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Voices & Opinion

POV: I’m a Hollywood Screenwriter. This Is Why Our Strike Matters to You

“The robots are coming. And not in a fun sci-fi movie way”

When I talk to folks back east, the farmers I grew up with or the marketing execs I went to college with, they ask what the heck is going on out there in Hollywood. They’re asking genuinely and I respond in kind. I can talk ad nauseam about the minutiae of ending mini-rooms and the value of two step deals and all the other things my union is fighting for, but then inevitably I get the polite nudge: ‘Yeah, but what is it really about?’ And that’s when things get real simple, real fast. Because the truth is that this fight is about nothing less than the future of human work.

The last writers strike in 2007 was about the internet. Writers wanted to get paid for the content they created that was then streamed. In hindsight that’s about the most obvious thing you can think of—ahem, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Peacock, Disney Plus, Max. But at the time, no one knew what the future held and the studios were adamant that they shouldn’t be beholden to an undefined pay structure of the future. They were wrong. The future happened just as the seers at the Writers Guild of America foresaw.

In 2023, this fight is about the future as well, but not just the future of writers and not just the future of the casts and crews who work with us. This battle is soon to be about the future of human endeavors writ large—about the future of human work. Robots on assembly lines and tractors on farms is one thing; no one has yet seen the automation of creation. To even type that phrase seems somehow blasphemous. But it is just over the horizon from today.

In a current Hollywood production, a member of my union writes a script and then it’s handed over to a vast number of professionals, line producers who budget it, actors who star in it, prop masters who fill it with gadgets, and so many others. If you want to know just how many, try to make it through the credits at the end of your favorite film or show. Hollywood is a massive employer and one of the largest US exporters after aerospace and agriculture, and receives less subsidy than either. And this is great because so many people on our team are in unions and guilds and therefore they have had access to livable wages and health insurance. 

Which brings us to the very core issue: Humans are expensive.

We just are. We want to have a car to drive to work and good schools for our children and hot meals. Robots want none of this. They don’t care about the cost of my daughter’s asthma inhalers, which I can’t afford without my union insurance. They don’t care about my rent or my grocery bill, which I can’t afford without my union fighting for my wages. Robots don’t care about money at all. But people do. And moreover, many of us like our work. I love mine. I’m obsessed with it. Ever since I could scribble words on a page when I was a kid back on that farm, I dreamed of being paid to write. And I was inspired by the pantheon of writers whose words leapt from the page and screen. A robot didn’t conjure the worlds of Tolkien or Tolstoy or Toy Story. Think of your favorite line from your favorite movie. One of mine is the very last line of Slumdog Millionaire: “It is written,” and it wasn’t written by a robot.

But here’s the problem: The robots are coming. And not in a fun sci-fi movie way. Remember how that current Hollywood production works with humans? Well, now imagine it without. You don’t need a writer if you can simply plug every script in history, not to mention every poem and book, into an AI program and then prompt it to generate something kind of new. And if you think every executive and producer in Hollywood isn’t using ChatGPT right now in my union’s absence, then you underestimate their passion and ambition. You have to possess an unrelenting grit and determination to survive, let alone prosper, in this industry. Projects make it to your cinema and TV despite exhausting hurdles presented at every stage, so if you think executives are going to blink while writers are on strike when there’s a working AI option, think again. This is a business and they want to make things with or without us.

And it gets worse. AI can also generate images. You’ve heard about the Pope’s puffy jacket and seen news stories about deep fakes; maybe you’ve even watched the faux Wes Anderson Star Wars trailer because you’re into that kind of thing. The bottom line is simple. AI is being developed to absorb scripts and crank out visuals. With a little fine tuning you can have completely realized content that hasn’t ever touched human hands. That means you didn’t pay a writer, but you also didn’t hire an actor, a location scout, a grip, a costume designer, a VFX artist, a teamster driver, or a set PA. That list of credits at the end of the movie just jumped down to zero.

If this sounds like fantasy, remember that the Godfather (of AI) began by scanning images to train his software. And who owns all the images here in Hollywood? The same people that digitized them so you could stream them. The corporations we’re battling own I Love Lucy’s chocolate conveyor, they own Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, they own Juliette Binoche’s chocolat. They own all the chocolates. They also own Katherine Hepburn’s megawatt smile and Jack Nicholson’s sneer and Viola Davis’s look of determination. One corporation alone—Warner Bros. Discovery—owns every word of The West Wing and The Sopranos and The Big Bang Theory and The Gilmore Girls and Ted Lasso—that’s a lot of words. And by the way, they also own Keanu Reeves’ performance as Neo in The Matrix. That’s a lot of images. And all they need to do is click a button and ask the AI to ingest it all. You think deep fakes are crazy? Wait ’til the algorithm decides to resurrect Lucille Ball from the dead because you streamed a rerun of her and her chocolates last night.

The optimists out here hope that there’ll still be a niche for “human”-created content, that it won’t just be AI-generated comic book movies and sitcoms. Kind of like how folks buy craft beer and handmade jewelry—but let’s be real, they don’t buy that stuff as much as they buy cheap, mass-produced goods at Costco and Walmart. You think Netflix cares if a writer wrote it or an AI did? You think Apple cares if a makeup artist touched the actor’s face or if an AI generated the whole performance (and makeup)? Not as long as the audience doesn’t care…

So then why pay for a human in Hollywood at all? And why should you care anyway? Therein lies the rub, because AI can already spot breast lumps better than a radiologist, can already sift through case files more ruthlessly than a lawyer, can already spit out ideas faster than an advertising copywriter. Those humans are expensive too. They care about hot meals and health insurance. Robots don’t. Corporations don’t. So what’s preventing the death of human work? That’s as simple as the problem we’re fighting about: rules. A collective agreement on a new set of rules. And we don’t have one.

Fifteen years ago we didn’t have an agreement about the internet. Where will we be in another 15 years? What exactly are we willing to do to preserve human work? In Hollywood, my union’s answer is strike. Now, right now, before it’s too late. We are fighting to ensure that human beings are at the center of our work. To insist that the TV show you love is written by a group of writers as it always has been and not by a single writer or executive or intern hunched over an AI console. It’s no small thing. It is the thing that nearly every worker in every white collar industry will soon face, whether they believe it yet or not. 

We writers are the canaries in the coal mine. What’s happening here in Hollywood is going to happen across the nation, and in most other industries, it’s going to happen without a union to fight it. So we’ve decided to make a stand, an insistence that humans be at the center of work, not just for ourselves, but as a statement of protest against the indifference of corporate and political concern for everyone else too. We’re going to fight for what it means to work in the future, as humans, because believe me, we’re fighting for our survival. All of us.

Michael Russell Gunn (COM’07) is a screenwriter and showrunner. His credits include producer of the ABC series Designated Survivor, supervising producer of Showtime’s Billions, and writer and executive producer of the 2022 Netflix series Thai Cave Rescue. He can be reached at gunnasst@gmail.com. 

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John O’Rourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.