The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 614 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This week, the WGA ratified a new contract with the studios, marking the conclusion of the 148-day strike, but that’s not the end of the story, nor does it really give a sense of how this all began. Today on the show, I will welcome the co-chair and chief orator of the WGA Negotiating Committee, Chris Keyser, to help us understand the storytelling behind the strike. Chris Keyser, welcome back to Scriptnotes.
Chris Keyser: It’s good to see you again, John. It’s been a couple of days since I was locked in a room with you for five months.
John: We were locked in rooms for a very, very long time. I know we are all kind of sick of talking about negotiations, but I promise this one is going to be different, because it’s going to be crafty. It’s going to be much more like… Greta Gerwig was sitting in your seat a few years back, and we were talking through Little Women. We were going through pages of the script, like, “Why did you make this choice? Why this word, not that word?” We’re going to do the same with you here, because we’re going to look at three of your speeches as a framework for talking about the overall narrative and storytelling that was so crucial for this whole campaign, for figuring this out.
Chris: A speech and two sequels.
John: A speech and two sequels, yes. You became not notorious but beloved, I’ll say, for long speeches. People loved your long speeches. We’ll talk through those speeches.
Chris: Is “long” the operative word in all that?
John: No. Inspiring, meaningful, scene-setting speeches. I think actually there’s a lot to learn here just in terms of how we tell stories, because in these speeches, we see that you had to establish a premise, identify themes and characters, structure a timeline, and it weirdly is a lot like what we do in our day jobs. One of the members of the Negotiating Committee said it was like being in the best writers’ room that just went on for forever.
Chris: It’s true. It’s true. Although we don’t start by saying it’s a story, in the end we have to tell a story to the members, and they have to believe the story and want to be a part of it.
John: Yes, and so we have to tell a story that feels true to them, and we have to be honest and truthful with them at every moment. Yet we’re still always trying to make sure that we’re framing it in ways that they can relate to, that they can identify with.
Chris: Exactly.
John: We’re going to talk about all that, and in a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about debate, because you were president of the Harvard University Debate Council.
Chris: You remember.
John: I remember way back then. You’ve stayed active in debate. I just don’t know debate at all. You’ve coached debate.
Chris: I have. We can talk about it, yes. I’m happy to talk about that.
John: Also, we’ve got a clip of you as a 23-year-old.
Chris: I’m less happy about that.
John: It’s amazing. You’re killing it on the debate stage. It’s strange to see, because it’s both you sound like a 23-year-old and you sound exactly like Chris Keyser, which is a great combination. You’re going to want to be a Premium Member to hear that Bonus Segment.
Last time you were here, Chris Keyser, I think we were sitting in this room, and we were talking through the agency campaign, which was a whole thing and a challenge. Before we got into what happened in this campaign, this negotiation, could you set the table a little bit for where we were at around 2019, where the Guild was at, what we saw as the big, broad issues going into 2020 and then into 2023?
Chris: Sure. I might even go further back than that-
John: Please.
Chris: … if that’s okay. I remember.
John: Please.
Chris: David Goodman will remember this too, because I bring it up a lot, that he and I had a breakfast while I was president of the Guild at some point. I don’t even know what year it was. I finished my term in 2015. He said to me, “Nothing’s going to happen unless you come up with an agenda for how we’re going to move things forward.” I don’t mean it was just mine alone. But that began a conversation, and he was part of it, and obviously a central part of it, and others were too, and so was David Young and everyone on staff at the Guild.
We began to identify some issues that we were seeing on the horizon that we need to deal with over the next decade or so. They included, and you know because you were a part of this, one, dealing with how we’re paid, the idea that drafts, which were the old measure of payment, the unit of pay, were no longer sufficient either for screenwriters or for television writers, whose work was getting longer and longer. So we talked about that. We talked about our relationship with our agents and the extent to which our agents were representing us as true fiduciaries. We talked a lot about the three guilds and the need for a kind of unified bargaining strategy. Those were the among the highlights of that. The conversation began in earnest. A good first step in all of that was probably 2017 when we took on span, in addition to trying to save our health care plan.
John: Span, for folks who are new to this, is the idea that a certain amount of pay in television gives you a certain number of weeks of that writer’s time, but you can’t drag people out forever on that.
Chris: Exactly, exactly. Essentially, when you sign a contract, you need to know what the term of the contract is. It doesn’t mean very much to say, “Look how much I’m paid. I just didn’t realize it was for the next 25 years.” That was all part of a conversation that we’d been having also, because we’d talked about free rewrites for screenwriters. The Committee on the Professional Status of Writers had made the rounds amongst all the studios for years and years and years talking about all of that. It was part of the same question, which is you get you a payment, you think it’s for a period of time, and then you end up working some multiple of that, and it’s no longer a viable career. It began there in 2017.
2017 was also important, I think, because it was the beginning of us testing the relationship between leadership and the membership. Maybe testing is the wrong word, but solidifying it, beginning to use our power again. Broadly speaking – and I’m not the best expert at this, other people will do better – the strike of 2007 and 2008 came after nearly two decades of Guild fear of using its own power after the strike of 1988.
Patrick and John Bauman and all of those and David Young, who reestablished the Guild as a kind of fighting force, took on the issue of jurisdiction of the internet, at some cost, because the Guild was not unified at that point. They had to build it from scratch. That strike obviously succeeded in achieving its principal goal but also revealed some of those ongoing divisions in the Guild. In 2017 we took a strike authorization vote. It was the first time the membership had voted not to strike but to give the Negotiating Committee the power to call a strike if needed to at contract deadline.
That was an important process. We didn’t end up going on strike, but it tested the waters in some sense. That led us to begin to talk about the agency campaign. It’s the way in which the agents and minimums in the MBA are, as David Young has said, just two sides of the same coin, how we get paid. The agency campaign was maybe the most important thing the Guild has done.
John: It was one of the strangest things the Guild has done, because it’s not going up against our traditional adversary. It’s not going up against the studios the way you do every three years. This was attempting to forge a new relationship with the agencies, who are in theory our allies, but oftentimes were working at cross-purposes to us.
Chris: That’s right. That was not an easy thing to do. It was different from a strike, because writers did not lose work in the course of doing it, but it went on for a very long time, and it tested the Guild’s resolve. The Guild held together through all of that, thanks in large part to everybody who was on that Negotiating Committee. David Goodman was remarkable in that struggle.
We ended up obviously resetting the relationship between writers and their agents and limiting the extent to which they could function not as our fiduciaries but as independent parties to our contracts, who would be paid directly by the studios or, alternatively, establish their own studios. They were both our employers and our representatives at the same time.
John: But that campaign also, I think, established a different connection between writers and the Guild, and the sense that the writers should’ve felt like they were in charge of the Guild and they could act together as part of the Guild to make changes that they wanted to see happen.
Going into that, we had the captain system, which we built up out of the remnants of 2007, 2008. But it was the first time really in practice we had to see people following leadership but also leading and self-organizing to do things. I remember the events like Latinx writers nights to talk about staffing and how to figure out new, alternative systems for that. Just the entrepreneurial nature of our membership was so apparent that they actually could take on that role and weren’t afraid.
Chris: That’s right. That’s exactly right. The other thing that the agency campaign proved was precisely how democratic the Writers Guild was. Without going back and reliving that or identifying who was on what side of the conversation, there were some number of people, showrunners and others, who wish we hadn’t done what we were doing during the agency campaign and made that relatively clear.
Probably if that had happened two decades earlier, that might have fundamentally divided the Guild and undermined the campaign itself. But what became clear during the agency campaign is that every individual member of the Guild has one vote in the decision about what the Guild does. That became critically important. I don’t want to suggest that we had a major fracture. It was overwhelmingly supported. But there were meaningful members of the Guild, people who had-
John: Famously, we had people running for office during the course of the agency campaign, who were down on the agency campaign.
Chris: That’s exactly right.
John: And so that we could have tension within the Guild and still be resilient and still get through it was crucial.
Chris: Yeah. Not to say it’s like 1864, but David Goodman, like Abraham Lincoln before him, was forced to run for office in the middle of a war.
John: Now, actually in the middle of the agency campaign, we had 2020, which was supposed to be a negotiation. Streaming was going to be one of the central issues on that. I was on the Negotiating Committee for that. This felt like the time where we’re going to actually really deal with streaming. We went in there with a plan. We had member meetings. Then we had a pandemic, and all the leverage we possibly would have just disappeared, because we couldn’t mount a strike threat in the middle of the pandemic. It was so strange. Everything was strange about 2020. But to go into this and have the air just go out of the balloon was really frustrating.
Chris: Yeah. It’s weird how history is defined by climate and disease so often. The pandemic marginally helped the agency campaign and undermined the MBA negotiations. I don’t want to say it exactly that way. Actually, the committee did a very good job. Not only did we use our leverage the way we could at that point, but we won some things we didn’t think we were going to win. You were centrally part of paid family leave, which was a meaningful achievement. A huge, meaningful achievement. And to do that in the middle of a period when no one was in a position to exercise the leverage we normally do was pretty remarkable.
