WGA + DGA. What happens if we cross the streams?
The guilds face a huge existential issue in the upcoming negotiation, so maybe it's time to work together.
ANDY BOBROW: Hi, happy holidays and welcome back to our blogcast.
We’re starting to see articles about the issues that are now common to writers, directors and actors, thanks to streaming. Namely the compensation categories that used to be called “residuals,” “profit participation,” and “reuse,” but now commonly go by the name of “hahahahah fuck off.”
First there was this letter from the DGA negotiators that was uncharacteristically aggressive - one might even say “writerish.” Then this piece by Jeremy Zimmer about the common ground between actors, writers and directors. And then this one by Nellie Andreeva where she quotes an anonymous observer saying the same thing. One might even get the impression that these stories are calculated to try to set the table for a WGA/DGA collaboration.
There’s no question that this year, more than any other I can remember, we have reasons to collaborate with the other guilds. Let’s talk about why we might, and whether we will.
CHAP TAYLOR: I can’t speak to our common financial issues, as I’m not a member of the DGA. I’m sure we’ll address that momentarily. I can speak to the dramatic increase in leverage that would result from coordination between the WGA and DGA (and SAG?).
As the Nellie Andreeva article points out, the WGA has generally been considered the most militant of the creative guilds. We have struck six times since the Guild was founded, most recently for 100 days in 2007-8. The DGA, on the other hand, has gone on strike exactly once, for three whole hours in 1987. The WGA and DGA have also traditionally pursued different negotiating strategies. Over the last several decades, WGA leadership has preferred to delay negotiations until shortly before the expiration of the MBA (Minimum Basic Agreement). On several occasions, Guild leadership has either called for a vote authorizing a strike, or threatened to do so prior to negotiations, as a method of increasing leverage against the studios. Conversely, the DGA has preferred to enter negotiations earlier and has generally exhibited a less antagonistic tone, at least publicly. I am not passing judgment on either strategy, merely explaining the difference. In Hollywood terms, you could call the DGA the “good cop” and the WGA the “bad cop.”
This year, things are different. Statements from DGA leadership, both publicly and through anonymous sources in trade articles, indicate that the DGA recognizes their members face the same reality as writers; the basic business model of the entertainment business is changing to the detriment of the men and women who make entertainment.
How does this improve the leverage of both guilds? Obviously, a writers’ strike cuts off the supply of feature and television scripts, but given the lead times of film and television productions, this may not impact studios and streamers immediately. Each writers’ strike then becomes a contest of who can take more punishment, as the studios continue to make entertainment from already-completed scripts, or replace scripted entertainment with foreign programming and non-scripted series, hoping to come to terms with the writers before their profits are impacted. It’s an immediate strike with long term effects. A strike by directors, on the other hand, stops any production that requires a director. Nothing can shoot. It has an immediate impact.
Many people believe that confronted with BOTH an immediate stoppage of production and a longer term loss of new material, the studios and streamers will recognize the need to negotiate in good faith. There is also an important optical component; if both the “bad cop” WGA and “good cop” DGA are willing to strike, it means that creatives across the industry are uniting to fight for the survival of middle-class careers. It isn’t just the “crazy” writers or the “responsible” directors. It’s everyone. Needless to say, this would be amplified even further by the official or unofficial support of SAG and IATSE.
Backed by the weight and reputation of the WGA, the DGA will get a better deal for their members. They will be negotiating with the implicit support of their sister guilds, with everyone recognizing the DGA deal might form a template for subsequent negotiations. Every creative in the industry will benefit. To badly paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, “If our guilds all hang together, we might not have to hang separately.”
AB: Yes to all that. It’s obvious that the DGA adds to our leverage and vice versa. I should say that these articles mention SAG too, and their participation would be awesome. It’s just that it’s so much harder for them to get to a strike vote, and in terms of pain, a SAG strike is effectively the same thing as a DGA strike; Both would shut down production on day 1. The Day 1 leverage is the thing we don’t have as much of.
