[Top negotiators for the writers guild believe the studios’
interests “are no longer sufficiently aligned to allow them to
easily negotiate together” ]
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WRITERS’ REPS TELL THE STORY | NEGOTIATING WITH HOLLYWOOD  
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Jeremy Fuster

The Wrap
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_ Top negotiators for the writers guild believe the studios’
interests “are no longer sufficiently aligned to allow them to
easily negotiate together” _

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Writers are finally back to work in Hollywood after the WGA and
studios reached a deal, which has left many in the industry asking,
“What took so long?”

Chris Keyser and David A. Goodman, the co-chairs of WGA’s
negotiating committee, pin the blame on the stall tactics that the
studios used alongside the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television
Producers, one that was rendered ineffective by the solidarity built
between the WGA and other unions throughout the summer.

“The AMPTP was created in the 80s during the Reagan era, a very
anti-labor time. Now, labor is reasserting itself over the last few
years, and the AMPTP can’t use old tactics anymore of stalling and
trying to squeeze the unions,” Keyser told TheWrap.

He continued, “The broad response I have heard from people I’ve
spoken to after seeing the deal we negotiated is anger at the studios,
people asking, ‘Why did you take a strike? Why did you take five
months and allow so much damage before taking this reasonable
deal?’”

[Hollywood CEOs and WGA lead negotiators during strike]
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The WGA’s deal saw the union earn a great deal of what it pushed
for
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the summer-long strike, including AI protections, a structure for
minimum staffing requirements on streaming shows, a guaranteed
two-step pay structure for screenwriters and minimum employment
requirements for Appendix A shows like comedy-variety.

Now it’s SAG-AFTRA’s turn to get back to the negotiating table
with a new round of talks starting on Monday. But even if a deal can
be reached there, it won’t be long before the studios and AMPTP will
be back to negotiate new contracts with IATSE and Teamsters Local 399
next year.

“I think what we found is that the AMPTP is an alliance of companies
whose basic interests are no longer sufficiently aligned to allow them
to easily negotiate together,” Keyser said. “The duration of this
strike came from the AMPTP framework of handling labor, and it has
caused them enormous damage. If they continue on this path, it won’t
just be labor that says something has to change. I think it’s going
to be the companies as well.”

Read more of Keyser and Goodman’s thoughts on the WGA’s deal and
how it can help SAG-AFTRA in its talks in the interview below, which
has been edited for length and clarity.

[Gina Rodriguez, Billy Porter, Yara Shahidi]
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WE HAVE HEARD FROM OTHER WGA NEGOTIATING COMMITTEE MEMBERS THAT THE
FIRST DAY OF THE TALKS THAT LED TO THE DEAL WAS SO RADICALLY DIFFERENT
FROM THE TALKS IN AUGUST. WHAT FIRST GAVE YOU THE INDICATION THAT
THERE WAS A MAJOR CHANGE FROM THE STUDIOS?
DAVID GOODMAN: We had conversations with the CEOs leading up to those
talks that definitely gave us the impression that they had been doing
some work in the interim to try to come back with a proposal that
would be more meaningful, especially around streaming. They had sort
of given a preview of that without giving specifics, but they signaled
they had that counterproposal. So obviously, when they made the
proposal, that that was incredibly gratifying that they were doing
something that they said they’d never do.

Personally, I think we did seal it on Wednesday, because that counter
showed us that we were on the way to a deal, that they were now
serious about discussing our issues.

CHRIS, WE HEARD FROM STUDIO SOURCES THAT YOUR CONVERSATIONS WITH
SEVERAL CEOS, INCLUDING DAVID ZASLAV, WERE KEY TO GETTING TALKS
RESTARTED. WHAT DID YOU HEAR FROM THEM THAT MADE YOU FEEL CONFIDENT
THAT THINGS WERE IN PLACE FOR TALKS TO GET STARTED AGAIN?
CHRIS KEYSER: Well, as David said, and he was on several of those
calls with me, it was the fact that they told us there was going to be
a different counterproposal than what they urged us to agree to last
month. We didn’t know for sure until we were actually in the room
with them on Wednesday, but there was a tone and specificity to what
they were telling us on those calls that led us to believe that they
were being straightforward. And then once we actually saw it and they
spoke to us in the room, we knew that we had moved out of that phase
of posturing and power playing and it was time to just sit down and
knock this thing out.

[wga-strike-rally-la-brea-tar-pits writers strike]

WGA Strike rally at the La Brea Tar Pits

HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK THE PUBLIC REJECTION
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YOUR MEMBERS OF THE AMPTP’S AUGUST PROPOSAL PLAYED AN IMPACT ON THE
STUDIOS?
GOODMAN: I think what’s interesting about that moment was that they
weren’t ready to make a deal yet. They had made this offer that they
thought was as far as they needed to go, and they wanted to use it as
a cudgel to try to divide leadership from the membership.

What that showed was just a lack of understanding of what the strike
was about, and their attempts of trying to convince the membership
that the leadership is crazy, which is an old tactic that many
companies use, was just not going to work.

HOW DID THE GUILD AND STUDIOS SETTLE ON A STREAMING BONUS MODEL FOR
WRITERS AS OPPOSED TO A RESIDUAL STRUCTURE AS YOU INITIALLY PROPOSED?
KEYSER: I think one of the difficult things about that part of the
talks is that in streaming, they’ve managed in some ways to divorce
viewership from success. Linear TV had reruns and advertising, so if
you ran it again, you made more money or if you sold one to another
platform, you sold it for a certain amount of money.