But we had known, I would say we knew in 2017, looking forward, that there were issues that we hadn’t dealt or were just beginning to see on the horizon that at some point would come to a head. And the question was, would 2020 be the moment in which that happened, when the Guild suddenly had to deal with the changes that were being brought about by the shift to the streaming model. Not being able to do it in 2020 delayed for an additional three years the ability to face all of that stuff. That’s really difficult in an MBA perspective, because one of the things that we talk about a lot with the members is the AMPTP tends to see things as solidified inside the contract.
If you wait too long to make a change, they say, “We have a mature contract on that provision, and you’ve been okay with it for a number of cycles. We’re not really inclined to do anything about that.” That’s what we faced in 2023, a long list of things, and longer than I think we knew in 2020, or at least problems that had become exacerbated in the intervening three years that had to be addressed.
John: Let’s talk about that list-making, because the process for figuring out what we’re going to negotiate in this MBA, obviously there were conversations ahead of time, but it started with a member survey. We surveyed the entire membership to see where they’re at, what are the things they’re facing. There’s quantity of information on that, but there’s also just a lot of anecdotal data and a lot of just people’s stories. It became clear, I think from that, that there was a big list of things.
I guess the question I want to get to is, how early on did you have a sense this was going to be a kitchen sink negotiation, where it felt like there was a whole bunch of stuff that all had to be addressed in this one thing, where there wasn’t a thing we could point to that’s like, let’s save the health plan, let’s save pensions, let’s deal with that. When was it clear to you that like, oh crap, it’s a big list here?
Chris: I think it was pretty early. I don’t know for you, but we were paying enough attention in the three years intervening, although I didn’t have any sense that I was going to be playing the role I had, because I had been tracking it somewhat and was in touch with Guild leadership and all the way through. I knew that list was getting longer and complicated.
I’ll tell you one thing that relates to this. In 2017, the staff of the Guild, because they had also done research then – there were surveys done then – came to a meeting with the co-chairs of the Negotiating Committee and said, “Here’s what we think should be on the table in 2017.” I remember having a pretty vigorous conversation, where there was a lot of push back from me and Billy and Chip, Billy Ray and Chip Johannessen, and said, “That’s too much.” I don’t know what that story is. It might actually be worth… I’m sorry for-
John: Oh, go for it.
Chris: … being parenthetical about this. It’s important to know that when we talk about this as a story, it’s more documentary than a piece of fiction. I know it’s not fiction. The story doesn’t come first. The facts on the ground come first. You can’t make that stuff up. What the Guild fights for is what the membership says it needs. I don’t want to make it feel as if story matters more than the reality of being a writer.
It’s also true, as you suggested, that it’s very difficult to have a negotiation where there are many, many things on the table, both because that’s a more difficult, complex story to tell, but also because it’s more difficult to defend a negotiation itself, where the tendency is for the other side to say, “What do I need to give you before you get so close to that point at which the membership is no longer willing to fight for everything that you have to start dropping stuff?” We can talk about that more. But it’s a risky way of going into a negotiation. Maybe risky is not the way to put it. Ellen would tell me that’s the wrong word. But I see it that way as a non-pro.
In 2017 we said, “We have to begin to couch this in a way that we cover as much as we possibly can, we don’t ignore any of the central issues, but that people understand fundamentally what we’re fighting for.” This was, by the way, before the health care stuff came up in 2017, for those who don’t remember, because that was a rollback on the table.
John: That’s right. That’s right.
Chris: They gave us the story that we didn’t have. Yes, I think it was pretty clear well before this negotiation that there was no way to boil this down to one or two things.
John: Let’s talk about the first framing of all this. The first time I heard it framed was in what you call the Member Rap, which was the presentation that you give to membership, saying this is what this is going to be about. I know you had to pitch it. You gave a version to the board. You read it to the Negotiating Committee. We all had notes. I feel so bad for how many notes you got, both in the room and emailed afterwards.
Chris: That was the largest writers’ room I’ve ever been in. Everyone felt free to.
John: Of course. You’re always surrounded by the best writers who have the strongest opinions in the world, and yet you got to a really good place. I thought we might spend a few minutes looking through this rap. It’s 20 double-spaced pages. The version I see says 22.0. Is that the 22nd draft?
Chris: The 22nd draft, yes.
John: 22nd draft.
Chris: Yeah. I should say, John, remember also, we had a month or more of meetings before that where we began to talk about which issue should be included and also making some really important decisions that held all the way through. For example, the question of whether minimum room size should be based on episodes or on show budget was a big conversation that we had.
John: I do forget that there was the long list, and we were scratching things out from that early stage. It was more detailed than what the Pattern of Demands is, but it was also allowing for some flexibility. Staff would weigh in on things. There were some wild ideas that were shot down. We were also really searching for how do we unify, bring this all together, what is the story we’re telling membership out of this. You were responsible for writing out the story.
Let me hand this over to you. This is something you’ve read 20,000 times, I’m sure. I thought we might start with, this is on the bottom of Page 1, you kind of establish the premise. Would you mind reading that aloud to us, that part?
Chris: This feels a little bit like I’m in a courtroom. They say, “Do you want to read out loud what you said? Do you stand by that?” I said, “Driven in large part by the shift to the streaming model, writing is being devalued in every sector of the business: in features, with its insufficient streaming residuals and continued reliance on free work – in comedy variety, whose writers were being unprotected by Guild standards on streaming platforms – in episodic television, where short orders, endless production calendars, the decoupling of writing from production, and the related rise of the mini room are an existential threat to writer compensation and power.”
John: That feels to me like a premise. In that paragraph, you’re really talking through this is the problem that we’re facing. This is the central thing that we have to look at. It sounds obvious, but without that, I don’t know what this whole campaign is about.
Chris: It’s always important, I think, in these kinds of negotiations, to tie what’s happening to some meaningful kind of sea change in the business. In 2007-’08, it’s obviously the hint that the internet is going to take over and our stuff is going to migrate to that, to an online platform. Here it was what came out of the shift to the streaming model. People understand that. They realize it’s the “why now”-
John: Exactly.
Chris: … of this conversation.
John: In a pitch, you have to sell why do we make this movie now, why do we make this series right now, why is this important right now. This is the “why now” of this. This is the premise.
Chris: The other important thing that is more apparent to me now than before is that premise that we stuck with all the way through, of no writer left behind, of every single sector of the business being attended to, dovetailed really nicely with – we were talking about it – the increasing democratization of the Guild. This strike relied in large part on the energy and dynamism of younger members. If we had decided, and we were never going to, that this was going to be an agenda that mostly took care of showrunner problems, for example, that wouldn’t have flown. We wouldn’t have been able to get away with that. What we ended up with was broad, near universal solidarity for an agenda that, as we said here, within the first minute and a half of the very first member message, said this is for everybody.
John: Let’s talk about who this everybody are, because next up, you have a premise, but it’s not a story until there are characters. On the next page, you get to the characters. I highlighted a few of them there, if you’d mind reading those.
Chris: “Our survey tells a story – your story. Almost 7,000 of you responded. You wrote to us in detail, with anger and sometimes with anguish and fear. Here’s who we heard from:
“The screenwriter who’s on a one-step deal, who’s been writing for months while their delivery money is held hostage to the next free rewrite, whose residuals on streaming are capped at the movie-of-the-week rate, even with its A-list stars and theatrical budget.
“The staff writer who’s kept at the same level on short orders, year after year.
“The lower-level writer who’s going from 10-week job to 12-week job to 20-week job. Who sometimes can’t even get those jobs because mini rooms with their small staffs and uniform salaries, tend to favor higher-level writers. Who gets a script – maybe.”
John: In that same segment, you’re talking through comedy variety writers and mid-level writers and showrunners and making clear this is about everybody. In doing that, you are letting people say, “Oh, he mentioned me, because that’s what I am,” but also, you can imagine yourself in those other people’s position, which ended up being crucial for solidarity to make sure that we all felt like we were fighting for each other.
Chris: That’s right. That’s right. The interesting thing about this is, though the membership, I’ll say first of all, understood it intuitively, because it did come from that, the full understanding of it in some ways didn’t come until people were in these meetings and then on the picket line where they began to meet each other. It was a little bit like those stories of… We’re not really like this. We’re not provincial and living in our own little wards, but it’s like you got called up to war and you met all these people from all across the country whom you had never met before. You went places you never knew existed in some ways. You learned stuff that you wouldn’t have learned had you not been drafted into a conflict.
John: I remember on the picket line talking with Jeopardy writers or folks who do Hallmark movies. It’s such a different structure of work than I’m used to, but it’s also covered by the same Guild and they have the same issues. Because I knew that those Jeopardy writers are under the same kind of provisions, Appendix A, as comedy variety writers, I understood what the kind of things were that they were facing, which was crucial.
