By Andy Schauer
For those unfamiliar, the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) – the collective bargaining union organized by and for film and television writers – is currently on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which is the collective bargaining entity comprised of those producers and distributors who hire the writers and profit from their work. The strike began on May 2nd and there has been virtually no news of any progress on the parties’ negotiations. That being the case, it seemed a good time to start a deep-dive series on the strike and the circumstances surrounding it.
This first installment is about getting our bearings. We should start by clarifying, there actually isn’t “a” WGA. The WGA West is based in Los Angeles and has around 20,000 members, while the WGA East is based in Manhattan and represents about 5,000 members. While the organizations are administered separately, they negotiate in tandem against the AMPTP. David Young is the WGA West’s executive director and was the lead negotiator in the 2007-08 writers’ strike. He was going to reprise that role but stepped aside for medical reasons in February. His assistant executive director, Ellen Stultzman, was selected as lead negotiator in his stead. Stultzman is regarded not only as an excellent researcher with a firm grasp on the increasingly complex film and TV market, but the ability to clearly communicate her insights. She was instrumental in writers’ 2019 campaign to end a talent agency practice known as “packaging” – supposedly a way for the agencies to streamline sales of their client-writers’ projects which had the net effect of skimming money from the writers into their own hands – so she has experience in staking out and defending difficult positions. Stultzman’s decision making will be guided by a 24-member negotiating committee co-chaired by David A. Goodman and Chris Keyser, who are both longtime writers and showrunners in addition to being current and past presidents (respectively) of the WGA West.
The AMPTP encompasses roughly 350 companies. Many of these member companies are smaller producers. However, the major studios (Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Universal, and Sony/Columbia), networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC) and streaming service providers (including Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+, etc.) are also represented. They are also the ones who largely set the tone and strategy for the AMPTP’s negotiations. Tasked with executing that strategy is AMPTP president and lead negotiator Carol Lombardini, who assumed the presidency in 2009 after acting as the AMPTP’s number two negotiator during 2007-08 strike. Like the WGA, AMPTP also has a negotiating committee. Unlike the WGA, however, they do not publicize who is on it.
Whether or not he is actually on the committee, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has emerged as a (perhaps the) target of the writers and labor-aligned activists. He says many of the right things publicly (e.g. “For this industry to succeed, everybody needs to feel fully valued,” or “Our objective would be that everybody gets fairly compensated for work they do.” Source), but his pay package is among the richest in the industry. Since taking control of WBD last year, he has also made (or at least overseen) numerous decisions seen as anti-creative (and particularly anti-writer), the most recent of which was an “oversight” that resulted in the Max streaming service no longer crediting creative workers with their individual roles (“Writer,” “Director,” etc.) but listing all the top-line people involved as “Creators” (Source).
But what’s driving Zaslav (and other executives) to make these kinds of decisions? We’ll start to dive into that question in more detail in our next installment which will cover “The Numbers.”
