Rosy Cordero / Deadline
A group of high profile writers including Julie Plec and New Station 19showrunner Zoanne Clack spoke about the WGA strike and the major issues surrounding the strike at the ATX Television Festival.
We are mad, said the the Vampire Diaries co-creator, who was speaking at the panel session along with Clack, Greg Iwinski, who wrote Last week tonight with John Oliver AND The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and moderator Beau Willimon, who developed Netflix House of cards. Damon Lindelof was originally slated to be on the panel but didn’t show up.
The lack of caring for artists and content creators has reached a breaking point. We didn’t have the support of other unions before, but now they are all as crazy as we are. We have this community of pure rage, there’s an enemy in that and it’s not us. The second thing is God bless them, millennials and Gen Z, a community of people who have seen shit hit them, everything in this generation is about fighting in the streets. There’s an energy of activism, that’s how they’re wired and how they breathe, Plec added. We have the spirit of revolution from below.
Plec, who has Girls on the bus coming from Max e We were liars at Amazon, she said she was lucky to reap the rewards of her career, but she’s striking out to protect those who come next. I have friends who have worked 15 consecutive years who don’t have jobs today and those who do take the job at 30%, 40%, 50% and 60% less wages, she added.
Iwinski, who also serves on the WGA Easts negotiating committee, highlighted the fact that many writers have to live in Los Angeles and New York to do their work, which doesn’t come cheap. Having to do this in a situation where you can now be someone who writes on a hit TV show and makes $80,000 a year and it has to be in food stamps, even though your show has been nominated for awards that the studio is happy to take the credit because, he said.
Clack, who was recently named showrunner of Station 19, he told Deadline after the panel that the upcoming season 7 of the ABC drama would be shortened due to the strike.
It also addressed one of the main problems for the writers on set during production. You must be on set. You have to learn these things, you have to learn how to edit. You have to learn everything, to get to the next stage and be a showrunner who can do the job, she said. There’s also this culture of very young people who come in and aren’t in the writers room and don’t make shows and become showrunners. Sometimes it works well, but sometimes they need a lot of help. It’s also just demeaning to yourself if you’ve now been given this million dollar industry to manage and you don’t have the skills.
It was also pointed out that negotiations with the AMPTP and WGA consisted largely of labor lawyers and commercial affairs executives rather than studio heads. I like to think that if Donna Langley or Susan Rovner or Pearlena Igbokwe were all in the room making these decisions, this would be a much easier conversation, Plec said. I don’t know who is at the top.
Iwinski used an NBA analogy when discussing the issue of mini-rooms. What if we just have two all-stars and they make the whole game? he said. They will only have the ball they can pass to each other and everyone else will do whatever is going on. That’s what’s happening with staff sizes: They’re doing well what if these two stellar writers just wrote all the episodes. If you’re a really important white dude, you can go yes, whatever or no, I want six writers. If you’re a low or mid level writer or a female or a black person or a black woman, and they actually need six writers, they’ll just say no, because the white guy didn’t need them, so you don’t have any. need. That’s why we’re fighting to the death for [room sizes].
Iwinski also talked about artificial intelligence. He said some executives are very susceptible to vaporware. There is some element of AI that will be people who promise the moon and deliver a mountain, he said. The real issue here is what you’re seeing with the studios is what if it doesn’t matter that it’s good.
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