Chris: The companies, I think, were often – I don’t know if they are anymore, maybe not – under the misconceptions that these agendas are imposed by leadership on the membership. That is not at all what happened. It comes up from the membership, and the leadership just echoes that.
Then I think the truth of this in any one of these longer struggles is that, just as in writing, you can’t make up stakes. You can put all kinds of flowery language around something, but either the stakes are there or not. The reason why this ended up actually holding people together was because they felt it deeply.
John: You want to move ahead?
Chris: Sure.
John: You literally state the theme. It’s Page 4 there.
Chris: Yes. “7,000 individual stories – your own private economies. With one repeated theme: the business is broken. Writing is broken.”
John: You literally state the theme. That’s a thing we came back to again and again is that the companies have broken this model that was so successful for them for so many years, and we need to fix it. We need to put in place practices that actually fix and correct the mistakes that they made, not to go back to an old system, but to make this current system workable, livable, survivable.
Chris: I don’t know we knew that. The thing is, you’re just guessing at… I don’t mean we’re guessing at the problem or the solutions. It’s like having a test screening, these early member meetings, to see whether it works or not, is this a four-quadrant negotiating agenda.
John: Let’s talk about the revisions and the rewrites, because I don’t remember clearly your first passes. What was different and what changed in that rewrite process, getting notes back from the board, from Negotiating Committee, from early people listening to the drafts of this?
Chris: That’s also a little distant in my memory, because there are so many drafts. First of all, it was a honing of the way we talked about the issues. I needed, and we always need, the first time through – and I remember this in every single one of these negotiations I’ve been part of – to have people hear it and say, “Am I understanding immediately what you’re talking about?”
Remember, these meetings, you’re sitting in the audience. You have some slides up of what the proposals are, but there’s a lot of information passing through your ear canal very quickly. It’s not easy to keep track of that stuff. It’s really important. It’s mostly not visual. One thing that goes on is people saying, “I’m getting this like this. It’s crystal clear.” The second thing is, to be honest, different constituencies in the board and NegComm saying, “This doesn’t entirely address what I need, and can you make sure that it does?” There was a lot of that.
Then the third thing is just there’s a lot of good language that comes out of a 40-person writers’ room. I found it, and I think that staff and anyone did, very useful to hear even the casual comments that people made in conversation. We would just jot things down and say, “That’s a beautiful way of putting that.” I remember, because I actually referred to it at one point, Mike Schur said, “The minimum size for a writers’ room in the MBA is zero.” We’re going to use that forever.
John: Absolutely. I do remember some NegComm meetings where someone would say something, like, “Yep, we’re pulling that in.” Let’s talk about some of the very specific and, in some cases, very strong language you’re using in that. “Cold calculation.” “Unconscionable practice.” “Systematic elimination.” “Held hostage.” “Spent money like maniacs.” You’re not afraid to paint the other side as being ruthless, which I think is important here. It’s not personifying them individually. You’re not trying to go after the CEOs. You’re saying these companies are acting in ways that are not necessarily evil, but not rational, not forgivable.
Chris: That’s right. First of all is you say ad hominem attacks ever, because eventually you have to negotiate with those people, also because it really is about companies at this point, not at all about CEOs, who probably have no idea exactly what’s going on at this point in the conversation.
It is an interesting thing that one of the things you deal with, with a membership that’s very attuned to obviously its own issues but also fairness – because writers really care not just to get the most of what they deserve but to make sure what they’re asking for is fair and that we’re characterizing things honestly, which I think is probably not necessarily the case in every single negotiation for every single Guild or union – but there isn’t a requirement early, particularly if you think that this could be a conflict negotiation – and we knew from the very beginning that there was certainly a possibility of that – to rev the membership up enough to have them ready to… Negotiation really isn’t a war – really, when we said that later, we meant it – but certainly a battle. To rev them up for battle, to take it out of the realm of, these are reasonable conversations with people who would deal with you reasonably, and remind them the fact is, left alone individually, they’re really being taken advantage of in the most obscene ways.
That will change over the course of the next… This is in February, March, so the next seven months, as we begin the strike and then move toward trying to settle it, the rhetoric will change, because, and David Young always used to say, first you have to make war, and then you have to make peace. Both of those things, you have to do them equivalently well.
John: In your recollection, did you have to tone anything down? Because I know that it is always a concern about overshooting or going too far. Do you remember softening any lines in this speech as you went along?
Chris: I don’t remember specifically, but I know all the way through, yes. There’s no question that sometimes you write these things, and you begin to rev yourself up, and it feels good looking at your computer. You need somebody to say, “This may be more than we need to say.” Staff was great about that. Ellen Stutzman, Rebecca Kessinger, in addition to all the members of the NegComm who read this in the leadership, and David Goodman in particular, they were all very good about it. But yes, periodically, you had to pull back on it.
John: Now, reading through here, I was also struck by the number of times you were heading off counterarguments, and so examples being, “You are going to hear relentless rumors of the demise of the streaming business. They will be used as a weapon against you – against all of us.” “You’re living in the past, the companies will say, This is the new business model. It’s not a business model. It’s bad faith.” “Some will say the companies want us to strike. That they want an excuse to shut down production. As if anyone’s stopping them from doing that now.” “You’ll be punished, some will say. We’re being punished now. This is what punishment looks like.” Many cases in here, you’re having to anticipate the argument and shut it down before it can be made.
Chris: It’s very, very deliberate, obviously, over and over again. First of all, it is sort of a debate tactic to preempt arguments. But even more important not to think of it that way, and you probably experience this with members, is one thing that we heard from them over and over again is, “Oh, you could see it coming. You told us what was going to happen, and then it happened.”
That was important for two reasons. One, obviously, it inoculates people against the shocks that necessarily will occur over the course of some number of months. A good example of one of the largest was, “The DGA is going to make a deal at some point. You need to know that. You need to know that we’re going to stay on strike, that they’re not going to solve any of our problems. We need to tell you that up front, so in that moment there’s no fracture.”
John: There’s no other Guild in no other hall that’s going to make our deal.
Chris: That’s right. Exactly, exactly. The other thing is, you begin to get a deep well of trust with a group of people who hear you saying this is what’s going to happen tomorrow, and then it happens tomorrow. We say, “Look, they’re going to make a deal. They’re going to make us an offer, and it’s going to be a bad offer. Then they’re going to tell you this about your leadership.” All of those things end up happening.
The thing is the AMPTP in some ways were undermined in this cycle, because it really did play the same playbook over and over again. They were undermined, one, because it didn’t work, because the world had changed then, but also because they were running the same offensive or defensive plays that we had seen over and over again. We knew where we could do the shift.
John: It’s interesting you use the word playbook, because we’ve used it a lot in the last couple of months, but it doesn’t appear in these early speeches. It’s a thing that came up later on. It’s such a useful way of describing their standard procedure, which is so ineffectual, which is crucial.
Chris: Here, for example, in this speech, really what we’re doing is saying, let us articulate for you what you have not been able to put together entirely, because you are still living in your own, as we say, private economy, what’s going on across the whole biz, where you fit into the way writing in general is being undermined and how we’re going to solve that. Though we talk about some of the companies’ arguments here, we don’t talk yet about negotiating very much.
John: We do say that we will be heading into negotiations. On Page 24, if you want to jump ahead to there, you introduce the notion of we may need to go on strike, which was I know a debate, like how much do we talk about the possibility that we’re going to head out on strike. Let’s listen to how you actually introduce it.
Chris: “But if the companies are unreasonable in response, it may require us to demonstrate our resolve – and we will come back to you for a strike authorization vote. We will still work to make a deal. That is always our goal. But if the companies’ answer is still no, then to get what we deserve, what we need to survive, may require a strike.”
“A strike is a brutal thing and it’s not always a fair thing. It’s okay to be afraid of it. Like a war – it takes its toll on all of us – but it also punishes some of us more than others. And yet, here is a simple truth, it is our willingness to strike, and nothing else, that gave us our health and pension funds, our minimums, and our jurisdiction over the internet.”
John: Here you’re just getting people ready for the notion that we may need to go on strike, especially a membership who most of them were not part of the 2007-2008 strike, so they don’t have a recollection of it.
Chris: That’s right. That’s right. Two things are true about this. One, and it’s sometimes hard to remember when you’re on the Negotiating Committee, is that we’ve been talking about this amongst ourselves for months and months and months, preparing, I guess inoculating yourself against all of those things, but internalizing what might happen in the future. Members are dealing with this for the first time. They’re coming to a meeting not quite knowing particularly here what they’re going to hear.
