The Writers Are Striking For The Future Of Entertainment

The Writers Guild of America is trying to save the film and TV industry from destroying itself.

An excellent article by Katharine Trendacosta on Defector.com. Some excerpts:

At the center of the Hollywood writers strike is this simple fact: Streaming is not meaningfully different from how people have always watched television and movies. You have some form of screen — a TV, laptop, tablet, whatever — and you choose something to watch. Though the specific mode of delivery has changed — the TV antenna became the cable box and then WiFi — and hard 22-minute time limits aside, the way people consume TV shows looks remarkably similar to how it has been for the past several decades.

This is why, for a lot of entertainment writers on strike, the future of writing to them looks like a guarantee of something they know works and believe should continue working. Their argument is: Why are we trying to change a system that has produced some of the greatest TV of our lifetimes?

The future of writing, as the studio bosses see it, is Uber.

Hollywood has what I like to call “Silicon Valley Fever,” where older industries look at the tech boom and want the same kinds of returns the major tech stocks do, despite the fact that they already make — and will make, well into the future — mind-boggling amounts of money. But why have one pile of mind-boggling amounts of money when you could have two? They look at tech and its business model of three labor abuses in a trenchcoat and think: Yeah, I want a piece of that. If only those pesky unions weren’t around. And so they pretend that anything on the internet is somehow a brand-new innovation, rather than simply a new delivery method for the same old services.

With so many tech companies, leadership thought they were disrupting the whole industry — and ended up reinventing a thing that already existed. Uber has invented the bus five times. WeWork reinvented the co-op. And, at the end of the day, Theranos was running tests on existing blood-work machines. Many studios, especially Netflix, would like you to believe that they have reinvented TV and movies, except the truth is that they just don’t want to pay writers as much money for their work anymore. It’s the only way they can continue to show growth in profit. One billionaire’s “disruption” is thousands of workers’ crushed livelihoods.

The strike is now in its fourth week after unionized film and TV writers voted overwhelmingly to strike following contract negotiations breaking down between their union, the Writers Guild of America, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, a long and fancy name for the industry group that represents many of the studios during collective bargaining. The strike has already shut down all the late-night programs as well as shows that otherwise would be in production, including Abbott Elementary and Stranger Things. It shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

“They want to try new things, which in some ways I have respect for. But on the other hand, it’s like the system exists because it works.” TV writer Angela Harvey, of Teen Wolf, and co-chair of the Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity, which advocates on behalf of historically excluded groups in the entertainment industry, said last year.

It’s a sentiment that has since been echoed by many striking writers. “They broke television. This is us fixing it,” one negotiating team member said. A board member summarized it as the WGA saving the studios “from themselves.”

The article details four stages of “Silicon Valley fever” and the end point is not a good one. If the only concern is growth and quarterly profits, how does that acknowledge the contribution of writers without whom the members of the AMPTP would have no “content” to deliver growth and profits? As the article’s writer states:

This is what happens when the only metric that matters is growth. The problem is there are only so many humans on the planet and so many hours in the day. Even if Netflix somehow created a dystopia where every single human was watching Netflix 24 hours a day, what then? Do they weep like Alexander, with no more worlds left to conquer? What exactly is the problem with making, as Disney did last year, $28 billion every year for decades? Why is $28 billion in 2022, $32 billion in 2023, and nothing in 2024 better?

Greed has run amok among the suits and this is their mascot even if they don’t recognize it.

Their greed and shortsightedness is on a path of self-destruction. Beyond fairness, what the WGA is fighting for is to save the film and TV industry.

To read the rest of the Defector article, go here.

Katharine Trendacosta writes about tech policy, the entertainment industry, pop culture, and where those things intersect. In her day job, she’s the Associate Director of Policy and Activism for the digital civil liberties nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In her spare time, she writes things like this.

Twitter: @k_trendacosta, @DefectorMedia.

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