Extract from ABC News
When Hollywood writer Alex O'Keefe recently won an award for his work, he was dressed in a borrowed tuxedo and a bow tie bought on credit.
The staff writer for The Bear, a smash hit for the streaming giant Disney+, said that on the biggest night of his career, his bank account was in overdraft.
He also had no idea where his next pay cheque was coming from.
"All I can say about Hollywood is this: all that glitters is not gold," he wrote on Twitter.
"I won the lottery, and landed a gig on a low-budget show that became a national sensation. The Bear was a gift, but in the end, The Bear was a gig. And between gigs, I barely survive."
Mr O'Keefe is one of 11,000 Hollywood writers who went on strike this week.
We may be living in the golden age of television, but the people who bring storylines and characters to life say the rise of streaming platforms is destroying their livelihoods.
After a breakdown in negotiations between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and film and television companies, Hollywood's writers have walked off the job for the first time in 15 years.
"The companies' behaviour has created a gig economy inside a union workforce, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing," the WGA said.
The impact on your favourite shows will depend on how long the strike lasts — and don't worry, Succession's final season has already been written.
Comedy shows, including Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, aren't so lucky. They went off the air immediately this week and will be replaced with re-runs for the foreseeable future.
Soap operas, which only shoot up to a month in advance, expect to be disrupted next.
But Hollywood writers say their fight is bigger than any inconvenience caused to your evening viewing plans.
They say they're not only demanding better conditions for themselves, but are trying to save show business from artificial intelligence (AI).
One fear is that studios and streamers will soon try to cut costs further by outsourcing script development and screenwriting to AI.
The human beings who created Tony Soprano, Don Draper and Shiv Roy say something fundamental will be lost if Hollywood allows itself to become a wasteland of AI-generated stories.
And it won't just be writers who lose out, but the audience as well.
TV's golden age has not extended to its writers
Every three years, the WGA negotiates with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents more than 350 film and television companies, on a new agreement for how its members are employed.
The AMPTP includes film studios — Discovery-Warner, Sony Pictures and Paramount — American television networks — ABC America, CBS, Fox and NBC — and streaming services — Netflix, Amazon and Apple TV+ — as well as cable and other independent companies.
But six weeks of talks between both sides ended in a stalemate on May 1, with writers walking off the job and picketing television studios in search of better conditions.
At the centre of the dispute, according to unions representing screenwriters, is how streaming services have disrupted the industry's traditional working model and pay structure.
In the days when television shows were 22-episodes and spanned multiple seasons, writers would be paid up-front for their work as well as receiving residual payments when successful programs were syndicated. These are essentially Hollywood's version of book royalties.
But the arrival of streaming giants has slashed the number of episode orders to eight or 12, forcing writers to search for more work throughout the year and turning the existing pay model on its head.
Nowadays writers are still paid upfront but receive less in royalties, because shows will end up on a streaming service and stay there.
Some say the change means they are no longer able to make a living in the profession.
As an anonymous writer for TV show Abbott Elementary — which airs on ABC America, a traditional television network — explains it:
"The amount for a re-air on the network is $US13,500 and the amount that you're paid for that episode being on new media streaming [Hulu, HBO Max and Disney Plus] is $US700," she told VOX's Today Explained podcast.
Along with lower residuals, upfront payments also appear to be an issue. The WGA argues the medium weekly pay for a writer-producer has gone down 23 per cent over the last decade, with inflation factored in.
"Studios have made the work of writing much, much more precarious for a writer," Adam Conover, a comedy writer and actor on the Writers Guild of America West Board of Directors, said on his podcast.
He says he's also noticed a trend among studios to use "mini-rooms", a loosely-defined term to describe a condensed version of a full-scale writing room.
Instead of studios spending millions on a crew and cast for a pilot, mini-rooms are a simpler and cheaper way to generate scripts and ideas for a TV show to see if a project is worth green-lighting or leaving on the cutting room floor.
In response, the union has proposed new staffing requirements for studios, requesting TV shows employ a certain number of staff for a period of time, as well as shorter exclusivity deals for writers.
As the battle with AMPTP heats up, the Guild has argued the very "survival of writing as a profession is at stake".
Remember the great strike of 2007 and 2008
This is not the first time Hollywood writers have put down the symbolic pencils and gone on strike.
In late 2007, 10,500 WGA members walked off the job for 100 days, having a profound effect on Hollywood that rippled through the industry for years.
The strike tipped California into a recession, resulting in the loss of $US2.1 billion to the state economy and more than 37,700 jobs.
Late-night hosts Conan O'Brien, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert arranged to pay their staff for the duration of the strike, grew beards in solidarity with them, and wrote their own jokes to keep their shows going.
Writers wanted residuals from DVD sales — still a profitable market at the time — and a stake in "new media," which we now call streaming.
After more than three months off the job, they finally cut a deal.
Under the terms of the agreement, streamers including Netflix and Amazon were obliged to hire WGA writers for their original series.
"[Netflix] was so new back then, that it just wasn't a priority issue [in the strikes], they made a tiny amount of progress on that front," says Tom Nunan, a former network and studio president and continuing lecturer in the department of film, television and digital media at UCLA.