It’s really important to give them the time to process. Here we’re in – I can’t remember what the date of this is – sometime in February, but we’re going to go into negotiation in March. So we’re only two months away from a contract deadline. They need time. You can’t come back to somebody a couple of days before a contract deadline with a strike authorization vote and say, listen, we’ve never mentioned the possibility that what you could be doing could send you out on strike. That would be too much of a shock to the system. We needed to begin to put into play the possibility. Trust us, we’ll try to avoid it, but remember that this is always an option and something we might actually need to do. That I think was a place, if you remember, John, where we had lots of conversations about quite how far to go.
John: Of course.
Chris: There were people who were very nervous about that and saying, “You’re going too far. May be going too far to say a strike is a scary thing and it hurts some people.” We, broadly speaking, had the philosophy, talk about the fear. It’s like raising kids. The best thing to do is talk about everything. Don’t let anything fester inside unspoken.
John: Now, we’re looking at this as a printed document, but of course this was a performance. You were reading this aloud. How much did that influence both your writing process and the shape of it itself? Because it’s not meant to be a pdf that someone’s reading. It’s meant to be someone’s watching you actually say it. A related question is, stuff got applause in here, and how much did you need to anticipate where the crowd was at during the speech?
Chris: First, I wrote it as a speech. I wrote it according to the rhythms of how I speak. Sometimes I’d get notes, and I’d have to say to people, “Listen, I know. Just trust me. It’s not a document you’re reading. It’s a document you’re hearing, so I’ve got to do it that way.” This is the least speech-like of all of them though in some ways, because it had a very long section of proposals, which are really-
John: Slides, yeah.
Chris: … just a slide deck. But everything else is like that, and it’s written intentionally that way, with repetitive clauses and builds and things like that. You can’t know until you get there what the audience is going to do. I actually have some memory of not being flustered but thinking, “Okay, where do I need to stop? How far should I go? When do I pick up again?” All of that. I’m sure David would tell you the same thing, and Ellen as well, who sometimes when she read through the list of proposals would get a standing ovation. Certainly at the end, you get a standing ovation between every one. You learn a little bit the way the audience is going to react to it, and then you adjust. All of these things we did only a couple of times each. We didn’t go on the road with any of them and really learn.
John: Never see how they played in Wichita.
Chris: Exactly.
John: Let’s talk about the audiences, because the audience who is hearing this speech are all WGA members. They’re all sophisticated. They can handle complicated language. They can handle these things. They know most of the esoteric terms that you’re talking about. You may need to explain a few things, but they get the whole scope of this.
One of the things that became really clear as we got into negotiations and I would hear from people who were outside of the business or who were producers of stuff, they had never heard of this speech, and so they didn’t have the framing of all this. We talk about inoculation, but it’s also education. It’s really making sure everyone’s on the same page. Our membership was really good at being on the same page. The rest of the town didn’t have any of that information and was just perplexed by what we were doing.
Chris: Actually, I was going to think about something before we get to that. Remember also, we actually did a couple of other small test runs of this. We got some writers and just did it in front of them and got some notes on these things, so that the first time we did it was not in front of, I don’t know, 800 people.
John: First, we had the captains’ meeting.
Chris: That’s right.
John: You read it at the captains’ meeting. There was also a showrunners’ meeting. It wasn’t in front of giant hotel ballrooms. It was smaller groups first.
Chris: One of the things that I experienced in this, and I think David Goodman would say the same thing, is we always went into those early meetings thinking, “You don’t know how this is going to play.” Writers adopted it almost immediately and universally. You could tell me better than me, because I’m too in the middle. Was there a sense that the town truly didn’t understand this and thought there’s no way this was going to happen?
John: Yeah, they truly didn’t. I remember a phone call with a producer on one of the projects who said, “Oh, yeah, I know you guys might be on strike, might call for a vote, but you wouldn’t actually be on strike until September 1st.” I’m like, “I have no idea where you’re getting that information, but I guarantee you that’s not correct.” There were other just really fundamental things about what it is you’re actually going for. They clearly didn’t understand it.
Chris: I don’t know if you were going to bring this up or not, but very early on in the process, I think probably even in the early member meetings with this message, even though it was broadly very well received, was this repeated question: what’s the bumper sticker?
John: I wanted to get to that.
Chris: Oh, sorry.
John: There was no great slogan. The closest you got to it, which you did repeat three times in this, was “Put money back in writers’ pockets and power back in writers’ hands.”
Chris: That’s right. That’s right. That’s what we came up with in this one. I think some other version of it was, if somebody asks you what it’s about, it’s compensation, compensation, compensation. And yet, that didn’t really end up being the way we talked about this, although fundamentally, obviously, it is about compensation and power. No one asked us again after the first month, what’s the slogan?
John: We never had a bumper sticker. We never had the thing to put on a T-shirt. It wasn’t that. It was about this. Once we were on strike, we were on strike, and that was the message is that we were on strike.
But before we got out on strike, we had to have a strike authorization vote. That’s the next speech. Talking through this, this was the SAV. We had a couple of these meetings. They were mostly in hotel ballrooms. The audience for this was probably different. We obviously had a ton of captains there, because captains will come to everything. We had skeptics. We had nervous people, because the people who were fully on board, I don’t know that they necessarily needed to come to this.
Chris: That’s right. It’s generally true in the Guild that some percent of people who trust and are fine don’t show up to the meetings, so the meetings may encourage a broader range of points of view. I had to admit, this SAV again went very well, even in the room, as I remember, although it triggers a different kind of question, like, “Tell me you’re not going to stay on strike over this or that,” kind of thing.
John: Absolutely. Cleverly, you’re trying to hold off on some of those issues, and you’re trying to hold member questions back about what would a strike be like or what the logistics of a strike would be. You’re just talking about trying to balance the hope and fear going into this moment, talking about why the strike authorization vote is important for leverage in the Negotiating Committee, so we can try to get the best deal possible without a strike, and yet at the same time say, “We’re asking you to trust us that we will make the best deal possible, but if we need to go on strike, we will go on strike, even though it’s a difficult thing to do.”
Chris: Yeah. I don’t know whether your listeners need even more of an explanation. By the time the SAV, the strike authorization vote meetings and the strike authorization vote happen, we’ve been in negotiations for some number of weeks. They haven’t gone particularly well. The companies are not really engaging us in a meaningful way. They’re engaging us in the way they would do during a normal negotiation, which is to say, “We can give you some version of Pattern, some increasing minimums, and a few sweeteners.” The message to the membership needs to be that, but also to talk about how a strike authorization vote will put us back into the negotiating room for about two more weeks or so before the deadline, and how that member power is going to give us what we want.
It’s an interesting conversation, because in some sense, you want to say to people, “Look, a really high strike authorization vote number gives us the kind of leverage to do the work that might avoid a strike. But you can’t vote for it thinking that’s what you’re doing. You have to know that it’s real, and if we don’t get there, then a strike is what may come next.”
John: Going back to 2017, a lot of the messaging was maybe not intentional, but a lot of the messaging you heard is like, “Vote for the SAV because then there won’t be a strike.” That was a message that got out there. This time we were definitely trying to push back against that. Don’t just say yes because you’re trying to avoid a strike. Know that a strike is possible.
Chris: That’s right. That’s right. It was an adjustment based on what we learned from 2017, where we probably went too far in that direction. It was effective, and it got us some of what we needed. The issues were important but not quite as existential that we describe these. I can’t say that we knew absolutely whether we were going to strike or not.
John: We had a rollback on the table too, and everyone wanted that rollback gone.
Chris: That’s right. Once that came off, of course things changed substantially. We made adjustments in that, because as I said, writers are very attuned to the truth of an argument that you’re making. It used to drive David Young crazy. He appreciated it, but it’s the only Guild that says, “I don’t deserve that, so don’t ask for that.”
John: Thinking back to this moment in the strike authorization vote, we did tell members that the AMPTP didn’t have crazy rollbacks. We were very honest with them. The AMPTP was polite and patronizing, but not outrageous. We worked really, really, really hard to get out giant SAV vote. Then it turned out every other unit after us could get a giant SAV vote just because, just because that was a thing that happened.
Chris: It drove us crazy. I went, “You can do this without being really neurotic?”
John: Absolutely. Without calling each individual member, it’s actually possible to get a giant number? It’s great that they did.
Chris: Writers are writers.
John: Writers are writers.
Chris: The other thing I was going to say is – and you know this because we’ve been in a lot of negotiations – you really don’t know until the last few days whether you’re in an actual negotiation or not. Even as we went back in with the companies, and they were being very, very difficult, there was always a possibility that at some point a week before or five days before, something would kick in, and instead of the posturing and this is all you were going to get or some stuff around the edges, we would begin to have a real negotiation. It never happened, but you don’t know that. I don’t know for you. For me, it was probably only three or four days before that I began to think, oh, they’re never coming around.
John: No, they’re just toying with us. I do remember you saying in the room that we have to prepare that they’re going to come to us with a deal that’s going to make it really tough for us to say yes or no, then we’ll have to debate that. That never happened. They didn’t come to us with anything even remotely close to that.
