Production halts as screenwriters strike
The fallout from the writers strike is beginning to hit.
Late-night shows — including “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — will immediately begin showing repeats, according to several people briefed on the plans.
The Comedy Central program “The Daily Show,” which has no dedicated host, will also air repeats, as will the HBO shows hosted by John Oliver and Bill Maher.
Late Monday night, the East and West branches of the Writers Guild of America, the unions that represent thousands of TV and movie writers, announced that talks with the major studios had broken down and that they were going on strike.
The writers have said that their compensation has stagnated even as television production has rapidly grown over the past decade. Writers Guild of America leaders have said that the current system is broken, arguing that the “the survival of writing as a profession is at stake in this negotiation.”
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood companies, said in a statement that its offer included “generous increases in compensation for writers.”
Writers assembled on picket lines in New York and Los Angeles beginning Tuesday afternoon.
Late-night hosts and their top producers have been on group calls in recent weeks, coordinating a response in the event of a strike, according to one of the people briefed on the plans.
Unlike the enmity of the socalled late-night wars from the 1990s, the hosts have made a concerted effort to show that they are on friendly, if still competitive, terms. When James Corden signed off from “The Late Late Show” last week, there was a taped segment that featured Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, and Meyers all together.
How long they stay off the air is an open question. During the last strike, in 2007, late-night shows
Writers assembled on picket lines in New York and Los Angeles beginning Tuesday afternoon.
stayed dark before they gradually came back to air after about two months, even with their writers still on picket lines. (That strike lasted 100 days.)
David Letterman, who owned his CBS late-night show through his production company Worldwide Pants, made a deal with the Writers Guild of America that allowed his writers to come back on the show.
The other hosts — whose shows were owned by media companies — had no such luck. Hosts like Kimmel and Conan O’Brien returned without their writers, and gamely tried to put together their shows without their standard monologues. O’Brien had to resort to time-killing gimmicks, such as spinning his wedding ring on his desk, setting a timer to it in the process.
It would take a long strike before there is a slowdown in the arrival of new TV shows and movies, because the production process for them can take months or more than a year.
The current dispute has pitted 11,500 screenwriters against the major studios, including old guard entertainment companies like Universal and Paramount as well as tech industry newcomers like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple.
The WGA painted the dispute in stark terms, saying that the ascendance of streaming services and the explosion of television production have eroded their working conditions. It has described this as an “existential” moment, and that “the survival of writing as a profession is at stake in this negotiation.”
Entertainment companies, which had previously said they were approaching the talks with “the long-term health and stability of the industry as our priority,” are confronting a rapidly changing business as network and cable television viewership plummets.
The primary sticking points, according to the studios, involve union proposals that would require companies to staff television shows with a certain number of writers for a specified period of time “whether needed or not.”
The unions representing the writers, the East and West branches of the Writers Guild of America, said “the companies’ behavior has created a gig economy inside a union workforce, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing.” Chris Keyser, cochair of the WGA negotiating committee, said in an interview “philosophically, and practically, we’re very far apart.”
A prolonged production shutdown could also prove damaging to local economies, particularly the workers who help support productions, such as drivers, costume dry cleaners, caterers, set carpenters, and lumber yard workers. When the writers last went on strike, for 100 days in 2007, the Los Angeles economy lost an estimated $2.1 billion.
The writers have raised numerous grievances.The most pressing issue to them is compensation.
Over the past decade, a period that is often referred to as Peak TV, the number of scripted television shows broadcast has risen sharply. Writers, however, said that their pay has stagnated.
In the network television era, a writer could get work on a show with more than 20 episodes a season, providing a steady living for an entire year. However, in the streaming era, episode orders have declined to eight or 12, and the median weekly pay for a writer-producer has gone down, the WGA said.
The writers want to also fix the formula for residual payments, which have been upended by streaming. Years ago, writers could receive residual payments whenever a show was licensed — into syndication or through DVD sales. But global streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have cut off those distribution arms, and pay a fixed residual instead.