Members of the Writers Guild of America picket outside Paramount Pictures on May 5, 2023, in Los Angeles. Entertainment industry writers are on strike, and their union remains at an impasse with Hollywood studios over a host of labor issues, most notably residuals for streaming content, staffing levels in writing rooms, and the use of artificial intelligence. Photo by Ringo Chiu via AP

TV & Film

For BU Alums in Hollywood, the Strike Is about Survival in a Streaming, AI World

They expect a summer of picketing, negotiating, protesting, and speaking out in their fight for fair wages and more

Hilary Weisman Graham, a writer/producer on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black and the co-showrunner on an upcoming CBS drama, Tracker, has a pretty good idea what she’s going to be doing this spring. “I’m going to spend a lot of time picketing,” says Graham (COM’92). “Beyond that, I’m not sure.”

It’s the same for Daria Polatin (CFA’00), a writer on Amazon Prime’s Hunters and Netflix’s Devil in Ohio. “I am on the picket line every day,” she says. “Showing solidarity, and feeling solidarity with fellow writers and supporters is incredibly invigorating.” And Erin Conley (COM’11), a writer on Netflix’s Shadow and Bone, has a temporary new job: strike captain and picket coordinator for the Writers Guild of America (WGA). She’s “been on the picket line every day.” 

What Graham, Polatin, and Conley—all Boston University alums now making their living as writers in Hollywood—won’t be doing is writing scripts for TV shows and films.

They are among the 11,000-plus WGA members on strike since May 2. It’s the guild’s first strike since 2007, the action kicking in less than an hour after the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) announced negotiations with the WGA had concluded without an agreement.

Bostonia reached out to BU alumni working as writers in the industry to ask about the strike and its implications. While there was general optimism that it would be settled, the consensus was this strike would last a minimum of three months. As most fall series are written in May and June, that would knock a lot of those shows off the schedule.

The previous strike, which lasted 100 days, had a lot to do with how writers would be paid in the then-nascent world of streaming. The current action still concerns streaming, as it has exploded beyond expectations and yesteryear’s agreement doesn’t fit today’s reality. But newer issues are also at stake this time around: how writers are paid in the here and now, and how writers will be employed and paid in the ever-accelerating world of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems.

“The move to streaming necessitated this strike,” says Patrick Casey, writer for Violent Night and the Sonic the Hedgehog movies. “It used to be if you created a hit, everybody got to benefit from it. The primary ‘disruption’ of Netflix and streaming has been to pay drastically reduced residuals—residuals used to pay your mortgage. Now, you’re lucky if the residuals on a similarly sized hit on streaming will buy you a single donut. 

“Residuals are essential to anybody in this business being able to survive and have an actual career,” says Casey (COM’01).

Graham calls the strike “heartbreaking,” but necessary. “Adjusting for inflation, median weekly writer/producer pay has declined 23 percent over the last decade,” she says. “Yet the studios and networks earned $28 billion in profits last year.”

This divide, not coincidentally, is at the heart of the angry reaction to BU’s speaker for its May 21 Commencement, David Zaslav (LAW’85), Warner Bros. Discovery president and CEO, who some writers have complained exemplifies the pay divide that’s broken in Hollywood.

Devaluation of Writers

Polatin explains how the writing process generally happens and how streaming has impacted writers: “Led by the showrunner—a writer and usually the creator of the series—the writing staff generates episodes in a writers’ room and writes the scripts, then produces the episodes, shepherding them through the postproduction process until they are ready to air. 

“Then streaming companies entered the scene and found numerous ways to disrupt this model,” she says. “They have downsized the number of writers in a writers’ room and cut writers out of the producing and postproduction process, leaving the showrunner to do even more heavy lifting. They have also created ‘mini-rooms,’ where they pay writers less to develop episodes because they haven’t green-lit the show yet. The pattern is that they usually green-light the show after the staff has been let go, and the rest of the work is shouldered by the showrunner. So, since staffing jobs are shorter, and streamers can go years between seasons, the streamers are turning writing into a gig economy. If we don’t settle these terms with the studios now, screenwriting as a profession will not be sustainable.”

That fear was exacerbated with the sudden rise of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

“TV writers and screenwriters face an existential crisis as we try to preserve writing as a viable means of employment and not another victim of the gig economy that devalues human talent and is driven solely by corporate greed,” says Graham. “Last year, eight major Hollywood studio CEOs made over $773 million in annual salary, while many TV writers can’t even afford to pay their rent. They think they can nickel-and-dime us, but unless we write it, they have no content to sell.”

Ariel Levine (CGS’10, COM’12), who wrote for the TV series Better Call Saul, says that “the devaluation of writers has led to a reality in which many of us are struggling just to get by.”

As to AI, Michael Gunn, writer on The Newsroom, Designated Survivor, and Thai Cave Rescue, penned a piece last week for BU Today, which could be viewed as either alarmist or depressingly prescient.

“The robots are coming,” wrote Gunn (COM’07), an organizing captain for the strike. “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.”

Gunn sees AI as not just a threat to Hollywood writers but virtually all white-collar workers and any creative.

But Casey thinks the fear of AI-generated scripts may be overstated. “AI will obviously be able to crank out pages faster than a human,” he says, “and maybe there are some instances where that will be a tool that can be used, but it’ll never be as good as an actual human filmmaker—at least not a talented one. Even if AI is cranking out entire scripts, they’re not going to be usable without a human being doing a hell of a lot of work to make it so.

“The studios just want to use AI as an excuse to pay the writers less—that’s all it is,” Casey adds. “That’s all they can think about, a way to screw labor. They think if they can get an AI to spit out a generic ‘two mismatched cops hate each other and then become friends’ script, they can then underpay a writer to fix the script and turn it into something worth shooting. But they can pay less because it’s a ‘rewrite’ and they won’t have to pay residuals because the AI ‘created’ this shockingly original concept. The AI won’t have really done anything.”

Peter Paige (CFA’91), showrunner and writer on Freeform’s Good Trouble, says the threat of AI is “absolutely a factor,” but he notes that writer pay has stagnated while studios have reported record profits to their shareholders. “It didn’t happen overnight,” he says, “but the devaluation of writers has led to a reality in which many of us are struggling just to get by.”How will this play out?

“The strike will end,” Conley says, “when the studios are ready to offer us a deal that enables us to share in the success of the content we create and make writing once more a sustainable career. We know what we deserve, and with the support of every major Hollywood union behind us, we will continue fighting for it.”

Graham says it’s hard to stay optimistic when the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) “refuses to even engage in a whole number of our proposals,” including weekly pay minimums, viewership-based streaming residuals, and the use of AI. She fears the strike could drag on for months. 

“But here’s the thing,” she says. “If they could do it without us, they would. But they can’t. So, in the end, the writers will prevail.

There are always concessions to be made when negotiating a deal and our leadership has been very upfront about their willingness to compromise, when necessary.”

“I’m of two minds on this one,” Casey adds. “I think the people are with us. The other unions are with us. That should translate into something close to a win. On the negative side, it’s a problem that the people running the AMPTP seem to genuinely hate their own industry, the artists who work with them, their products, their audiences, and humanity in general. The studios used to be run by people who loved movies and wanted to make hits. Sure, those guys were greedy and antilabor, obviously, but they also understood the value of hits and knew where hits came from—the talents of the creative people in this industry. Now, the companies are seemingly compelled by vampire financiers who don’t care about making hits or growing their audience, and might kill the entire industry forever to make a single extra dollar in the short term. I wouldn’t put it past them to kill the golden goose rather than allow anyone else to have a single egg. Hopefully sanity will prevail.”