WGA Writers Look Back At 2007-08 Strike For Lessons To Apply To Looming Negotiations: “They Call It Fog Of War For A Reason”

deadline.com:

The WGA is gearing up for upcoming contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, arguably its most important in over a decade.

This has prompted a group of top writers to look back at the lessons learned from the 2007/08 writers’ strike to see what can be applied to this year’s talks.

Angela Workman, writer of The Zookeeper’s Wife, Chap Taylor, consulting producer on The Blacklist, Holly Sorensen, creator of the Step Up TV series, Flint Wainess, consulting producer of The CW’s In The Dark, Mixed Signals writer Eric Tipton and Marc Guggenheim, co-creator and exec producer of Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow – all veterans of the 07/08 picket line – weighed into the issue ahead of the negotiations. “There’s a lot of confusion about what the 2007/8 strike did and did not accomplish, and a lot of discussion about what we might achieve in our upcoming negotiation,” writes Workman on the From The Trenches: Working Writers in Conversation Substack. “We thought it might be useful to review our experiences.” There are a number of issues on the table this time including the topic of dwindling residuals in the streaming era, the increase in mini rooms and shorter episode orders as well as questions about feature screenplays and the topic of free work. “We have to start this discussion by underlining that our industry business model is broken.

The handful of multinational corporations who control entertainment pay their CEO’s tens of millions of dollars while pleading poverty to the creatives who actually make their product,” writes Taylor.