NEW YORK (AP) Late-night television shows including The Tonight Show and The Daily Show will begin airing reruns as union writers embittered by Hollywood’s low salaries in the streaming era set out on strike Tuesday for the first time in 15 years.
The labor dispute could have a cascading effect on TV and film productions depending on how long the strike lasts, and it comes as streaming services come under increasing pressure from Wall Street to post profits.
Along with NBC The Tonight Show and Comedy Centrals Daily Show, ABC Jimmy Kimmel Live has all scheduled reruns throughout the week.
The guild is seeking a higher minimum wage, less-staffed writing rooms, shorter exclusive contracts and a residual wage overhaul, all terms that the WGA says have been reduced in the content boom driven by streaming.
The companies’ behavior created a gig economy in a union workforce, and their unwavering position in this negotiation betrayed a commitment to further devalue the writing profession, the WGA said in a statement.
Picket lines were planned throughout Los Angeles and New York City later Tuesday. The WGA must first picket outside the building in Manhattan where NBCUniversal is hosting an event for advertisers of its streaming service, Peacock.
Demonstrations in Los Angeles are planned outside the offices of Walt Disney Co., Netflix, Amazon, Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, CBS and Sony.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the trade association that negotiates on behalf of studios and production companies, said it presented an offer with generous compensation increases for writers as well as improvements to streaming residuals.
In a statement, the trade association said it was ready to improve its offer but was unwilling to do so due to the breadth of other proposals still on the table that the guild continues to discuss. ‘insist.”
The survival of our profession hangs in the balance, the guild said.
Streaming has exploded the number of shows and movies made each year, which means more jobs for writers. But WGA members say they make much less money and work under tougher conditions. Showrunners of streaming series only receive 46% of the salary that showrunners of broadcast series receive, according to the WGA.
The guild is looking for more compensation on the front-end of transactions. Many back-end payment authors have historically taken advantage of similar syndication, and international licensing has been largely done away with by the start of streaming. More than half of writers are paid the minimum rate, an increase of 16% over the past decade. The use of so-called mini-writers rooms has exploded.
The Hollywood Trade Association said on Monday that the main sticking points for a deal revolved around these mini-rooms where the guild is looking for a minimum number of scribes per writer room and the length of job restrictions. . The guild said more flexibility for writers is needed when contracted for series that tend to be more limited and short-lived than the once-standard 20+ episode broadcast season.
Many studios and production companies are reducing their expenses. The Walt Disney Co. is cut 7,000 jobs. Warner Bros. Discovery cuts costs to reduce debt. Netflix pumped breaks on spending growth.
When Hollywood writers have gone on strike, it has often been long. In 1988, a WGA strike lasted 153 days. The last WGA strike lasted 100 days, beginning in 2007 and ending in 2008.
During the 2007 strike, late-night entertainers finally got back into the air and improvised material. Jay Leno wrote his own monologues, a move that angered union leaders.
On The Friday episode of Late Night, Seth Meyers, a WGA member who has said he supports union demands, prepared viewers for reruns while lamenting the hardship a strike brings.
It doesn’t just affect the writers, it affects all of the amazing non-writer staff on these shows, Meyers said. And that would really be a miserable thing for people to have to go through, especially since we were on the heels of this terrible pandemic that has affected, not just show business, but all of us.
Scripted series and movies will take longer to be affected. But if a strike persists all summer, fall schedules could be disrupted. And in the meantime, not having writers available for rewrites can have a dramatic effect on quality. The James Bond film Quantum of Solace was one of several films launched into production during the 2007-2008 strike with what Daniel Craig called the bare bones of a script.
Then there was a writers’ strike and we couldn’t do anything, Craig later said. We couldn’t employ a writer to complete it. I tell myself, never again, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes and a writer that I’m not.
With a long overdue walkout, writers rushed to get scripts and studios sought to prepare their pipelines to continue producing content at least in the short term.
The worst was assumed from a business perspective, Warner Bros. chief executive David Zaslav said last month. Discovery. We prepared. We had a lot of content that was produced.
Overseas series could also fill some of the void. If there is, we have a broad base of upcoming shows and movies from around the world, Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos said during the company’s April earnings call.
Still, the WGA strike may just be the beginning. The contracts for the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, expire in June. Some of the same questions about the streaming business model will be considered in these trading sessions. The DGA is due to start negotiations with the AMPTP on May 10.
The cost of the latest WGA strike cost Southern California $2.1 billion, according to the Milken Institute. It remains to be seen how painful this strike is. But as of Monday night, laptops were shut down everywhere in Hollywood.
Crayons down, Halt and Catch Fire showrunner and co-creator Christopher Cantwell tweeted shortly after the strike was announced. Don’t even type in the document. ___
AP Media Writer David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.
