There's a lot of work to do before Hollywood can get fully back to work (SAG-AFTRA, anyone?). Now the industry is left to pick up the pieces of a long and disruptive work stoppage.
, nor is the film and TV business set to come roaring back to full health right away. The WGA negotiating committee said in its message to its 11,500 members that it would vote to send the deal to the WGA West board and WGA East council for approval , followed by the scheduling of a ratification vote by the guild’s membership.
Writers won’t go back to work until authorized by their union. With actors still on strike, most scripted productions can’t get back up and running immediately, though late-night shows and talk programs should be operating soon.The 160,000-member performers’ guild’s demands and sticking points are broadly similar to those of the writers . Scribes, while declaring victory for themselves, have posted messages of solidarity for the actors, and it’s not clear when SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the major studios, will return to negotiations. But there will be ample pressure to move things along now that the writers’ strike is effectively resolved. Specific WGA deal points have yet to be disclosed, and won’t be until the lawyers finish combing through the fine print. We’ve yet to see how, exactly, the sides dealt with the stickiest issues, including minimum staffing in writers rooms, success-based financial rewards for streaming series and the threat of artificial intelligence, on top of the typical stuff like increases in wages and residuals.has proved to be especially challenging, as the technology is developing rapidly and neither side wants to incorporate language into a contract that would backfire three years from now. AI could be an even bigger sticking point in dealing with the actors, for whom advancements in generative image and voice tech could represent a more tangible and immediate threat. All of these are issues that writers considered not just essential but existential. To many, this fight wasn’t only about improving their own livelihoods, but also about preserving screenwriting as a viable career option for future generations., adopting the apocalyptic rhetoric of a high-stakes presidential election. Studio chiefs, early on, made one tone-deaf public relations blunder after another, with one executive, allegedly and anonymously, telling Deadline they wanted to starve out the writers. Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger, speaking from the billionaire summer camp of Sun Valley, Idaho, seemed to provoke scribes and actors by saying that their demands were simply “As SAG-AFTRA joined the writers in July, a rousing speech by the actors union’s president, Fran Drescher, injected a dose of adrenaline into the nation’s “hot labor summer.” After more weeks of picketing, an August restart of negotiations between the WGA and the studios ended in disaster.The studios, believing that they were being forced to negotiate against themselves, released a summary of their Aug. 11 proposal in an effort to show that they had been willing to bend on key fronts. Writers — buoyed by high levels of solidarity from within and from fellow unions — were enraged, seeing the tactic as a blatant attempt to go around their negotiating committee. At last, after additional dueling press releases, discussions picked up last week with a new sense of urgency as the CEOs joined the proceedings at the AMPTP’s Sherman Oaks headquarters. If the shutdown lasted much longer, there’d be little hope left of salvaging the 2023-2024 television season. Movie slates would be further disrupted. In the absence of a Lew Wasserman-type figure, the task of leading the studios through the impasse was taken up by a Gang of Four: Iger, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, NBCUniversal studio group chairman Donna Langley and Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav. The same quartet took part in the fateful Aug. 22 meeting that guild negotiators described as a “lecture.” The fractious tenor flared up again over the weekend, even as it seemed as if a deal was in progress, if not imminent.” offer, as people close to the studios described it, leading to a social media freakout as the most vocal writers on X took issue with what looked like a take-it-or-leave-it stance from the suits. But the uproar did not, in fact, torpedo the deal as some feared it might. Calling an offer “best and final” is not particularly unusual in a negotiation, though WGA Resistance Twitter took full advantage of the opportunity to dunk on the companies’ used-car salesman lingo. As many a professional pontificator has learned throughout this process, writers sure know how to land a brutal insult. In the end, as was always going to be the case, the two sides had no option other than to work with each other. They had it wrapped up in a matter of days . As the anxieties boiled over online, the negotiators themselves pushed forward. This was never a situation in which the writers had to agree to a truce by Yom Kippur or be left to picket until January or beyond. There’s a lot of work to do. But count this as one Hollywood Armageddon avoided for now.
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