Chris: That’s right, because it turned out, going back to the same thing, their playbook was their playbook. You have to assume that in some ways the AMPTP was perfectly okay with us going out on strike, because they assumed that their strategy is to push us to the side right now because we were going first, get to the DGA, make a deal there, make a deal with SAG, come back to us, and say, “Now you’re alone. You’ve got this big, overreaching agenda,” as they might put it. “We’ll do a little bit here and there, and then you’ll settle pretty quickly.” That obviously did not happen, which was their fundamental mistake in all of this. I think we realized at some point, oh, this is not a real negotiation that’s going on up until then.
John: We did go out on strike. Not a shock there. The next speech we’ll look at is from the Shrine Auditorium. The premise in your first speech was on Page 1. The premise in this speech I think actually comes quite a bit later on. It’s on Page 9 here. Do you want to read through this section?
Chris: Sure. “But now as we move to close the deal with the companies, we must speak in the language of power. Power is the only thing that moves them. Our employers give up nothing in negotiations out of fairness or compassion. They say yes only when they are made to understand the cost of saying no. They say yes only when they are made to understand the cost of saying no.”
John: Great. An example of repetition there, to make sure people actually heard the point.
Chris: Exactly. Pretty obvious [crosstalk 44:00].
John: But talking about this is going to be a power negotiation, that we basically have to show our power, so the power in the SAV but ultimately then the power in the strike, and that this wasn’t about what is right and what is fair and what is honest and what is true. This is about our power versus their power.
Chris: It’s important education for new people on the Negotiating Committee as well, which is to realize that for writers the story has to begin with a truthful recitation of the problems in the industry and what we need to survive. Truth doesn’t end up mattering very much in all of this. In fact, David Goodman made the joke in the later meetings that at some point one CEO said to me, “Stop with the speeches. I don’t want to hear anymore why it’s true.” That’s really the case. We had to say that to the members. We had to say to the members, “Look, at this point you and we know that we’re right in asking for these things, but that doesn’t matter anymore. We need your vote now, because all they’re going to respond to is the risk of a strike and what that means to them. That’s our power. Our power is the only thing that’s going to move them closer to their bottom line.”
John: Now, ultimately, we do go out on strike. I think the counterargument to that is that truth doesn’t matter to the companies, but truth matters tremendously to our membership and our transparency.
One of the great things we did, which I don’t think was all that well planned in advance, was when we went on strike we put out this two-pager that listed this is what we are asking for, this is what their counter is. That did so much work for us in terms of letting our membership know this is why we’re out on strike, these are the issues. What do you know about the two-pager? Because I perceive the two-pager as something that Sean on staff generated for our own internal purposes. When did it become an external document? What was the decision to make that a public document?
Chris: I think the staff had it pretty clear in their head that they were going to do that as we got to the last-
John: Day or two.
Chris: … day or two or so. Remember again, it’s a very complicated negotiation. It’s much more complex in some ways than some others. You can’t just say, “We didn’t get jurisdiction of the internet yet, so we’re still on strike.” You had to make clear exactly what we were asking for. The favor the companies did was the opposite of what you were talking about your fear would be, what happens if they get awfully close to what somebody will say is good enough. They were so far away-
John: Exactly.
Chris: … from what anyone would say was even plausible that this very clear recitation of how far they were away from any kind of reasonable deal really gave us a lot of power moving into the strike. It’s one of the most important days of the entire process from February to the middle of September is the release of that document. I don’t even remember it being a debate. It just seemed like it was a given.
John: The other thing I think was so powerful about the two-pager is it mirrors your initial speech in terms of we heard from the screenwriter, we heard from the middle-level writer, we heard from the lower-level writer, we heard from the showrunner, and each of those people could see themselves reflected in the things we were asking for and were not receiving and could also remember, “Oh, that’s right, that’s what the comedy variety proposal is. That’s what the issue is here.”
Of course, the issue that we… This may be a good time to talk about it. Going into this negotiation, the AI stuff was just a tiny little footnote at the end. I remember in those initial meetings with the Negotiating Committee, we have all these other things, and then there’s also AI. Like, “Really? Are we going to talk about AI?” I would explain why I thought it was important, but it didn’t seem that important. Then it became much more important really during the time we were in negotiation. Then we went out on strike, we could say to the members that they did not even want to talk to us about AI, and that that signaled that they were looking to do things with AI, and that became a real centerpiece flashpoint. It became one of the most important things we were fighting for in this.
Chris: It reminded me of a few things. First, let’s put AI aside for one sec. I just wanted to talk about one thing. It’s interesting. One thing that the two-page document pointed out though is exactly how complicated this negotiation is, and in some ways how even really attentive members don’t necessarily understand things intuitively, immediately.
It’s a conversation that I had with Ellen and that we had to have with members repeatedly afterward, because the two-pager included, for example, our opening proposals on minimum room size. Tell me if we did not spend the next two months explaining to our own members this was just an opening proposal, it was not the number we expected to end up at. We understood there would be a negotiation. You get caught in those things because our sense of negotiation has not been internalized by every single member. There was that. That was a little bit of a pressure that got put on us by the two-pager. It was way outweighed by the honesty of it, but we had to go back and explain all of that.
AI turned out to be a gift in some ways, because I think we were somewhat focused on it. They made us afraid of it in ways that we hadn’t been before. It required us to dive into it. I know we had a working group, or that the board had a working group. You had been working on it all the way through. But we didn’t quite know all the implications of what it would be. What it ended up doing though during the strike was it made the story even stronger, because it dovetailed with other things we were saying about the drive toward efficiency and productivity and how that would eventually undermine writer employment, how they could replace original creativity or well-distributed creativity amongst a reasonable number of writers with very few writers and a machine.
All of a sudden, all of these things we were arguing about – this may be a part of the bumper sticker – began to feel like, in ways that we didn’t really understand at the beginning, were coalescing into a single, larger argument that the membership really understood.
Look, we didn’t overhype AI. We didn’t try to turn it into more of a nightmare than it was. But the membership and the rest of the world began to fear it really intuitively. It also linked us to labor across America, because everyone’s worried about the idea that they don’t matter anymore and that they can be replaced by a machine. Maybe not everybody, although maybe everybody should. It was a fascinating moment and a huge mistake on the companies’ part.
John: They’ve largely acknowledged that, I think, because if they’d dealt with it early on or at least not ignored us completely, it wouldn’t become a flashpoint for the DGA even. The DGA, who didn’t seem to have an interest in it at all, suddenly had to have an interest, and then they had to get an AI proposal on there. They got really insufficient language, which angered us, angered our membership and riled us up and created even more attention on the issue. It was foolish.
Chris: In the months that we had to think about it, with your work and the work of the staff and everything, resulted in a much more sophisticated, I think, AI …
John: A hundred percent.
Chris: … standard proposals than we had at the very beginning.
John: We didn’t have anything on consent, basically that they had to tell you if they were handing you stuff generated by AI. Those were not part of our initial proposals there. Those were not any crucial gains.
Chris: Look, it was certainly an education for me, I think also an education for our members, thinking, for example, about training AI, to distinguish between uses of AI, those parties, Open AI, Google, Microsoft, who don’t own our copyrights and whose use of our material will be an issue both for us and for the companies who do own it. But in our relationship with the companies who do own the copyright over our material, it’s much more complex, because they have certain rights, and we have certain contractual rights, and the balance of those things is going to have to be worked out. But I didn’t understand that going in.
John: We are now out on strike. We have this big meeting at the Shrine Auditorium. That’s where I think we really established some individual characters in the strike, which I wouldn’t have anticipated. Obviously, Ellen became a superstar, and people just loved her sense of humor and her deadpan affect. You and David Goodman, you were familiar to people in the old history. People knew you guys. Lindsay Dougherty suddenly came out of nowhere. I’m thinking, she’s not even in our Guild, and then she became a superstar.
Then Carol Lombardini. The speech at the Shrine is the first time you mentioned Carol Lombardini by name. It’s in reference to things she said in the room, basically making sure that our membership understands that they were hearing us but also ignoring us at the same time. That was crucial. You said before we don’t do ad hominem attacks, but you do mention Carol Lombardini by name. What was your thinking about that?
Chris: John, I think it was around the time we began to understand what was going on here, which was that there was probably a split inside the room we had hinted at between the legacy companies and the streaming companies based on their varying business models, and that one of the factors impeding the legacy companies, for example, from coming to terms with what was happening was the way the AMPTP functioned. It became very useful to have a villain in the story.
It was good to have the villain be the AMPTP, because I think we knew – I say we knew and it all turned out this way – but in fact we had some experience and did know that this would get solved eventually when CEOs from the companies would engage in the process. It was a thing we had tried to have happen from very early on. They were resistant to it. We can talk about that if you want. It was a way of saying we’re not going to identify those people who will eventually be, I don’t want to call them the heroes, but will be our partners eventually, to spare them from that, and yet still identify, for the membership, the antagonists.
