The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (38 page)

The three key catalysts for the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike all appeared in 2005: the introduction of the video iPod, the launch of YouTube, and the formation of Writers United. To begin, the studios’
astonishing financial success in selling episodes—and whole seasons—of
Desperate Housewives
and
Lost
via iTunes commanded the industry’s attention. In March 2006, when residuals were due for digital downloads, ABC chose to pay its writers as if the electronic sell-through (the industry term for a one-time download of media content for a fee) had the same value as a DVD sale, that is, a final price that accounted for manufacturing costs. To writers, this formula made no sense. Chuck Slocum argued, “If on March 1, 2006, they had paid [the equivalent of] the TV rate, there would have been no strike two years later. Our philosophy in the strike, in the negotiation, was the Internet ought to act like TV. And it largely does.”
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YouTube was more than just an overnight sensation. By 2006, the website’s traffic was growing at an astonishing rate of 75 percent per week, and the service reimagined, for producers and consumers of media, the potential for streaming media content.
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One of the most serious concerns for writers and media industry executives as they witnessed the switch from traditional film and television media to digital forms was that young people were becoming so accustomed to using the Internet for entertainment that industry insiders never knew for sure whether these viewers would miss television were it to disappear. Executives now asked television writers, especially those working on edgy, youth-oriented series, to “make things more YouTube-able,” as
Just Shoot Me!
writer Ross McCall detailed.
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They wanted scenes that could be easily excerpted and uploaded into three- or four-minute streaming videos for use as advertising tools for a series. But as writers witnessed, and studies subsequently quantified, the Internet diverted many audiences from traditional media. Greg Thomas Garcia, series creator of
My Name Is Earl
and
Raising Hope
, observed, “Kids today, you take TV away, they’ll say, ‘Big deal,’ and they’ll click on the computer.”
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When writers tried to calculate appropriate compensation amid the proliferation of new media outlets, they found the math more nuanced than the numbers that studio heads put forward to investors and the press about the success of digital platforms.

The success in 2005 of the Writers United slate in the WGA West elections—with Patric Verrone as president, David Weiss as vice president, and Elias Davis as secretary treasurer—proved to be a turning point in the relationship between East and West. The group’s strategy for reorganizing the Guild had been in the works for a number of years. Mark Gunn, a member of the negotiating committee and writer of
2gether
, described the leaders
as “a shadow government . . . a little revolutionary faction inside the Guild. . . .”
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In the months leading up to the election, Writers United held meetings to educate the membership on its positions and to request that writers vote for its candidates as a slate, not just as individuals. The plan was to take over the leadership of WGA West, and the strategy involved a three-pronged approach. According to Patric Verrone, “We were campaigning on the concept of organize, organize, organize. We’ve got to get more members involved internally; we’ve got to get more people outside the union into the union, expand our jurisdiction; and third we’ve got to get the other unions—SAG, DGA, IATSE, Teamsters—involved in a coalition that has the power-building mechanisms that the AMPTP already has in place. That was our mantra.”
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On the day after the slate was elected, the newly formed board of directors fired McLean and named David Young interim executive director. A long-time Los Angeles union activist and leader, Young had built a reputation by organizing blue-collar workers, specifically carpenters and textile employees. When asked about his professional transition, Young was unruffled by celebrity: “Here I was doing something that I had become really good at in my second language [Spanish]. I get to do it in English. . . . This is easy, relatively speaking. . . . So now I’m in the big leagues [and] the bats are better. The dining room’s better.”
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Young’s expertise in mobilizing base membership was critical to the new slate’s overall strategy. As he came into the position, he saw a clear point of concern. If the fundamental functions of a union are to organize jurisdiction, negotiate contracts, enforce those contracts, do political work that addresses the broader labor situation, and uphold the craft, the WGA had been working hard on the latter four but had done very little to address the first—hammering out jurisdiction.

