The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (39 page)

In response to the growing number of members who were scripting video games, both branches of the WGA formed divisions to handle gaming contracts, and the Guild created an outreach program designed to assist writers who were working with video game companies and wanted their work to fall under WGA jurisdiction. In 2003, the video game industry was worth $11 billion.
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Just four years later, the Entertainment Software Association declared that video game sales had reached $18.85 billion, with $9.35 billion spent on consoles and $9.5 billion spent on software.
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The WGA also began honoring these writers with an annual Game Writing Award. (Unfortunately, only games created by signatory companies were eligible, which left out the vast majority of the most popular games.) Members formed a New Media Writers Caucus, which offered associate membership to any working video
game writer. Given the vast potential audience switching their home television sets to auxiliary modes, this film- and television-based media union could no longer ignore the significance of a growing labor force. Furthermore, the video game industry was one of the only media sectors actively hiring a significant number of writers at the time.
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The industry was changing rapidly, and the Guild, as always, wanted to remain relevant.

Organizing the Membership

I never worked harder, being out of work.

—Bill Scheft, writer on
Late Night with David Letterman
, interview, 6 April 2012

The WGA’s new leadership was particularly astute in crafting a top-down approach to energize their membership base in the lead-up to the 2007 negotiations. Part of this strategy involved the mobilization of key individuals, notably A-list writers, who functioned as ammunition against the AMPTP. Here, notions of hierarchies and authorship were used to the advantage of the entire writing community. These key writers used their celebrity to influence public opinion and to encourage other writers to join the Guild’s campaign. The Guild’s leadership targeted television showrunners and well-respected feature film writers, inviting them to join the board and the contract negotiation committee. Executive Director David Young understood the unique power of showrunners: “Our television screenwriters operate the most successful franchises in this industry. . . . They are in this quasi-management role and yet, because of the history and culture of this organization they came out of a writing room. . . . We have paid a lot of attention to that. Not because I wanted to be elitist . . . but because I just analyzed the situation and said, these people can almost make or break us in a strike situation.”
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At a dinner hosted by the WGA for 120 writer-producer hyphenate members, these prominent showrunners realized that many among them had been asked to create “promotional” web shorts for the studios without compensation. This gathering galvanized key members, and they agreed that if a strike were to happen, the hyphenates would walk out. Reversing the stance they had taken in previous Guild struggles, most hyphenates now agreed that the two jobs could not be separated.

The WGA used the power that successful writers held in board rooms, writers’ rooms, and programming meetings not only to build awareness and visibility but also to remind the AMPTP of the creative labor it would lose in a walkout. David Goodman, a member of the WGA’s board and negotiating committee, emphasized that the Guild “made a concerted effort to get A-list people half in TV, half feature [film]. By doing that . . . we were telling the companies that this was something to be taken seriously, not just by Guild activists but by rank-and-file Guild members, and by rank-and-file I mean
important
members, members who have big earnings and who the companies can’t not be in business with. Setting that example in the negotiating committee got us a few steps further down the road in terms of organizing both sides, feature and television, than we could have been if we had just gone with Guild activists.”
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The committee included a showrunner from each of the networks as well as Oscar-winning writers from virtually every major studio, including Ronald Bass, John Bowman (writer on
Saturday Night Live
and
Murphy Brown
), Marc Cherry (creator of
Desperate Housewives
), Bill Condon (who adapted
Chicago
and
Dreamgirls
for the screen), Carlton Cuse (showrunner for
Lost
), Stephen Gaghan (who wrote
Traffic
), Carl Gottlieb (writer of
Jaws
), Susannah Grant (who wrote
Erin Brockovich
), Carol Mendelsohn (showrunner for
CSI
), Marc Norman, Shawn Ryan (creator of
The Shield
), Ed Solomon (who wrote
Men in Black
), and Larry Wilmore (creator of
The Bernie Mac Show
), among others. Putting these members in positions of authority was a strategic step in building the membership’s trust in the board and the negotiating committee. In years past, some of the most egregious infighting during negotiations and strikes came from high-profile writers who felt their needs were not being served. When these writers defected, others followed, and the AMPTP would take advantage of the weakened Guild to make a deal beneficial to the companies.
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The WGA East used a model of strike captains, each of whom was responsible for galvanizing a group of writers.
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The East also sent veteran writers to the negotiating table, including Terry George, writer of
In the Name of the Father
and
Hotel Rwanda
, Brian Koppelman (
Ocean’s Thirteen
), and Raphael Yglesias (
Fearless
). The diversity of well-respected players sitting across the bargaining table from the AMPTP sent a message to both the membership and the studios that the union was mobilizing its community for the fight ahead.

