What's up with the Writer's Strike?
The WGA is one of the three main guilds in Hollywood along with the Director's Guild(DGA) and Screen Actor's Guild(SAG). Due to various abuses by studios since the beginning of the medium the guilds were formed to protect their members through collective action. The guilds provide members with health care plans, since nearly all jobs in the movie industry are contract work and the employers don't offer any. They manage the royalties issued to their members. This last thing is the main issue in the current situation.
Each guild contains pretty much everyone in their particular craft in Hollywood that actively works with the studios. The major studios have signed agreements with the guilds that they will only employ their members, or individuals who get waivers from the Guild that represents their craft.
There are directors who aren't members of the DGA like Quentin Tarantino, who mostly work with non-Guild signatories. Most actors are in SAG but usually every one joins because it's next to impossible to get work unless you're a member.
Every working writer in Hollywood is a member of the WGA. Every director of a studio film is a member of the DGA, as is every assistant Director(the bulk of the membership). You may recall Robert Rodriguez was going to direct John Carter of Mars for Paramount but had to quit because he gave up his DGA membership to co-direct Sin City with Frank Miller(co-directing a film is against guild rules unless it's a pre-established team, such as the Wachowskis who made the Matrix).
The reason the guilds insist on this is because the situation for writers, director's and actors before the guilds was horrible, with rampant abuse by the studios(we're talking 1920s, 1930s here). Their only strength lies in the group, if a significant number of quality writers weren't members of the WGA then the ones who were members would be black listed, and the abuses would almost certainly start again.
These contracts with the studios expire every few years and get renegotiated each time they end. Sometimes those negotiations go badly and the guild strikes. The last time the WGA struck was 1988. That strike didn't end too well for the WGA and at the last renegotiation the WGA didn't make too good of a deal with the studios, in order to avoid a strike.
The main issues this time are that the writer's want an increased percentage of dvd sales(they currently get 4¢ for every dvd sold of a movie they have written, they want 8¢ per dvd) and to negotiate a percentage of any revenue from internet downloads. Currently that revenue is negligible but they're planning for the future. Also there are certain issues that writers want resolved, such as studios demanding free rewrites on screenplays they buy, whereas they used to pay per draft.
The studios initially wanted all revenue sharing to end, but that was not a serious demand and they took it off the table to make themselves appear to be reasonable.
The Writer's Guild contract has ended at 12:01am November 1st. The Screen Actor's Guild and Director's Guild of America contracts end on June 1st. The thinking is that the WGA was going to wait until June 1st to strike, working until that time without a contract(following the terms of the now expired one) and going on strike with SAG, who have their own complaints. The DGA has only struck once in their entire history, for six minutes. They're traditionally the ones to lead the way to a new deal, as they are both the most conservative and most powerful union(no films or tv shows being possible without their membership).
The past several months has seen the studios stockpiling and fast-tracking movie projects based on the belief that the strike would happen in June. This was meant to give them a surplus of material to release in the event of a strike. This was a fairly well known strategy and the Writer's Guild decided that they'd be stupid to give the studios so much time to prepare, so they decided to threaten to strike early when it would do far more damage.
As it stands right now as I write this the Writer's Guild contract has expired and the negotiations have ceased, the WGA can go on strike at any moment, they are expected to do so starting next week.
What this means to the audience is that all tv production aside from reality shows will necessarily cease by the end of November due to lack of scripts. There are several episodes in the can for most shows(not sitcoms) but only 2-3 at best. No movies in preproduction can move forward(rewrites are constant until date of production begins, and sometimes throughout), so if a movie has not started shooting yet, such as the Justice League movie, it likely will not begin until the strike is over(assuming one is called).
Beware of what you read about this situation in newspapers and magazines and movie websites. All of those places entirely depend on studio advertising to survive, so there is not even a real assumption of neutrality there. If they upset the studios they can and will go out of business. If they upset the WGA they will be fine.
This is not a situation like when the baseball players went on strike, where millionaires were complaining about being shortchanged by the team owners. None of the rich WGA members stand to benefit from any new deal, they already have a better deal than what will be negotiated. The deal being negotiated is for the minimum terms available to a writer.
This will solely benefit the lowest rung of writers, who are not rich and have to work very hard to make a living. The number of top tier writers is 20 or so, the total number of WGA members is upwards of 12,000.
The same is true of the Screen Actors Guild, where the really rich and famous(or even semi-famous) actors are less than 1% of the total membership.
- fin