MARC GUGGENHEIM: Chap is right that the historic dynamic has been that the WGA is the “bad cop” and the DGA is the “good cop.” There are numerous reasons for this dynamic, but the thing to keep in mind is that good cop/bad cop only works when both cops have the same goal. That has only intermittently been the case between the DGA and the WGA. The good (?) news about the upcoming negotiations is that writers and directors – and actors as well – are all aligned in the need for a workable model for streaming residuals. (Writers have other issues unique to writers – span protection, mini-rooms, etc. – and whether the WGA would strike over those issues if the residual question was resolved to our satisfaction is another question.)
I’ve been a member of the WGA for twenty years longer than I’ve been a member of the DGA. On the WGA-side, the conventional wisdom is that the DGA is a weak negotiator. But I can no longer square that with the opinion of my friends in the DGA who are very pleased with what their guild has achieved for them over the years. For example, my wife (a fellow showrunner) told me about a show that got fined because an episodic director didn’t receive a large enough trailer for the single day he was on location.
As a member of both WGA and DGA, I believe our guilds will dramatically benefit from coordinating our negotiations. In fact, I just came from lunch with a friend of mine who’s in the DGA. We agreed that streaming residuals is an existential issue for writers, directors and actors.
AB: Totally. So I guess the next question is what form does this cooperation take? Do we create a list of common demands? Do we try to have multi-party negotiations right now? I assume the AMPTP would ignore that request. But the image in my head about DGA negotiations, I don’t remember where I read this or if it’s still true, but I’m under the impression that the DGA goes and has very informal 1-on-1 talks, like the president, not the committee, goes in and talks with studio heads to hammer out a framework before the formal negotiations start. I wonder if we could do something like that with them. It’s no secret what all 3 guilds want right now.
HOLLY SORENSEN: Well, we have to assume that they are in contact right now. There are always talks of bad blood between these two guilds, but I’m sure every member of both guilds hopes that prior conflict and communication issues get sidelined this time, it’s just too important. The good news is that the DGA is talking tough. That’s new. And if both guilds can set aside the issues that are vital to them individually, or even conflict with the other - for instance, mini rooms have been disastrous for writers, but good for directors - and focus on the mutual threat all guilds face, the residual issue, we could have an ‘undeniable’ alliance (in the parlance they understand.) What I think no one will accept is if somehow we hear, “We tried an alliance, it didn’t work.” Try harder. Get a third party to mediate, and show your work. It is a year where striking might be the most warranted, and also striking would be the most disastrous. We are tip toeing on a live wire.
MATT NIX: I suspect that a good opening gambit for the WGA would be to go to the DGA with some proposals for jointly addressing creative rights issues. Just from a political standpoint, I think that might give us a firmer basis for joint negotiations. I’m a member of both unions, and there’s some stuff the two sides are never going to agree on. But I think on things like late scripts for TV directors there are things to be done on the WGA side that are reasonable and would be seen as a show of good faith. And I think there are similar concessions that the DGA might see as reasonable, particularly for feature writers.
AB: Oh, right, so like work out some creative rights issues with each other, rather than involving the studios. A WGA/DGA creative rights contract. That sounds like a good idea regardless. Just a general good move, because the two guilds do have beef with each other and may as well sit across a table, rather than argue through proxies.
MN: Yes. It could be as simple as giving some teeth to existing creative rights rules in the form of fines or penalties. Both unions supporting some kind of reform could help with some of the historical ill will between the unions. I think the DGA has more of an issue with this than the WGA does, by the way. Writers tend to get angry at individual directors but not so much at the DGA. The DGA, on the other hand, seems to have more beef with writers in general and the WGA as a whole. I’m just thinking of the rank-and-file TV director or AD who is mad about TV creative rights issues and doesn’t want to ally with a group that is so often cast as the enemy. A campaign to bring the guilds into an alliance has to bring those people in, politically.
