“I’m a TV Writer on Food Stamps”

“While writers like me struggle to make ends meet, Hollywood studios get rich off the content we create.”

Part of an going daily series on the Writers Guild of America strike. This is a first person essay by Jeanie Bergen. It appeared in The Cut.

I was working as a cater waiter when I sold my first TV show. One evening, while working a party, I ran into someone I knew in college. I was serving weed-infused chocolate-covered strawberries to rich white men while a celebrity tooted on a harmonica in the background. I offered my acquaintance a napkin and asked what he had been up to. He informed me he’d just developed a pharmaceutical drug. He returned the question in kind and I shared my news. He smiled, surely thinking I was joking. I wasn’t.

The original pilot was based on my experience becoming guardian and caregiver to my sibling, who is a person with disabilities, after our parents died. It had been years in the making. After working as a local-news journalist, I came to Hollywood and started over. I took out loans to attend a graduate screenwriting program, worked for a studio, and landed a gig as a writers’ assistant, where I met the writer who generously agreed to supervise my pilot. We had sold the pilot in May, but I wasn’t paid until October of that year. Which is why I’d happily kept donning my apron and spilling Champagne on people at weddings.

The pilot never got picked up for production. As a mid-level TV writer, I’m now used to this feeling of taking one step forward in my career only to then take two steps backward. I’m currently walking two dogs for $30 per day on a route that takes me through Hollywood and past a billboard for the hit comedy I most recently wrote on. Have I “made it,” I wonder? It doesn’t feel like it as I pry stray chicken wings from a dog’s mouth in an attempt to pay my bills.

Right now, the WGA is striking because sustainable writing careers in film and television are in danger of disappearing. There are two main ways you can make a living: you sell pilots or screenplays to studios, or you get staffed as a writer on someone else’s project. In traditional broadcast TV, writers could stay employed for most of the year, from the writers’ room through production. But streaming has changed the game. Lower- and mid-level writers are rarely paid through production now, meaning we do not get on-set experience or learn how to produce TV. Studios are also ordering shorter seasons and hiring fewer writers to work on them. It has become common for writers to work on just one season of television, for ten to 20 weeks per year, and be unemployed for the rest.

Industry revenues topped $220 billion last year, and yet somehow median weekly pay for writer-producers has fallen over the last decade of peak TV. Television writers are compensated on a weekly basis. The current WGA minimum for a staff writer position is about $5,000 per week, though some lower-budget streaming series are allowed to pay less. In theory, it sounds like a lot. But not if you’re only employed for ten weeks, and you pay your taxes, and you pay 25 percent of your wages to agents, managers, and lawyers — partly to negotiate more money and secure fair contracts. Factor in rent in one of the least affordable cities in the U.S. and eating three meals a day and you aren’t left with much.

In my first job for a streamer, I was one of three writers in the room tasked with writing 12 episodes. I was paid around the WGA minimum for “low budget New Media,” and in addition to having a smaller writers’ room, streamers pay less in residuals too. A residual is a payment for reuse of a writer’s work — anytime a show is repackaged, resold or rerun. Not that long ago, writers could live off residuals until their next job. I’ve only ever made $533.55 in residuals, none of it from streaming, even though the show has rotated through every major streamer.

This story is all too common among Hollywood writers. Meanwhile, there is enough money to go around and make for a more livable experience for writers. All it requires is less corporate greed and more common sense. Writers who do not need to wait tables or walk dogs will have more time to be creative.

You may read the rest of The Cut article here.

For the latest updates on the strike and news resources, go here.