Earlier this week, the Writers Guild of America officially launched an industry-wide strike in light of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ continued refusal to meet them on reasonable ground in their negotiations for a new collective contract.
The union has fought for a guaranteed number of on-the-job weeks for TV staffers, pay structures to compensate for the residual fees eliminated by streaming, and regulations to rein in the looming existential threat of artificial intelligence. The organization representing the studios and networks countered with a staunch refusal to curtail the amount of work that can legally be done for no money, and proposed a “day rate” for comedy writers that essentially turns the process of making TV into a form of freelance employment at-will. These groups must now play chicken for the soul of art in America, which directly hinges on the fundamental human right to do your job under financially livable conditions. The other path at this decisive fork leads to a clear dead end for moving pictures.
This crisis concerns the dynamics between management and labor, but as consumers, it’s our tendency to see the conflict in terms of what it will mean for us regular folks. Fortunately for those keen on playing armchair analyst, recent history supplies a clear precedent for the rocky times to come. The WGA last went on strike for 14 weeks beginning at the tail end of 2007, as the rapid expansion of new media and the online economy terraformed the landscape of movies and television. The stoppage had a cataclysmic effect on output as in-progress projects died on the vine, shows went haywire without the guidance of their writers, and films were rushed into, through, and out of production. One hopes that the AMPTP won’t allow matters to turn so dire again, but in the event that they do, we already have a notion of just how widespread the collateral damage could be.
The WGA also went on strike in 1988, during which time executives at Fox circumvented the lack of available writers by developing Cops, a compilation of unscripted vérité footage documenting the encounters of on-duty police officers; reality TV likewise exploded in 2008 as a quick and cheap way to generate content unencumbered by creative inspiration. The Apprentice had been on a steady season-by-season ratings decline come 2007, until NBC diverted its resources toward retooling the show as The Celebrity Apprentice and created a monster hit during the thick of the work freeze. (It’s one of many possible Point A’s that set us on the way toward the Point B of the phrase “Trump’s America”.) The spiking trend quickly cooled into the accepted wisdom that reality programming meant fast, easy, reliable paydays, and other networks followed suit. In the post-strike months, The Learning Channel – having debuted its original programming in 1993 with Great Books, a literature survey co-produced by Walter Cronkite – premiered Toddlers in Tiaras, Cake Boss, I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, 19 Kids and Counting, The Little Couple, and a distaff Cops clone called Police Women of Broward County.
Late-night programs live and die by their writers’ rooms, and their changing status conveyed the effects of the strike in real time. Ellen DeGeneres crossed the picket line to continue on with her show, excising the monologue and explaining that she couldn’t bring herself to lay off the hundred-plus employees who would be affected by a shutdown. Conan O’Brien took a different approach to looking out for his people: while paying their salaries out of his own pocket, he returned to the air with a statement expressing his solidarity with their cause, then held the show hostage with deliberately tedious footage meant to draw attention to how badly he needs his writers. Stupid, surreal and often hilarious in spite of themselves, segments from this odd limbo period saw O’Brien check in with the idle writers as they played the video game Rock Band, and challenge himself to beat his personal record for longest continuous spin of his wedding ring on his desk.
Fiction TV took it on the shins hardest during the strike, as the suits cut episode orders and outright canceled whichever shows they didn’t consider worth retaining. (Casualties of this slash-and-burn doctrine included the long-running sitcom Girlfriends, the modestly acclaimed dramedy Men in Trees, cult sci-fi series The 4400 and the New Orleans-set procedural K-Ville.) Soap operas attempted to forge ahead with non-union writing crews, and fans vehemently rejected the pale imitation of the genuine article. Fox pried control of Family Guy from creator Seth MacFarlane and completed three episodes without his approval. Tina Fey’s background at Saturday Night Live allowed her to take the truncated 30 Rock onstage for in-person performances at New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade. Many shows never recovered from the disruption to their narrative, Heroes being the favored example of a mythology that went off the rails after a strong freshman season. Pushing Daisies maintained a more consistent level of quality, but ABC’s capricious rulings cut the show short before it could connect with a wider audience.
Because the scripting of a movie represents a more finite, closed-off act than the ongoing interplay between writing and shooting for TV, the film sector fared somewhat better, though not without its fair share of disasters. Many would-be blockbusters found themselves racing against the clock to get something on paper before the strike went into effect, a situation that led to Michael Bay – by no means a man of letters – taking it upon himself to sculpt an outline for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen into a screenplay he could use. The James Bond picture Quantum of Solace, widely criticized upon release for its difficult-to-follow plot, also suffered from a lack of on-hand scribes that forced star Daniel Craig to take a crack at writing himself during shooting. George Miller had begun casting his superhero crossover Justice League: Mortal by 2008, but Warner Bros wanted to rework the concept, which the strike wouldn’t allow. The studio shut the production down instead, and closed a sliding-doors portal to a pop-cultural universe drastically different from our own.
This contentious chapter of history foretells a bleak road ahead, though the fight for fair wages is nowhere near as alarming as a future without it. If writers can’t earn a living from their craft, there will be no more writers. Businesspeople confident that ChatGPT can whip up the next Get Out or Mad Max: Fury Road will be disappointed to find that there’s no synthetic substitute for human thought, and as audiences increasingly wake up to this fact, the profit margins those C-suiters are so fond of will start moving in directions that don’t make them happy. Corporate greed, motivated by an untenable mandate from Wall Street to somehow sustain exponential growth forever, represents a suicide spiral for showbiz. Recognizing the worth of the professionals that give value to these networks and studios goes beyond dealmaking savvy, or even a moral imperative – it’s simply and objectively correct, the only feasible way forward for financiers, artists and viewers alike.
