On Strike!
I don’t normally do this. My usual procedure is to write these essays a week ahead of time and let them simmer. Like a nice steak, a good bottle of wine, or your significant other when they’re in a bad mood, things often get better when you just leave them alone for a while. This keeps me from popping off too hard on airlines or unfriendly dogs or dentists and their snide little remarks and lets me take a more measured approach. Well, NOT TODAY! Today, as of 12:01 am I and all of my fellow professional screenwriters are on strike and this here is my little teeny tiny corner of the internet so I’m gonna talk about it!
I’ve been screenwriting for almost a decade and I’ve been doing it full-time since 2015, with a few detours to procure part-time work in order to survive and pay the bills. Getting into this business takes a lot of luck and I do consider myself very lucky to have made it this far…I’ve also run into some pretty bad luck. The first show I sold went the way of the dinosaur when there was a complete change of leadership at the network mere months after the paperwork was signed. The second show I sold looked like it had a real chance to make it to air and be my ticket to a real career…until a one-in-a-lifetime pandemic shut down the industry for more than a year and my show disappeared with it. I rewrote a movie that finally made it to air but was uncredited because it was re-rewritten by the director a week before shooting. So again, good luck and bad luck.
As the son of a writer and someone who has had the privilege to chase my dreams I’ve had almost every advantage someone could have trying to make it in the creative fields and it has STILL felt like a Sisyphean task. But that is the reason this strike is so important. Making it in this industry feels impossible, so when you do actually make it, getting paid fair wages and being treated with respect is the absolute least one can ask for. In an industry where the companies we work for have made between $28-30 BILLION dollars in profit every single year for the last half-decade, writers’ pay has, accounting for inflation, declined 14%. Ten years ago, 33% of TV writers were paid the minimum…now roughly half are. The longer you look the more you see stories of writers on your favorite, award-winning, show having to drive for Uber or deliver Postmates to make ends meet or being manipulated to do draft after draft of free work only to have the opportunity at fair pay be snatched away as the studios cry poverty.
Labor unions and guilds are the only protection workers have in our current system and the only chance we have when going against multibillion-dollar companies…but guess what: they need us. They have no product without us. If they could write movies and create compelling shows and craft brilliant dialogue, they would…but they can’t. This goes for every worker in every industry, if they could replace you they would.
This strike will be hard for everyone in the industry. For everyone from the lowly Production Assistant (which I spent many hard years as) to the Set Dec teams, to the Crafty department, to Post Production, this will be miserable. It is also the only way to stave off an existential crisis for all writers, present and future.
So please, show your support on social media for writers everywhere.
In solidarity.
Well said, young writer! I was able to build a career and raise a family (one might argue, badly, since my son decided to become a writer) but the industry I worked in has changed so dramatically that the kind of upward mobility I could aspire to has become almost impossible. If this strike doesn't succeed, every union will join ours in a downward spiral. So fists up, pencils down, LA is a union town!
Full support here, Will. The magic sentence in your piece for me is “ This goes for every worker in every industry, if they could replace you they would.” Welcome to the capitalist world where PROFIT is master of the land and the worker be damned.
STRIKE! ✊🏻