While I was covering the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, an obvious question for a follow-up was what the future of Hollywood would be. While there’s certainly been a lot of pieces since the end of the strikes, one of the conversations I found that touched on this was with Adam Conover on his Factually podcast. It’s from August of last year, arguably during the height of the strikes. I actually linked to it…
I’ve had the chance to catch up on a lot of Scriptnotes episodes over the past few weeks, which is always a good thing. Scriptnotes is a weekly podcast hosted by screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin which has been going on for over a decade and continues to have things about and interesting to screenwriters. As I’ve been meaning to do some posts about the future of Hollywood following last year’s strikes and the…
I still should work on a wrap-up post regarding last year’s Hollywood Strikes, but one of the outcomes the unions were able to negotiate was visibility about the success of shows on streaming services. In what definitely feels like an effort to guide that narrative, Netflix released a heretofore unprecedented amount of data publicly in December regarding how many people watched what on their service. You can get a summary, watch a half hour press…
So, the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, approved a tentative agreement with AMPTP on November 8th, but the agreement has yet to be ratified by the membership and there appear to be a lot of questions about how AI is being dealt with (actors’ concerns being similar yet different in some important regards than writers). So I’ll plan to write something post-ratification (and yes, the presumption is that the agreement will be ratified). But the ratification vote…
Like many, many other people, I had hoped that the end to the WGA strike would lead to a quick negotiation with SAG-AFTRA in its wake. Unfortunately, the AMPTP has evidently walked away from the negotiating table because learning nothing is… a power move? I’m not sure. Anyway, I am already speculating on what the future will bring, because even though we’ve heard a lot about how streaming isn’t the most lucrative business model ever…
Okay, I’ll be honest: I was putting off finishing this post in hopes that I could do one big post about the end of both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Although SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP are back at the negotiating table since last week, as of this writing, they haven’t made a deal. The WGA, however, has made a deal and, in a trend they established from the get-go, the WGA has provided a great summary…
So I’ll have a longer post in October as previously mentioned, but for those seven or nine people actually getting some updates about the strikes from this blog, a tentative deal has been struck between the AMPTP and the WGA as reported various places. As you’ll see in the article linked above, there are several procedural steps that are not perfunctory that involve the WGA West and East boards validating the deal and then, importantly,…
Evidently, meetings will resume between the WGA and AMPTP staring tomorrow, Wednesday, September 20th, so just a few things to update from the Strikes. “Hot Strike Summer” continues to radiate heat throughout the film industry and beyond. The studios suspended some development deals with more established writers, some of whom were about to meet with the studios before the main WGA/AMPTP meeting was announced. Related to labor organizing Marvel VFX artists have been feeling the…
The Hollywood strikes continue and have no end in sight as I mentioned in my last post. So, with that “no news is bad news,” I thought I’d share some good news for this Labor Day. Now, I’m more of a Tom Swifty fan than Taylor Swift fan, but besides knowing that “girl can write a song,” I appreciate how she’s taken the “with great power comes great responsibility” challenge seriously. You see, she’s made…
We’re at the end of Summer with the start of Labor Day Weekend, we’re well over 100 days into the WGA strike, and we do have some developments since both strikes began. But before I get to that, I should cover what hasn’t changed. It’s still a puzzler as to why the companies haven’t settled considering what is being asked. AMPTP, the group representing the companies (both the traditional studios like Paramount and the streamers…