Screenwriters on strike: Hollywood grinds to a halt

One of the most famous telegrams in Hollywood history was sent in 1925, said Michael Schulman in The New Yorker.

It was from Herman J. Mankiewicz, the future co-writer of Citizen Kane, to his journalist friend Ben Hecht, urging him to move west and get into screenwriting, which Hecht later did, to great acclaim. “Millions are to be grabbed out here,” Mankiewicz told him, “and your only competition is idiots”. How times have changed.

‘Birth of reality TV’

Last week, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the union representing most of Hollywood’s TV and movie scribes, went on strike in protest at poor pay and working conditions. It’s the WGA’s first strike in 15 years, said Chris Murphy and Savannah Walsh in Vanity Fair, and it could have interesting consequences.

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The last strike, which went on for 100 days, delivered a boost to reality TV shows, which had the advantage of not needing a script. One show that emerged from that time and won huge ratings was Celebrity Apprentice, fronted by a certain Donald Trump.

‘Replaceable widgets’

The screenwriters have good reason to be unhappy, said Rick Cleveland in the Los Angeles Times. When I got into the trade 20 or so years ago, you could still make a decent living. You could work with directors on set and in editing, and go on to work as a co-producer. Royalties from the reruns of TV shows helped you through lean times. Today, though, writers are treated as gig workers, taken on for short contracts and let go before the production of their show even begins. And the streaming services that now dominate the industry pay out lower royalties. The business is making more money than ever, but it’s turning writers into “replaceable widgets”.

There’s another “huge issue” troubling writers, said Alissa Wilkinson on Vox: the rise of AI. They’re worried about studios using algorithmic tools to generate ideas for plots, or even scripts, and then hiring writers to polish them up. Writers could then be paid at a lower rate, since technically they’d be “adapting” an idea rather than creating original content. Given that many TV series and movies are, by their nature, “highly formulaic” – think police procedurals and romcoms – this fear is well grounded. Alas, the WGA is probably fighting a losing battle against AI, said Liz Wolfe in Reason. Some already fear the worst. As the writer C. Robert Cargill puts it: “You think Hollywood feels samey now? Wait until it’s just the same 100 people rewriting ChatGPT.”