More than 11,000 Hollywood film and television writers launched their first strike in 15 years on Tuesday after talks with studios and streaming platforms over pay and working conditions failed.
The stoppage will mean the immediate interruption of successful programs, such as “late-night shows”, and in delays of television series and films that are scheduled to premiere this year.
“We have not reached an agreement with the studios and platforms”, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) said in an email sent to its members that was seen by AFP.
The responses to the requests were “totally insufficient, given the existential crisis that screenwriters facethe WGA said, adding that the strike had begun.
The move came after the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents Disney and Netflix among others, said negotiations had “ended without an agreement.”
Late-night talk show hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon endorsed the scriptwriters.
Colbert considered their demands.”reasonable”, while Fallon expressed support for his team. “I couldn’t do the show without them.he told Variety.
WGA members urged solidarity among members. “Drop your pens!”, tweeted Caroline Renard, writer of several series and television shows.
Picketing is expected to begin in Los Angeles at 1:00 p.m. (2000 GMT), with similar demonstrations in New York, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“They will not break this union”, David Slack, screenwriter of “Law and order” and other programs, wrote on Twitter in a tweet taken up by the WGA, whose logo became “Writers union on strike.
The last time Hollywood screenwriters walked out, in 2007-2008, the strike lasted 100 days and cost the industry some $2 billion.
This time around, screenwriters are demanding higher salaries and a larger share of the profits generated by streaming, while studios say they have to cut costs due to economic pressures. .
Remuneration for streaming
Screenwriters say their salaries are stagnant or devalued by inflation, while their employers profit and raise the salaries of their executives.
In addition, they maintain that there have never been so many scriptwriters working for the minimum wage set by the unions and denounce that the television networks hire fewer people to write increasingly shorter series.
When the talks collapsed on Monday, the WGA accused the studios of seeking to create a gig economy, in which being a screenwriter would become a “totally independent profession”.
The AMPTP noted that the WGA’s demand that studios hire a certain number of screenwriters “for a specified period of time, whether or not it is necessary” is one of the main points of disagreement.
Another controversy is how scriptwriters are paid for streaming content, which on platforms like Netflix often remains viewable for years.
For decades, writers have been paid “residual royalties” for the reuse of their works, a percentage of studio revenue for the movie or show, or a flat fee each time an episode is played.
But with streaming, writers get a fixed annual payment, even if hundreds of millions of viewers watch the products.
The WGA asks to revalue those amounts today “too low in view of massive international reuse” of the programs. He also wants to discuss the future impact of artificial intelligence on the screenwriting profession.
“Break this jam”
The AMPTP points out that the “residual rights” paid to screenwriters reached a record level of $494 million in 2021, up from $333 million ten years earlier.
After the waste of recent years, when rival platforms tried to grow their subscribers at all costs, the studios are now under intense pressure from investors to cut spending and turn a profit.
And they deny that the economic difficulties are a pretext for not attending to the claims of the scriptwriters.
“Do you think Disney would fire 7,000 people for fun?”, indicated a source close to the AMPTP, who considered that Netflix is the “only profitable platform at the moment”.
On Monday, the studios said they were “willing to enter into talks with the WGA in an effort to break this logjam.”
But the industry fears a domino effect. Other Hollywood unions have already expressed their solidarity with the scriptwriters, such as the actors’ SAG-AFTRA, and the directors’ DGA.
Source: Gestion
Ricardo is a renowned author and journalist, known for his exceptional writing on top-news stories. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he is known for his ability to deliver breaking news and insightful analysis on the most pressing issues of the day.