In the summer of 2006, the WGA stood in solidarity with the striking writers of
America’s Next Top Model
(
ANTM
). Holding picket signs decrying “the ugly side of a beautiful show” were its twelve young, articulate writers, an ideal group to serve as a test case for the WGA in reality television. The series was enormously successful, the writers loved their jobs, and all twelve wanted to become unionized under the WGA. Past modeling contestants on the series were even game to walk the line in solidarity with the writers, making coverage by the press much more likely. The Guild and the reality writers strategically organized a large rally of Hollywood writers to coincide with the launch of
ANTM
’s new parent network, The CW. Knowing that this campaign was as much about public perception as about industry politics,
the
ANTM
writers also took their grievances to the forums most visible to fans of the series, MySpace and YouTube. Befriending thousands of fans and posting updates via the Internet and social media, the
ANTM
writers made their case—for health benefits, residuals, regulated wages, and a pension plan—visible not only on the streets of Los Angeles but also in virtual communities.

The reality show’s producers removed the striking writers from their payroll in November. In turn, the WGA filed unfair labor practice charges against them with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the writers had been fired because of their union activity. Verrone chastised the show’s producers in broader terms: “This is illegal strikebreaking, an insult to the Hollywood talent community and an embarrassment to this industry.”
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By focusing on the individual professional craftsperson as the symbol of labor suffering from the effects of corporate greed, the Guild tried to make reality television a central economic issue for the industry. Ultimately, the writers were replaced by peers willing to break the strike, talks ended, and the series went on. Without the unified support of all reality writers under the umbrella of the Guild, each labor struggle carried immense significance. With the
ANTM
writers, the WGA had lost a key battle. And yet, the lessons learned from this campaign helped the WGA leadership prepare for the 2007 negotiations. The following fall, the Writers Guild East and West joined forces across guilds and associations to bring a compelling case to the FCC against further media conglomeration.

Eight representatives from entertainment’s creative labor force—a panel that included producers, writers, directors, actors, and composers—faced the FCC commissioners in a large hall on the campus of the University of Southern California in October 2006. Hundreds of concerned citizens, media workers, and independent media company owners looked on. Even though these vastly different organizations representing diverse interests had been at odds about a myriad of issues over decades, on that day the voice of the American entertainment industry spoke as a unified whole against the conglomeration of the media industries. Stephen J. Cannell, creator of
The Rockford Files, The A-Team
, and
21 Jump Street
, representing the Caucus of Television Producers, Writers, and Directors, spoke first. Not surprisingly, he began with the story of an unlikely hero, a thirty-year-old man who tried to sell the character Jim Rockford to ABC. ABC bought the idea but hated the iconoclastic protagonist of the first script. Cannell and Universal Television
took that script to NBC, where the series became a five-year Emmy-winning television sensation. Cannell went on to become the third largest supplier of television in Hollywood; but by 1994, after repeal of the Fin-Syn regulations, he could not get a pilot greenlighted by the networks without forfeiting ownership.
⁵⁹

Taylor Hackford, screenwriter of
Ray
and third vice president of the Directors Guild of America, presented data that his guild had tracked over the previous decades. In the 1992–1993 television season, independent producers created 66 percent of network primetime programming. Only six years later, the numbers had reversed: the networks and their affiliated producers were responsible for 62 percent of primetime. By 2006, programming by the networks and their affiliates dominated 76 percent of primetime.
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During that thirteen-year period, the number of independent studios creating scripted programming for networks had decreased from twenty-three to two—and those two so-called independents were actually part of major conglomerates, Warner Bros. and Sony.