John: I think it’s good to stress that on our side, we did nothing to try to vilify David Zaslav, but just a series of things happened with David Zaslav, that he became a public figure for other stuff he was doing, but that wasn’t our doing.
Chris: It wasn’t. I don’t even think it was beneficial to us, to be honest with you, because he wasn’t the villain in this story. I don’t want to identify anybody. But we needed him to be part of the solution, and so hyper-identifying him with what was looked on as some flubs didn’t really advance our narrative particularly well.
John: Now, the narrative at this point is much less about… You had speeches along the way. Occasionally, a video would come. A new Chris Keyser video would drop. Everyone would stop what they’re doing and watch the Chris Keyser video. But the messaging and the narrative at this point was much less about you and what you were saying, as consistent communication from the Guild to members, from the Guild to press, just telling the story consistently and honestly and openly, and with good framing, to everyone to make sure we are all on the same page about what was happening there.
Let’s talk about message discipline. One of the things that people may not understand is that as board and Negotiating Committee members, we get some talking points, usually from Rebecca, about like, this is what we want to say about these things, and we can say those things.
If there’s a member email, we can generally say what’s in the member email, but we shouldn’t go much beyond that. We have discretion about what things we can say to individual members, but not say to groups, or certainly not to say to the media. That was so useful on our side, both for us individually as NegComm members, but I also think for members. They knew what we could talk about, what we couldn’t talk about with the negotiations. We could listen and pass that word up, but it felt like it was a good way of keeping this all together, keeping the story one story.
Chris: I think that’s true. It’s true, and yet there were risks inherent in making that work. The reason why it did was not something that we might have, I don’t know about predicted, but we couldn’t have counted on. There were two sides of that. The first was, I’d say it was a pretty remarkable Negotiating Committee and board and council. They were very, very good at telling the story and making it a story, not just a series of talking points. Broadly speaking, we really fanned out across the city or cities and told that story over and over again, and told it with very great discipline and some power.
Then, because I think the story we were telling was true, the members, who were much more important than had ever been true before, even in the agency campaign, as advocates and storytellers as well, also repeated that story, sometimes in ways that were very funny but always on point. You just didn’t get those people who were going off on tangents and misidentifying what our key proposals were, whatever it was. We couldn’t have known that until it happened. But it turned out that we had 11,000 members on point.
John: Yes, and it was really impressive to see. I’d also say that a lot of the discussions that happened in 2007-08 on the Deadline Hollywood comments section, instead, those member conversations were happening in smaller forums. We weren’t as public, which I think was really, really helpful. If there was misinformation or issues coming up that way, we could talk to those members individually. We could address those things. But there weren’t big public fights happening, which I think was great.
Chris: Yeah. Members really did also internalize the idea that union conversations have to be internal conversations. You can disagree, push back, ask questions, but that ought to be inside the union, because otherwise it can be very dangerous. Obviously, we had the advantage of a much more favorable press.
John: We really did. What theory do you have for that?
Chris: One thing is the journalists know what we know. They’re also members or want to be members of unions. They have seen this in their own lives, the way in which their working conditions have been degraded over time. I think there was some sense of that amongst the reporters. Not everybody. Not every reporter was that great. We still had some who seemed to take the companies’ side no matter what. By and large, again, there was a sympathy and empathy for writers that I don’t think we had before. I don’t know if you have other theories as well.
John: Certainly on the AI issues, because I did a lot of the AI press, they would stop recording and say, “I totally get this, because that’s exactly what’s happening in my industry.” They’re afraid of AI, because they’re just as vulnerable as we are, if not more vulnerable.
Chris: Right, and then probably the fact that this caught on more broadly amongst the public and other labor unions. We always tell our members very early on, the only people who need to hold together are writers themselves. Don’t worry about public opinion. Don’t worry about any of that other stuff. If we’re strong together, we can win. Turns out the truth is broad-based public support and, even more important maybe, real support amongst guilds and unions, particularly those in our own industry, were critical to the success of this. But once that builds, once that’s the story out there, I think it also engenders more support. It’s very difficult to push against that quite as hard and just take the company line.
I think there was, broadly speaking, just a general acknowledgement, except on the part of some people. The companies were just wrong about this stuff. I don’t mean wrong on every single point, but I mean broadly speaking, they had broken the business. Something had to be done. It wasn’t going to undermine their business model in order to do that. They all had to work through their problems. They can’t work through their problems by leaving their workers behind. That’s not a path forward. People got that in a way then.
Remember also, by the way, without going on, in 2007 and ’08, we’re talking about the internet. It’s a thing that hasn’t quite happened yet, and a lot of people don’t want have happen.
John: Exactly. The internet was our AI.
Chris: Right, but we were trying to control it and use it as if it were something good. Writers were thinking, “Oh my god, I don’t want to write in seven-minute segments or whatever on the internet.”
John: Webisodes. All webisodes. We also have to consider that the companies had their own narrative. They had to have their own internal narrative about what was going on, how long this was going to last, that the writers’ demands were unreasonable, that these things were close. And they didn’t have the message discipline to keep it together. They didn’t all have one story.
As little things would come out, it became clear they were just denying reality. It was frustrating to watch at times, because little bits would come out. I remember being in the room with the AMPTP one day, and we were getting these texts saying, “I hear there’s a deal. I hear that you’re already signed and you’re about to announce it.” We were nowhere close. This was in August when nothing was happening. It was clear that either that’s the story they were telling internally, and that it had leaked out, or they were trying to sell the story. But it never worked. They just kept tripping over themselves whenever they were trying to sell a story to the broader public.
Chris: That’s right, yeah. First of all, nowhere was that more apparent than in the fateful day when somebody anonymously decided to tell the press that they were trying to starve us, in fact. We took strength from all of that, because they misperceived how things would play. I’m not quite sure why they made those mistakes over and over. I think in some ways there was competitive PR going on, that different companies were trying to position themselves, and that led to mistakes being made. I don’t know whether it was ever being run through some central communications department there or not, but they seemed to do that over and over again. I have a feeling sometimes some of these companies had to tell stories to their own employees.
John: I think so too.
Chris: Yeah, that were not necessarily what was going on in the room.
John: No. It’s tough. Let’s think about the narrative going forward, because while we’ve just had the ratification vote, so that chapter is done, the story continues, because looking back to 2007-2008, the story of what happened in that strike kept changing and evolving. You heard a narrative like, oh, we lost things in 2007-08 or DGA won the internet in 2007-2008.
I want to think about the narrative going forward and some things we’re going to probably start hearing over the next couple months, couple years about stuff. The New York Times’ The Daily Podcast was talking about the wrap-up of the strike. And they said, oh, don’t be surprised if streamers start raising their prices, because they’ll have to pay for these writers. Price increases are your fault, Chris Keyser.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. One of the things that became true in the negotiations is that the CEO said to us, “This has nothing to do with our bottom line.” We made that argument to them. I know television very well. You could talk about features. But these adjustments in the writers’ budget are just internal conversations about how to reallocate inside a budget that used to much more highly favor writers and has ceased to do so. This is not going to raise their costs. Even some of the proposals, by the way, like what they call success-based residuals, are so small in comparison to what’s really going on.
We had lots of conversations with CEOs or other people in the business, who would just repeat to us, “You know, these companies have enormous problems. They have cost problems. They’ve thrown all this money out. They’ve chased the Netflix model of unlimited spending with no requirement of any kind of revenue on the other side. They’ve got too many upfront costs, and they’ve eliminated backend, and it’s all become disastrous. There’s no relationship between pay and results.”
We kept saying, “We get it. You’re going to have to take care of all of those things.” That’s what’s actually driving the changes in the business. This is not about that. This is just about the fact that when you hire us, and you only hire us when you want to spend the money, you have to pay us fairly.” This is at minimums also. This is not over scale. This is not what the highest paid screenwriter gets for a movie. This is really what the entry-level screenwriter and television writer and Appendix A writer can expect in a contract. It has nothing to do with the overall macro changes in the industry.
John: The price of Netflix or Disney Plus will go up. It has nothing to do with this contract or SAG-AFTRA’s contract. It’s all about how much money they think they can charge consumers for this and how much money they want to make. That’s what it’s all about.
Chris: That’s right. Look. They’ve got a problem in streaming obviously in particular, because they decoupled what they spent from what they got back. At some point, my guess is, and you can talk about this – I’m sure you have – that streaming is going to resemble some hybrid between broadcast and basic cable of subscribers and advertising and resale to secondary markets. That’s going to be a balance that the more successful company’s going to make work. It’ll take them some number of years to do that. But that’s going to be okay. We’re going to suffer in the meantime.
John: It’s going to be okay. Fewer shows will be made. Fewer writers are going to be employed. Both entirely possible.