In the months leading up to the strike, the whole industry was hopeful that a walkout could be averted. But from very early on, there were signs that an agreement responsive to the writers’ demands would be virtually impossible without a standoff. In mid-July 2007 the AMPTP told a group of national journalists, “We want to make the deals. We want to share in success with both the networks and our creative partners, but we just need some time to figure out what those business models are going to look like.”
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Whatever desire the studios claimed to have “to share in success” was absent at the preliminary contract negotiations later that month. Rather than offering the Guild a point of entry into digital compensation rates, the AMPTP put forward proposals that partially revoked rights to residuals previously won by the WGA. According to Mark Gunn, who was on the WGA negotiating committee, that hard-line tactic ended up helping the writers to unite: “The AMPTP had every opportunity to split us. All they had to do is make us a low-ball offer and a chunk of our membership would have said, ‘Take it, we can’t afford a strike.’ Instead they made us a series of ridiculous offers that no reasonable member of the Writers Guild would say yes to—thus forcing us to go on strike.”
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As the months allotted for negotiations dwindled down to weeks, the Guild conceded key issues, but the AMPTP held its line. The WGA contract would expire on October 31, 2007, but the Guild’s plan was to stay on the job until the following summer so that writers could walk out together with the Screen Actors Guild and possibly the Directors Guild. (AFTRA’s MBA was up for renewal in January 2008, and the SAG and DGA MBAs would expire on June 30, 2008.) Then came an idea from the East. At one of the East’s negotiating committee meetings in late September, Susan Kim remembered screenwriter Adam Brooks (
French Kiss
) asking, “What if we go out [on strike] now?” meaning when the WGA contract expired rather than waiting until June.
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The studios were planning to stockpile scripts all winter. Warren Leight, then the showrunner for
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
, told the group that a November strike would instantly end his show’s ability to run new episodes. The East talked to the West, and the two boards decided that if the writers were going to have to strike, they would go out when the WGA contract expired. Michael Winship, senior writer of
Moyers & Company
, who had assumed the presidency of the WGA East in September 2007, saw surprise as key to success. The strike “really caught them flat-footed, which will never happen again, but in that instance, they caught them totally off guard.”
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The strike authorization passed with an astonishing 93 percent of the membership of both branches of the Guild giving approval. With negotiations going nowhere, a walkout suddenly seemed inevitable. On November 5, 2007, the 12,000 members of the WGA began a strike that would last 100 days.

The decision to harness the power of the celebrity writer was crucial to the Guild’s strike plan. Television showrunners—not just those on the negotiating committee, but all head writers—became key players in spreading the right message about the strike. This outreach was highly successful: showrunners encouraged their staff writers to join them on the picket line, and those writers then informed others about the action, thus building a network of strikers who felt connected to their picket teams. “It was an absolutely intentional strategy for a number of reasons,” David Goodman explained. “There would be people out in the world who may not know Carlton Cuse, but they may know ‘Carlton Cuse, executive producer of
Lost
’; you may not know Marc Cherry, but they know ‘Marc Cherry, creator of
Desperate Housewives
.’ The general public knows those names.”
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The WGA could not indemnify showrunners from the possibility that studios would sue them for breach of contract, but it was unlikely the studios would mount lawsuits. They needed their showrunners back as soon as the strike ended and were disinclined to create ill will with these indispensable employees.

On the first day, 3,000 WGA West picketers circled the sidewalks in front of Fox, CBS, Warner Bros., Sony, Paramount, and Disney. Their red union T-shirts against the blue California sky and white studio buildings created perfect images on the covers of newspapers, on television screens, and on websites. On average, 1,500 WGA West writers walked every weekday for three months.
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In the East, the Guild coordinated its members to picket at a different corporate headquarters or studio each day. The images of WGA East members picketing the conglomerates in the freezing cold and snow struck a different chord and gave the group an aura of gravitas.

The two branches of the Guild displayed their unique styles on the picket line. Bill Scheft of the East remembers, “The difference between the East and the West? They had Alicia Keys and we had the not-yet-disgraced John Edwards.”
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But getting Edwards was actually a major coup. After standing with the East, Edwards refused to cross a picket line to take part in a presidential debate at CBS on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The other candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, quickly sidestepped also, and the debate was canceled. “That was very effective,” according to Winship. “It fell on that very slow news day just by accident. So it got this huge amount of coverage.”
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IMAGE 24   Striking writers in front of the iconic Paramount Studio gates on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (2007).

Photo by author

The AMPTP placed a series of full-page ads in the business trades and national newspapers. In response, the WGA turned to its own membership to assemble a communications campaign for the strike. In addition to using phone banks and traditional press releases, the WGA exploited digital communication to access members, the Hollywood community, the press, and the general public by way of private e-mail and public blogs. Writers recognized, as did the AMPTP, that positive public relations and media attention would help sway professional and public opinion. Roger Wolfson, a television writer for
Saving Grace
and
The Closer
, remembered the third day of the strike, when the WGA realized how tough this war of words would be:

When all seven media companies responded by consolidating their PR operations under the guidance of Sony’s Jim Kennedy, a former White House spokesman—and eventually, Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane, two of the highest paid and previously most sought-after media consultants in America—Guild members bolstered the Guild’s
communications department with a media room of its own. At 4:00 on Thursday, November 8th, we put out a call for writers with PR, political, or journalistic experience. Within an hour, the room was staffed by a rotating group of thirty WGA members, many having worked for national campaigns or major newspapers, and they worked nearly fulltime for the rest of the strike.
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The importance of e-mail, especially for a membership dispersed across the country, should not be underestimated. The leadership was able to coordinate with and spread official word to Guild members more cheaply, simply, and efficiently than ever before.
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Strike captains regularly sent out e-bulletins to update members on the state of negotiations or picketing schedules. The Guild also launched a number of e-mail campaigns to promote government support and public awareness. They asked that writers encourage their friends and family to spread information about the strike and invite them to get involved through support campaigns.