The Great Backfiring: Did This Move Just Add Weeks to the Strike?

The studios released their proposals into the wild. The writers are crying foul.

The Ankler staff writer Elaine Low has been doing a good job covering the WGA and SAF-AFTRA strike, both on The Ankler podcast and the Strikegeist newsletter. Low is out on the picket line seemingly every day and in my view presents the strikers’ perspective fairly.

Here is an excerpt from her latest Strikegeist newsletter:

On Tuesday night, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers released its package of proposals into the wild (read: to we members of the press), making public the details of an offer that had been murmured about for the last week and a half since Hollywood’s studios and the Writers Guild of America reignited negotiations amid an historic 100-plus day strike.

Nice for reporters to have, of course, so we don’t have to keep trying to suss out deal points from the rumor mill. But according to some, it wasn’t necessarily released just meant as a point of clarification.

The Los Angeles Times’ Meg James and Wendy Lee report that the tactic — which may even constitute a labor violation, according to one legal expert they spoke to — was meant to divide and conquer the writers:

People close to the studios who were not authorized to speak publicly acknowledged the decision to make deal points public was designed to circumvent WGA leadership to spur writer-producers and legions of workers who are struggling financially to begin to apply pressure to WGA’s leadership to accept a deal.

For what it’s worth, a source close to the studios tells me that the release was meant to demonstrate the breadth of the proposals — i.e. that the major studio players were, in fact, trying to meet the writers’ asks — and not to circumvent the negotiation process.

If that was the intent, boy, did it not translate well.

“It was an incredibly dumb move that totally backfired on them because it added new fuel to the fire of the whole membership,” says one showrunner, who prefers to remain anonymous amid the negotiations.

The WGA sent its 11,500-person membership an update three hours later — timing that implied it had not anticipated the studios and streamers making its offer public — with word that the negotiating committee had just met with Disney CEO Bob Iger, Universal’s Donna Langley, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav and AMPTP president and chief negotiator Carol Lombardini.

“But this wasn’t a meeting to make a deal,” read the letter. “This was a meeting to get us to cave, which is why, not 20 minutes after we left the meeting, the AMPTP released its summary of their proposals.”

The meeting consisted of “a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was,” added the guild.

I was on social media when 24 minutes after the end of their meeting with the WGA Negotiating Committee, the AMPTP released their counter-proposals via Deadline. The shit immediately hit the fan. Anti-AMPTP sentiment only got worse when three hours later, the WGA Negotiating Committee sent this email to Guild members:

I immediately tweeted that. The response was overwhelming. Here are just a few examples:

On and on the replies piled up throughout the night, morning, and into today. The AMPTP move, like so many PR efforts they’ve made in the last four months, did nothing but motivate striking writers. Here is an example:

I think the general impression of writers to the AMPTP’s latest stunt can be best summed up by this:

For the rest of the Strikegeist article, go here.

#WGAStrong

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

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