Chris: I think very possible, because that peak TV era of anything goes is probably over. But people were talking about that well before. If you go back to the very first speech I made, I talk a lot about all the things the companies are saying before we go out on strike, about how the business is changing and they can’t spend the money and they’re not making money anymore. This is all over the place well before the strike happens. Decisions about what the proper number of shows is or writers being hired because of that, that’s all built in to the system.
John: It’s correlation versus causation. Yes, these things are happening at the same time, and they have the same underlying causes, but we didn’t cause this.
Chris: That’s right. That’s exactly right. Look, it’s going to be complicated. Individual writers are not going to know going forward exactly what the cause is of any given period of difficulty. I think there will be even people in our guild who will say, this happened to me because of the strike. I can’t say it’s not true for anybody. I don’t know what specific effect that will be. But broadly speaking, as with the recession of 2007-08, corresponding to that strike, unfortunately, the ups and downs of the business, the inherent uncertainties exist outside of remarkable but not business-plan-changing gains that the writers have made.
John: I think coming out of this strike period, we’re not going to have that intense focus and member-driven messaging about what things are. We’re not going to have that instinct to push back against, “This is the narrative that they’re trying to sell you.” Some of that stuff is just going to come up. You’re going to hear these stories and these accusations that, oh, this is going to make it harder for new writers to break in or that more production is going to go overseas. These things can be true, but they’re actually not caused by what we just did and the gains that we made.
Chris: Exactly right. There are some risks with that. Look, I think there are some really excellent agents who are engaging with the guilds more directly and who will take on all of the challenges, and the less good ones will repeat the message that exonerates them and the whole business from it and say, “You’re not being hired because of this and that.” We become an easy scapegoat in all of that, and we’ll have to deal with all of it.
John: Yeah, we will. We have two listener questions that I thought might be appropriate here. Drew, hop in here.
Drew Marquardt: Allen writes, “I was curious if the new WGA agreement has any impact on foreign levies payments. I saw a lot of material about an increase in foreign residuals but wasn’t sure if that included the levies as well. I’m a non-WGA writer, but I’ve received foreign levies for several years now and wasn’t sure if those amounts would increase with the new agreement or if it was a completely separate thing.”
Chris: I am really the wrong person to be asking this question. As I understand it, and John, you may know it better, foreign levies are based under European law. That essentially has something to do with distributing some piece of the value of selling tapes and DVDs because they might’ve been used to copy your programs. That will have nothing to do with-
John: It’s not part of this contract at all. Foreign levies will continue the same way that they always have. The Guild receives money on behalf of writers and other artists that get sent from Europe. The Guild is not the main collector of that. It’s not part of this contract.
Drew: The next one comes from An Anonymous Young Writer. They write, “With the strike over and the writers returning back to work, how is our relationship with the studios that we spent the last couple of months outside their buildings striking? I feel like there were some jabs back and forth, with us chanting, ‘Pay your writers,’ and waving our taunting signs, while they were okay with waiting months to give us a fair deal, and even Universal cutting their trees to make it harder for us to strike. How are we supposed to work together again, knowing that we just endured the last couple months fighting against them?”
Chris: Here’s what I hope and what I think is going to be true. I think that the creative executives with whom we work day to day understand the business, understand what we were fighting for. They may have supported us, more or less, to some degree. None of them I think should or do feel as if they were the target of this conversation. I think we tried to make that clear in our messaging all the way through, that they would be our partners again.
You can’t say never. You can’t say nobody is going to get pissed off about it. But I think broadly speaking, and John, you can speak to this as well as I can, the creative relationship between writers and their executives is going to go back to where it was before. If anything, we just miss each other and can’t wait to get back to work.
John: Absolutely. In the spirit of getting back to work, a thing that I keep trying to stress is that all of the energy, enthusiasm, and drive we showed on the picket lines these last five months needs to be channeled back into the thing we’re actually really, really good at, which is we are the best film and television writers in the world.
As we get back to work, what I’d love to see is, in a couple years down the road, looking back at this period, why did film and television get so good in 2024 and 2025. It’s because we had all these writers kept from doing a thing that they are so amazing at for five months, and came back with this incredible burst of passion and enthusiasm and wrote the best things that have ever been written. I think that’s going to get you past these weird feelings about the studio executives. We’re going to write these amazing things, and they’re going to pay for them, and we are going to make great TV and film.
Chris: I think that’s right. I also say, by the way, it’s a very writer thing to get worried about how people feel about us and think that somehow if we ask for something, we’re going to get punished for it. But the CEOs with whom we negotiated ended this on a note of respect. I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish, but phone calls that said, “Listen, you guys fought hard for a thing you needed, and you got a deal, and that’s good. And we know that the thing is broken, and we should have conversations about how it broke and what needs to happen.” I don’t mean just the business itself, but I mean the system of negotiating new deals. I think all the way up to the top there is, I hope, some level of mutual respect back and forth.
John: That would be great. Wrapping this up, so talking about the narrative of the strike, the storytelling of the strike, what things did you learn as one of the showrunners of this crazy writers’ room?
Chris: Look, I think as is true with history in general, you have to do the best you can, and you have to be lucky in some ways. We got lucky.
John: We got very lucky.
Chris: We got very lucky in a lot of ways. A lot of things came together in the way we needed them to come together. It’s an odd thing to say, because we got so unlucky for the years before in the business. It’s not a lucky place to be right now. But the membership, its youth, its facility on social media, the mistakes the companies made, the extent to which they made it very clear in the way they communicated with us, the fact that the staff was so good at ascertaining exactly what was in the members’ hearts, in their 7,000-response survey, really set us up well. And I think we executed it nicely.
I do think that we learned a lot from 2007 through 2017, in the agency campaign to now. But some of it just has to break in your favor. We take good lessons from it and realize we’re just going to have to get lucky again the next time we do it.
Here’s a thing that we did know though, which is that writers are committed to each other. They are brave. They do understand. They are willing to stay together. I think the relationship between writers and their guild is different from what it was before this strike and will help us going forward. Success breeds success, and we need to use that. I guess that’s one thing I learned is you got to keep that going, keep that momentum. We’re not going to fight the next fight immediately, but we need to talk to each other constantly, all through the next two and a half years, to whatever happens. What about you?
John: I think it’s a good lesson in what is possible. I remember there were times throughout this campaign I would feel frustrated or just I couldn’t see what was going to happen next. I remember you saying at some point that you yourself did not know how this is going to end, that all you could know is the principles of what it is you were going for and to try to keep moving forward on those principles.
The fact that we ended up at this place where we really did get the things we needed to get was just a good lesson in being ready for hard things, embracing some of the uncertainty, and also just counting on each other. I think I felt it in the room with the Negotiating Committee, but I also felt it on the picket line. I felt it in the big rooms. Even in the most difficult member conversations, when I’d have phone calls with people who were kind of flipping out, if I could get back to the place of what it is that we’re going for here, what it is that we need to achieve, that does a lot of the work.
Chris: Yeah.
John: We have a tradition on Scriptnotes where we do a One Cool Thing, something we want to share with our audience. My One Cool Thing this week is called One Revolution Per Minute. It’s this animated short film by Erik Wernquist, which is set in a space station that has artificial gravity, because it’s revolving. It’s revolving around a central axis, so a very classic way to create artificial gravity in science fiction movies. It’s gorgeously animated. But what it’s mostly showing is that in order to create even .5g gravity, you have to be spinning really fast, and it’s actually really uncomfortable. This thing has big windows, so you can always see the thing you’re looking at. It’s like, oh, it’s too fast. It’s really uncomfortable.
Chris: You really feel like you’re inside of it, essentially?
John: Yeah, but it’s also gorgeous. Just watch it, because it’s a gorgeous video and really shows what a space station could feel like. You really wouldn’t build it this way, but it’s just very impressive. Take a look at it. It’s called One Revolution Per Minute. We’ll have a link in the show notes. What do you got for us, Chris?
Chris: It really shows how you’re looking forward and I’m looking backward. You’re fun, and I’m less fun. I have to admit that I’ve been so burdened by this thing, and not in a terrible way. I have a one-track mind. I re-watched yesterday one of my favorite movies, my favorite documentary, which is Barbara Kopple’s American Dream. If you haven’t seen that, you have to go watch American Dream, which is about a strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant, and it is devastating.
John: I know of the movie, but now I need to see it.
Chris: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s all labor all the time. I’m going to stop. If you had asked me two days from now, maybe it would be something else, but that’s where we are.
John: I did an AI panel yesterday. It was a good panel for the FTC. I was happy to do it. But also I’m happy not to do those for a little bit. I think it’s going to be fine. I’m happy to go back to-
Chris: Dear FTC, not home right now. Call somebody else.
John: Absolutely. There’s so many talented people on the Guild who can do those panels. I don’t need to be the person doing them now.
Chris: It was one of the wonderful things, wasn’t it? All these people we met on the Negotiating Committee, incredible people who are going to take over and do the work.