Mike Mills, bassist for the rock band R.E.M., representing the Recording Artists Coalition, explained how regionalism had disappeared in radio: “The bond between a local station and its local listening audience has largely evaporated. . . . Playlists have been corporatized, nationalized, and sanitized.”
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On behalf of actors, John Connolly, president of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), spoke of catastrophic job loss, salary compression, a paucity of roles for minority actors, and the loss the of localism in news reporting.
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Anne-Marie Johnson, first national vice president of the Screen Actors Guild, informed the FCC commissioners about the strain that media conglomeration had placed on her membership: “The days of an independent producer taking his or her creative vision of a series or movie of the week to fruition are a thing of the past.” Johnson made her point clear: with increased consolidation of media ownership, viewers could no longer tap into a diversity of viewpoints and a diversity of representation. “As a union, and a vital part of the American labor movement, we are gravely concerned that the continued consolidation of our employers will result in the exclusion of the issues and challenges facing workers.”
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Mona Mangan, executive director of WGA East, addressed the loss of localism in news, the massive cutbacks in the numbers of news writers, and the retrenchment of news writing.
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WGA West President Patric Verrone then laid out figures for the commissioners: “Twenty years ago, when I
entered this business there were twenty-nine dominant entertainment firms, with $100 billion in annual revenues. Today, there are six, making nearly $400 billion. Fifteen years ago, less than a third of writing employment was controlled by these firms. Today, they control over 80 percent of it. . . . Homogenization is good for milk, but bad for ideas.”
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Marshall Herskovitz, president of the Producers Guild of America and creator of
thirtysomething
and
My So-Called Life
, echoed the concerns that talent had expressed since the earliest days of unionization:

Ask any showrunner on any network and they will tell you that the level of control now exerted by network executives—over script, direction, cinematography, costumes, even the color of sets—is unprecedented in the history of the medium. . . . Eccentric choices that went into making
thirtysomething
the groundbreaking show it was would absolutely never be permitted today. . . . The independent producer no longer exists in television. . . . Consolidation of media is turning our artists into employees, and make no mistake, the result will be harmful for our society. I’m of the belief that storytellers matter, that art matters, that art helps a society define itself. The consolidation of media inherently endangers the storyteller, because, to that conglomerate, the story has no inherent value other than as an asset to be exploited.
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Following this eloquent and candid testimony about the need to support Hollywood’s creative crafts through diversity of media ownership, the PGA, the WGA East and West, the DGA, AFTRA, and SAG had a proposal. They asked the FCC to ensure that 25 percent of television primetime programming would be designated for truly independent production companies and producers who were working outside of the oligarchy.

In this rare moment of cooperation, producers, writers, directors, actors, and composers demanded that federal regulators open their eyes to—and take a stand against—media conglomeration. This time, the voice of the media industry was not that of the owners or the corporations. Rather, Washington was listening to American media workers who described the damage that deregulation had unleashed. In the subsequent months and years, WGA leaders, staff, and members began to testify more frequently before government officials in Sacramento and Washington, DC, in hopes of
distinguishing their needs from those of management, developing political clout, and forging political alliances through advocacy, outreach, and the new WGA West Political Action Committee.

If the event had been scripted, this FCC hearing would have been the dramatic turning point when the historic underdogs finally had their chance to speak and where their heroic, united action against the giant beasts gobbling up the media industries would herald a clear shift in the narrative. In reality, after a nationwide, multiyear listening tour, the FCC commissioners released their report on February 4, 2008, three months to the day after the Writers Guild had gone out on strike. The majority opinion determined that limits on television ownership, radio ownership, and radio-television cross-ownership should not change. Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate wrote for the majority: “Many wanted us to go further in repealing the ownership restrictions, but we have chosen a measured and cautious approach. We recognize the changing dynamics of the media market, but also give due consideration to the weight of the record before us.”
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Two commissioners, Michael J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein, expressed anger with the decision. Copps wrote in his dissent: “So even as it becomes abundantly clear that the real cause of the disenfranchisement of women and minorities is media consolidation, we give the green light to a new round of—yes, you guessed it—media consolidation.”
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Although Washington remained unmoved by the plight of media artists and creators, this moment of unity hinted that changes were underway, as writers and the Writers Guild began to see the advantage of coalitions of talent working together toward a common cause.