"No-one predicted [streaming] was going to be what it became."
In the 15 years since writers cut a deal, streamers have fundamentally changed the way we consume their stories in a way many could not have predicted.
American network and cable TV subscribers have been in a slow decline, prompting advertisers to pull their funding.
Meanwhile, Netflix grew its global subscription base from 24 million to 214 million in the decade since 2012,.
With the future of streaming looking bright, other companies began to look for opportunities to grab a slice of the pie, prompting another significant shift about two years ago.
While Netflix remains the apex predator of the streaming world, competitors like Disney+, Apple, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max have begun rising up the food chain.
Now streaming giants are facing pressure from Wall Street to become more profitable as subscriber numbers stagnate.
"They have a long way to go to figure out how to make these profitable ventures. It's very challenging," David Mumpower, a media expert, chief content officer of Mickeyblog, told CNN.
He said unlike in previous strikes, the WGA is "acutely aware" their leverage isn't as strong because "the dynamics have changed".
But with very talented people struggling to make ends meet, some see a strike as their only option to negotiate a better deal.
"The television industry and the film industry in the move to streaming have transformed in ways that have dramatically hurt everybody in Hollywood, from writers, to directors, to actors to crews," said Mr Conover.
"We expect this to still be a business that is massively profitable. We expect to participate in that and to be able to build a f***ing life."
Netflix believes it is in a better position than most to weather the storm.
"If there is [a strike], we have a large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world. We could probably serve our members better than most," said Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos on an earnings call.
Could AI soon script your favourite shows?
It's a different situation for writers, who feel they are about to experience another significant disruption from AI.
The fear is that chatbots like ChatGPT, which can generate writing and mimic human dialogue, will eventually replace writers or replicate their existing work without credit.
Similar conversations have already begun in the music space, after an AI version of singers Drake and the Weekend were used to create a fake song called Heart on My Sleeve.
The pop track went viral before being shut down over intellectual property concerns early last month.
Nunan, the founder of Bull's Eye Entertainment, believes AI poses a threat to everyone "in every industry" because of how quickly and effectively programs like ChatGPT can generate content.
"If I was involved in negotiations on behalf of the writers, this would be — of the 10 issues, I'd be negotiating with the producers — this would be one through 10. It's that important," he told the ABC.
"It's, if you forgive the expression, it's an existential threat to their very existence."
Ben Mankiewicz, a prime-time host and grandson of Herman Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the 1941 classic Citizen Kane, has described his experiments with ChatGPT in the screenwriting space as both "exciting" and "disturbing".
"I find it very hard to believe that it's ever going to get the humanity that makes a screenplay great," he told the Guardian.
But AI remains a known unknown. As the technology develops, writers see the potential for these programs to devalue their original work in a process that has been described as "automated intellectual asset-stripping".
The WGA has argued safeguards need to be put in place before the AI revolution takes a firm hold.
It isn't calling for an outright ban on AI's use, but has suggested chatbots like ChatGPT could be used to help writers write a script as long as they don't have to share credit or residuals, according to Variety.
It reportedly wants a guarantee "literary material" — an umbrella term for screenplays, dialogues and other things people write — can't be generated by AI and that writers' must be human beings.
The WGA has also argued that "source material" — which could be a novel, an article or another piece of work that could be adapted for the screen — can't be generated by AI.
"We're all trying to come up with definitions right now, there is no one definition for anything, and what the writers are trying to do is really regulate the use of AI in any kind of creative endeavour," Nunan said.
But so far the AMPTP has refused the WGA's demands around AI, instead responding with a counter offer of "annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology".
"The studios basically have taken the position, [they're] not even going to open the door on that issue. [They] want to wait and see what happens," Nunan said.
The domino effect about to hit Hollywood
Hollywood insiders expect the strike to last at least several months, given that writers and producers have both walked away from the negotiating table.
What that might mean for American audiences — and viewers around the world — is the possibility of weird and wild storylines on some of their favourite TV shows.
In the last writers' strike, one of the characters of Friday Night Lights got away with murder after the strange subplot was forgotten in the chaos.
Meanwhile, Daniel Craig stepped into the role of writer, rewriting scenes for Quantum of the Solace.
Nunan believes it's unlikely you'll start to see AI-scripted television shows and film just yet.
"If studios and networks start to turn to [AI] for content, it's going to be very gradual," he said.
"It's not going to just like with a snap of a finger or a light switch, just come on …
"I think whatever rollout occurs would happen very slowly. And it would happen probably after this [strike] is resolved."
The strike could also be just the beginning of a blockbuster season of industrial action in Hollywood.
The Screen Actors Guild and the Director's Guild of America are due to begin renegotiating their contracts with producers in the coming weeks.
If they cannot reach a deal by June 30, actors and directors — who also feel short-changed by the rise of streaming services — could join their writer colleagues on the picket line.
"Everything changed with streaming," said actor Amanda Seyfried who recently starred in Hulu's miniseries The Dropout.
"Everyone should be compensated for their work. It's f***ing easy."
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