John: When I look at the folks who have won on the board or won on the council, they’re so smart and they’re so great. Go, go, lead the way.
Chris: One of the things that happens when the Guild is successful at fulfilling writers’ needs is that people say, “I want to be a part of that. Why would I not want to be a part of that?” You get really great people, because you have to love writers after all of this.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on debate. Chris Keyser, thank you so much for coming on this show again to talk through this whole crazy thing we did.
Chris: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here. This may be the last time I get to talk about it for a little while.
John: You won’t miss it.
Chris: No. I will be okay moving on.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Chris Keyser, can you talk to us about debate? To set this whole thing up, I have to play this clip that’s going to embarrass you. This is a clip from, I think it’s 1984. You were dressed in a tuxedo. You had a bow tie. Let’s listen to it.
Chris [in old clip]: There’s much that is lousy on both sides. The world is a lousy place. It’s also a crazy place. I’m 23 years old and no less than any one of you who has antipathy for the United States. I’m sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. Still, it seems to me that we do ourselves no good to deny what is good in a system which is not all good, to deny what is good in a system which can correct itself, and that is the United States. I think one political analyst in the United States put it best when he said, “Critics say that America is a lie because it does not reach its ideals. America is not a lie; it’s a disappointment. But it’s a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” I beg to oppose.
John: Chris, you got huge applause there, rapturous applause. This looks like it’s off of PBS. Was this the highlight of your debating career? Talk to us about debate and your experience with debate.
Chris: My experience with it. Yeah, that probably was my highlight of my debating career. I wasn’t a really good debater most of the way through. I debated in high school and then in college, but not for very long in college. I used to do a kind of debate called policy debate, which is very fast speaking and like speed chess or something like that, which was great and one of the formative things of my youth. My friends, my decision to go law school, the way I thought about the world was all, I think in some ways dictated by the fact that I was part of the debate world. I loved all of that, but I ended up not caring very much about the competition in some ways. I moved into more public debating, which this is an example of it at the Oxford Union. By the way, Boris Johnson was there-
John: Wow.
Chris: … and Andrew Sullivan. I debated against William Hague. They were all in this path, I guess, not all them, the Eaton through Oxford to leading their country down the terrible path. It’s a straight line in the UK. That’s broadly speaking. I don’t mean it that way necessarily, although there are a lot of examples of it.
Anyway, that was really fun to do. It was just a way of seeing the world and talking about important things. I did a couple of these at Oxford that PBS broadcast. That was sort of fun. Then I put debate away for a really long, long time.
Debate more importantly became a part of my life again because my son started debating when he was in fifth grade, in elementary school. I guess like the dad who gets pulled into being the first base coach, because his kid says, “My dad played baseball once,” I ended up being a debate coach for about 10 years or so, but mostly for young kids, for elementary school kids and then for middle school kids, just because I really believed in the way in which debate gave kids a sense of their own selves and their own voice and ability to understand the other side of the question, to listen well. There were so many things. I can’t think of any activity outside the curriculum in a school that’s better for, broadly speaking, developing an analytical and compassionate mind than debate, so I’ve believed in it for a long time.
John: That’s great. I confessed to I think it was Rachel on picket line at Paramount that I get very intimidated by your ability to spontaneously speak so eloquently. She’s like, “You know he was a national debate champion.” I’m like, “I did not know he was a national debate champion.”
Chris: Do you know why you didn’t know that?
John: Because you don’t talk about it?
Chris: Because I wasn’t the national debate champion.
John: You debated on an international stage, as we just heard.
Chris: I did, periodically. I think it’s probably a 10,000 hours thing, whether that’s true or not. It’s just a skill you end up developing.
John: Here I was. You’re a professional athlete. I was saying, “Why can I not play basketball as well as Chris Keyser can?” It’s like, oh, because that’s something he does.
Chris: That’s like Scotty Pippen saying, “Why can’t I play basketball like Michael Jordan?” You do fine. You’re okay. I don’t mean to say I’m like Michael Jordan. That sounded obnoxious. I was trying to compliment you, not myself. Very careful of these things.
John: Roll back the tape here and see what you actually said. Talk to me about how you teach a fifth grader debate or a high schooler debate. What is the fundamental structure that you’re learning as you’re learning to debate? Is it about how to put together an argument and supporting arguments? Is it about the literal performance aspect of it? What are the things that are crucial for debaters to learn?
Chris: All of that stuff. Those topics are often announced in advance. It depends on the format of debate. There are a lot of different ones. I did policy. There’s Lincoln-Douglas. I coached in middle school parliamentary debate. The first part of it is research. It’d be a little bit like paralleling our negotiations. It’s the months we spent trying to figure out what our position was going to be and what the world suggests and understanding it from both sides, knowing what somebody else might say, and generating arguments that may work and understanding the power of arguments and how to answer them. Then it’s about being in a debate round itself and under the pressure of having to listen and take notes and understand what the other side is saying and respond immediately.
I’m just picking a few things out, because it’s too long of a conversation, but there are lessons that I think you learn in debate if you do well, one of which is don’t shy away from the places where you’re vulnerable. Lean into where you’re vulnerable. You can’t be silent on that stuff. All the stuff that we are talking about in this labor action, about preempting other arguments, understanding where our weaknesses are, trying to figure out what the other side might say, that all is well practiced in debate.
There are some kinds of debate where performance matters a lot, where eloquence matters. But there are some forms of debate where it doesn’t at all. It’s just about the very quick application of arguments and being able to cover all of them and understand all the nuances. I did different kinds of debate, and it gave me different skills. Some of them are about picking up on that stuff and generating arguments and answering arguments. Some of them are about convincing other people. I went to law school afterward. People who know me probably make fun of me about this, but I end up then thinking about writing scripts as making emotional arguments.
John: I want to tie that in. To what degree is screenwriting in general related to debate? How useful is that as a skill? Obviously, you’re anticipating there’s a dialogue between two people, that the people are going to come into a scene or a moment with opposing opinions, and then one person’s going to win the other one over, or at least reach an understanding. How does it apply?
Chris: I don’t think of it quite that way. I think running a show has something to do with organizational principles and beating out series and the structure that’s required in a screenplay or a television script are all related to that. In some sense, not to overstate it, it’s all like debate.
It’s got that element of poetry in the sense that you’ve got to be as efficient as you possibly can. Debate is all about time limitations and getting as much in as you possibly can do. You need to know in some ways the precise, right number of words and exact words to use in the moment. I don’t think of it that way. Getting to the heart of something I think is much more what I say it applies, is to think not that you have to approach it in the obvious way. You don’t want to write the scene that everyone expects. No one’s looking to me for advice on how to write right now. But I think that’s it. In debate, arguments have inherent power. They have weight. You have to know what that weight is. The same thing is true, in some ways, in writing. It’s like, where’s the weight?
John: I was a journalism major and essentially was advertising. It is that ruthless efficiency, like how do you get this down to an idea that people can grasp so clearly? Style and presentation, all that stuff matters a lot, but if you don’t have that central core idea, the whole thing doesn’t land. It doesn’t work. People respond to that core idea more than anything else.
Chris: Right. But for me, I continued to do it more because I thought for kids that the ability to think clearly and to appreciate both sides of an argument, to listen really well and to feel confident in your own point of view matters. That’s why I think I probably focus more on debaters who are entering into adolescence and right at the cusp of that, because that’s when that becomes particularly important.
John: How objective is the judging, scoring of debate?
Chris: It’s subjective.
John: It’s subjective.
Chris: Subjective. That’s, by the way, the other thing that’s really good about debate. You lose a lot. You lose sometimes for reasons that are not fair, and you have to deal with all of it. John Meany is the head of the middle school public debate program that I worked under. He always said, “Human communication is imprecise and fallible, and you have to learn to live with that.” You have to learn to live with taking your audience as you find them and convincing them of what they can understand when. By the way, it goes back again to what you and I and everyone else did in this strike, is that you can believe whatever you want, but unless the people to whom you are speaking perceive that, it doesn’t really matter.
John: It matters much less what you say versus what they’re hearing, what they’re actually taking in. If you’re not getting through to them, it doesn’t count.
Chris: Right. Academic debate is fairer than politics, where no one listens to anybody, it doesn’t really matter, and no one changes their mind from where they started. But it’s full of uncertainty.
John: Excellent.
Chris: That’s the way it is. Anyway, I love doing that, and I haven’t done it for a little while, because I got pulled back.
John: You’ve been busy doing things.
Chris: I’ve been a little bit busy. It was really great. It was a great way to do something with my son. We had lots of kids of that generation.
John: Chris, thank you.
Links:
- Chris Keyser’s speech to members at the start of negotiations
- Scriptnotes, Episode 389 – The Future of the Industry
- One Revolution Per Minute by Erik Wernquist
- American Dream on IMDb
- Christopher Keyser on IMDb
- Chris Keyser at The Oxford Union Society vs. The Harvard Debate Council, 1982
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.