Just hours after the union, which represents thousands of television and film writers, announced its strike, hundreds of its members occupied an entire block in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday.
Before an NBCUniversal event on Fifth Avenue, the writers gathered, chanting “No contract, no content” and holding up signs with slogans like “Pencils Down!!!”. and “Spoiler alert: We’re going to win.”
“These companies are absolutely destroying our industry,” Tony Kushner, the acclaimed playwright and screenwriter of films like “Lincoln” and “The Fabelmans,” said from the picket line, citing Hollywood studios.
It was a loud show of solidarity, echoed by pickets outside major Los Angeles studios. But the immediate fallout of the strike – which shattered 15 years of industrial peace in the entertainment industry and will bring much of Hollywood’s assembly line to a standstill – was felt most clearly in the world of late-night television, which immediately went dark.
On Tuesday afternoon, NBC issued a statement that the upcoming episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” would be an April repeat. Late Night With Seth Meyers has canceled a show that was supposed to feature an interview with actress Rachel Weisz and replaced it with a February rerun.
New episodes of late-night shows hosted by Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel have also been suspended. Saturday Night Live has canceled a new episode scheduled for this weekend with Pete Davidson as host. NBC said it would “rerun until further notice,” raising the possibility that the show won’t be able to end its 48th season with a finale.
How long late-night talk shows stay off the air is an open question. During the last strike in 2007, late-night shows began to come back after about two months, although their writers were still on picket lines. (This strike lasted 100 days.)
Mr. Kimmel, ABC’s late-night host, paid his staff out of pocket during that strike, and he said years later that he had to return to the air because he had nearly depleted his life savings.
David Letterman, who owned his CBS late-night show through his production company Worldwide Pants, made a deal with the Writers Guild of America that allowed his writers to get back on the show.
The other hosts – whose shows were owned by media companies – weren’t so lucky. Hosts like Mr. Kimmel and Conan O’Brien returned without their writers, valiantly trying to put their shows together without their standard monologues. Mr. O’Brien had to resort to time-wasting gimmicks such as turning his wedding ring on his desk while setting a timer.
Jay Leno, the host of “The Tonight Show,” infuriated WGA officials by writing his own monologue jokes. “A Jew, a Christian and a Muslim walk into a bar,” Mr. Leno said during his opening monologue, which lasted nearly 10 minutes. “The Jew says to the Muslim, look, I have no idea what they’re saying because there’s a writers’ strike.”
Late night hosts and their top producers have been conducting group calls over the past few weeks to coordinate a response in the event of a strike, according to a person who was briefed on the plans and spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation .
Contrary to the enmity of the so-called late-night wars of the 1990s, the hosts have made a concerted effort to show they are on friendly if still competitive terms. When James Corden said goodbye to “The Late Late Show” last week, there was a glued segment It starred Mr. Colbert, Mr. Fallon, Mr. Kimmel and Mr. Meyers all together.
Mr Meyers, the NBC 12:30 show host, alluded to the devastation of the recent strike in a segment late last week.
“It’s not just affecting the writers,” Mr Meyers said in the web-only video. “It affects all of the incredible non-writing staff on these shows.”
He added that he was a proud member of the WGA and that he firmly believed what the authors were asking was “not unreasonable.”
“If you don’t see me here next week, know that it’s something not to be taken lightly and I will miss you heartbrokenly too,” he said.
The strike would have to last a much longer period before viewers began to see the impact on scripted TV shows and films, as the production process for these can take months or more than a year. But the mere fact that many productions were suddenly halted was a blow to an industry already rocked by the pandemic and sweeping technological changes in recent years.
The biggest problem for the authors is the payment. They have said their pay has stagnated despite the rapid growth of television production over the past decade. The unions representing writers, the Eastern and Western branches of the Writers Guild of America, said: “The behavior of the companies has created a gig economy within a unionized workforce, and their steadfast stance in these negotiations has underscored their commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing”.
WGA leaders have called the moment “existential” and argued that “the survival of writing as a profession is at stake in this trial.”
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which is negotiating on behalf of Hollywood companies, said in a statement just before the strike was announced that its offer included “generous increases in writers’ remuneration.”
The main sticking points, according to the studios, are union proposals that would require companies to staff TV shows with a certain number of writers for a certain period of time, “whether necessary or not.”
Chris Keyser, chair of the WGA negotiating committee, said in an interview early Tuesday morning that “philosophically and practically we are very far apart”.
Over the past decade, a period often referred to as peak TV, the number of scripted television programs aired in the United States has increased dramatically. However, writers said their pay is stagnant.
In the network television era, a writer could get work on a show with 20+ episodes per season that would provide a steady living for a whole year. However, in the streaming era, episode orders have dropped to 8 or 12, and the average weekly salary for a writer-producer has fallen slightly, the WGA said.
“They make it impossible for younger writers to make a living,” said Mr. Kushner, the playwright and screenwriter. “Our wages have fallen since the last strike.”
The authors also want to fix the formula for final payments, which streaming has turned upside down. Years ago, writers could receive residual payments when a show was licensed – through syndication or through DVD sales. But global streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have cut off those distribution channels and instead pay a fixed balance.
For now, the creative energy of the writers will be exclusively devoted to their pickets. Outside of the NBCUniversal event, one writer held a sign that read, “Pay your writers or we spoil the ‘succession’.”
Brooks Barnes contributed reporting.