But in streaming, you put something on a service and it sits there
forever and whether more and more people watching it over and over
again had any positive effect on the streamer’s business success was
hard to say. So when we made our proposal on streaming, we told them,
“We know you know more than us on this, and if you don’t like the
viewership residual proposal, propose something else.”

With the bonus model being set at a percentage of the total subscriber
base, the standard of success to earn it adjusts depending on the
subscriber size of the platform the show is on. Of course, we
negotiated to try to get as many titles as possible to qualify for
that bonus, but it was a foot in the door to gain more transparency in
how successful a show was doing no matter what streaming service it is
on.

[Casey Bloys]
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THE STUDIOS DID NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT AI BECAUSE SO MUCH OF THE
TECHNOLOGY IS STILL HYPOTHETICAL. YOUR MEMBERS FORCED THE ISSUE, BUT
HOW HARD WAS IT TO NEGOTIATE TERMS WHEN THERE’S STILL SO MUCH
UNKNOWN ABOUT WHAT AI CAN DO?
KEYSER: When we sat down the the executives individually, the AI
discussions were easier compared to other stuff. It was just the legal
language that made it so hard and took a lot of time at the end
because, as you said, we don’t know the full effects that AI will
have on the industry yet.

But we still got the two vital things we wanted on AI. First,
there’s how AI affects our work going forward. We got really deep
meaningful protections that AI is not literary material, that the
credited writer has to be a person and that person’s compensation
cannot be infringed upon.

The other question was about what has already been written and what
what the rules were concerning how companies could use the work that
we had written to train AI. Remember, this is different from the risks
posed by ChatGPT and Open AI, that those who do not own the copyright
might use the work that we have written to create new material. There,
I think we and the companies are on the same side.

But what happens inside companies with the material that they already
own, that we’ve already written, where they actually have copyright?
It’s a little unclear how they intersect with AI, but they certainly
have some legal copyright rights in that material. We, on the other
hand, have contractual rights in that, and where those copyright
rights and contractual rights intersect is the question. We think the
right thing to do is to say, “We retain all of our rights under law
in the MBA, the companies retain all the rights,” and then we will
negotiate whenever the time comes that AI creates a situation where
those rights have a conflict.

[AI Media Tech]
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THERE ARE SO MANY DIFFERENT SECTIONS OF THIS CONTRACT THAT SECURE
HIGHER PAY, FROM TWO-STEP PAY FOR SCREENWRITERS TO GUARANTEED NUMBER
OF WEEKS OF MINIMUM PAY FOR SCRIPTED AND COMEDY-VARIETY SHOWS AND A
PREMIUM FOR WORKING IN A MINIROOM. HOW DO YOU THINK WE ARE GOING TO
SEE THE OVERALL TRENDS IN WRITERS’ PAY CHANGE IN THE NEXT TWO YEARS?
KEYSER: Well, obviously, all writers’ minimums are going to go up
substantially, so that downward trend on writer pay will be reversed
there. What happens to above-scale pay is harder to predict, but we
hope that this contract will give agents more ammunition to push for
higher pay for their writer clients.

There are a number of companies that put a hard cap on salaries for
writers that aren’t on overall deals — $12,500 per week is the
figure we see get bandied about the most senior writers, but that’s
not a remarkable above-scale rate for someone who has been writing for
10, 15, 20 years. Agents have had a hard time breaking that, but now
with this contract, the scale rate in many rooms for writer-producers
is $14,000 per week. We don’t know how the companies will act on
this, but we feel that we’ve given agents more leverage to negotiate
for higher pay.

SAG-AFTRA HAS ALSO BEEN LOOKING TO INCREASE THEIR MEMBERS’
COMPENSATION, AND DURING THEIR TALKS THEY WERE PUSHING FOR A
SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN BASIC RATES. BUT IN YOUR CONTRACT, YOU AGREE
WITH THE AMPTP TO THE SAME BASIC RATE INCREASES AS THE DIRECTORS GUILD
WHILE SECURING PAY INCREASES IN MANY OTHER AREAS. AS SAG-AFTRA RESUMES
TALKS NEXT WEEK, DO YOU THINK THAT THEY CAN TAKE A SIMILAR STRATEGY IF
THE AMPTP INSISTS ON THE SAME BASIC RATE INCREASE?GOODMAN: I don’t
think the big takeaway from our talks that can apply to SAG-AFTRA is
about what path they can take but what path the studios need to take,
and that’s to take the union’s demands seriously. We rejected the
AMPTP pattern bargaining strategy that they have used for decades.

Now, we couldn’t completely overthrow it. There are still parts of
this contract that we agreed to that the AMPTP patterned after the DGA
deal, but we stuck firm to demands that were unique to writers until
the studios understood that we wouldn’t accept any deal that
didn’t properly address them. The actors have been doing the same
thing with their unique demands out on the picket line since July, and
I’m confident that they will get those demands satisfied in a way
that, like our contract, doesn’t affect the companies’ bottom
line.

_YOU ARE READING AN EXCLUSIVE WRAPPRO ARTICLE FOR FREE. WANT TO LEVEL
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_For all of TheWrap’s Hollywood strike coverage, click here
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_Jeremy Fuster: Box Office Reporter • [email protected] •
Twitter: @JEREMYFUSTER [[link removed]]_

* Writers' Guild of America
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* WGA
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* WGA Writers Strike
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* Hollywood
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