egregious article in which they finally let the mask down and said the unspeakable: starve the writers. “It’s been agreed for months,” the anonymous source admitted. The studios want to break the WGA and delay doing so until the writers “lose their homes.”
“A cruel but necessary evil” to protect her inflated, unjustified boardroom pay. These are real quotes. Even Marie Antoinette flinched.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Rumors circulated on Twitter of a zoom the morning after, with screaming studio bosses pointing fingers at each other. Whichever half-witted idiot let this happen will soon be living thousands of miles from Los Angeles and likely printing 2-for-1 Blizzard pamphlets at the Dairy Queen in Bangor, Maine. This week’s fun new picket parlor game is to guess who was stupid enough to say the quiet part out loud.
But thank you, whoever you are. Because these quotes charged us. You’ve reminded every writer why we’re doing this. Why we can’t give up – and now you better believe there isn’t a single author who doubts that this is possibly the most important strike in the history of our craft and industry. Nothing unites so much as a great evil. Nothing makes heroes better than a relentless villain.
Then, in our darkest hour, amid the first signs of despair as the defenders of Helm’s Deep awaited the AMPTP’s promise of eradication, a horn sounded in the wilderness. And over the Hollywood Hills came the damned horsemen of Rohan!
Not Gandalf per se, but Sir Ian McKellen himself! And Meryl Streep. And Quinta Brunson. And Salma fucks Hayek.
The actors came to help their poor, sweaty writer friends. (You know who writes the jokes that make them look good.) Fumbling AMPTP tried to put SAG in another extension, but it backfired. Apparently Carol has no idea what it means to work on set. Because if she did, she would know that you never force an actor to say a line they don’t believe in. And there’s no way he’s being pressured into signing a deal selling his digital soul to a generative AI Baal.
Now it’s real. And now you, AMPTP, have set this industry on fire with your bad faith and intransigence. All you had to do was make a fair deal. All they had to do was codify the practices that have made this industry prosper. But instead you wanted to break us. Out of sheer greed, you dreamed of feeding us boring chatbots. (Although that’s a pipe dream instilled in you by big tech monopolists who are ruining every industry they enter and siphoning off the livelihoods of others for themselves so they can build apocalypse bunkers in which to thrive hide once they’ve finally and completely ruined the planet. The rest of us. Besides, I wouldn’t target Big AI just yet – it looks like the FTC might be after them.)
And not only that: we caught you in the act. Because every writer in the WGA will print this Deadline article and send it to the National Labor Review Board. You see, it is indeed a crime not to negotiate in good faith and to threaten employees about union activity. So while righteous anger tempts me to “cry havoc and let the dogs of war get away” – and while part of me wants to go all-in on Michael Keaton/Batman at this point – there’s a more circumspect approach here. Because we writers would love to make films again, get our jobs done, and create one of America’s most valuable international exports — as long as we get a fair deal that protects our future and the future of this industry. Since the studios can’t seem to grasp 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 that it has no intention of negotiating in good faith and would rather let Hollywood burn than engage in rational, mutually beneficial deals. If they’re not listening, maybe it’s time for the FTC to dismantle the vertically integrated media conglomerates pretending to be studios: that’s what we’ve been really debating on the picket lines. And while we’re talking, maybe they should disband Big Tech as well? Google, Amazon and Meta are de facto monopolies that manipulate markets and suppress competition. Also, the burgeoning AI lobby has already corrupted the Senate Copyright Subcommittee, as anyone who watched yesterday as Thom Tillis and Chris Coons snubbed artists knows. Because even though Silicon Valley could bounce checks off all the PACs this election cycle, you know what is NOT a winning policy? You just let Big Tech hand over all jobs to robots. That’s how countries collapse, and we like that.
sincerely,
The workers of Hollywood
PS: If you have time, could you also investigate why the studios fired all of their diversity managers?