Beyond that, it just seems like the move is to focus on our most pressing common issues, like residuals and data, particularly with regard to streaming. It does strike me that it might mean focusing less on issues like raising minimums for writers, since that doesn’t really affect directors. Similarly, I’m not sure how we address mini-rooms in a joint negotiation. Of course, negotiating jointly doesn’t mean we give up ALL of our writer-only issues, but it does complicate them. The DGA isn’t going to die on the hill of eliminating mini-rooms for writers. If anything, mini-rooms are BETTER for directors, since the episodes have typically all been written before production for a lot of those shows. That’s the kind of thing that is going to get a little tricky in a joint negotiation, I think. I mean, just to be blunt about it: the DGA hates the term showrunner. They don’t even use the term in their training programs, apparently. They would much rather TV were more like features, where a Head Writer deals with writing and then disappears while the Producing Director runs point on production and post. That’s a non-starter for the WGA.
To be clear, I’m not trying to be pessimistic. I’m just noting that if we’re going to go into a joint negotiation we might have considerably more power. But we’re going to have to deal with the political issues within both guilds to get that process started, and it will probably mean giving up on some of the issues that aren’t shared.
CT: These are all valid points. But I keep coming back to the biggest issue that unites all of the creative guilds. The largest producers of entertainment today consider themselves technology companies. They have no respect for the unique contributions of writers, directors, actors, or below-the-line crew. They consider us no different than the legions of coders they employ to write lines of code in their Web businesses. They don’t give their coders ongoing participation in the code they write. And they don’t want to give us participation in the success of the films and television series we create. That is an existential threat to all of us. And I hope it is sufficient to overcome any traditional rivalry between guilds. The only real chance we have in the upcoming MBA negotiations is an official (or unofficial) alliance among the people who actually make entertainment.
HS: Which is why, agree or not, folks think the return of Bob Iger bodes well for these negotiations. Throughout Hollywood’s history, other kinds of money have tried to come in and either make Hollywood conform to their ways of working or disrupt it entirely and it has never, ever worked. Hollywood has never run like a traditional business, it has its own ways which have worked for it, they are weird and they are not scalable.
AB: That’s so true. And we have seen some version of this before. Gulf + Western came here and bought Paramount. Seagram bought Universal. Sony bought Columbia. So the old way to infiltrate Hollywood was you buy a studio, and at that studio is a producer who tells you “This is a weird business that doesn’t scale, so back off I know what I’m doing.” But with the streamers, they’re eliminating the whole concept of a studio and they’ve eliminated the position of “person who tells us to back off.”
HS: It is incredible how little tech companies seem to understand about how Hollywood works. I had a show at YouTube where Cobra Kai was birthed, and the message from Google was, “just start remaking old movies as series, that is what works.” Without any understanding of how and why this particular show worked. Unfortunately, OG Hollywood is starting to act more and more like them and that shit has got to be reigned back in. In what world ten years ago would you announce show pickups and then just change your mind, or back out of deals, or deep six finished projects? Hollywood at one time had some pride in its part of the process. Hollywood worked when the whole process was respected. But now that streaming has contracted and everyone has been forced to look at their actual budgets - not their pretend-to-be-in-business-with-unlimited-money budgets - they are all crying poor. What union members all have in common is that we didn’t change the business model, we didn’t change the whole way pilots and shows are considered and made, and we didn’t tank the business. They did. We shouldn’t continue to accept all our rollbacks because they played with fire.
MG: One-gajillion percent, Holly. In fact, I think a lot of what is driving pro-strike writers is a general frustration (to put it mildly) about the way the business is working (to put it incorrectly) lately. From what I’ve seen and heard, the development process in television has gotten completely abusive with networks and streamers demanding endless drafts. Work has dried up for many in features and television, at all levels of experience. I could go on (and on and on). The problem is that these problems – among others – aren’t addressable through the MBA. Which means that even if we get everything we want in the upcoming negotiations, we still have a lot of work left to do…
HS: I just read in the trades that Netflix has said they can get twice as big as they currently are. Owning the marketplace has been everyone’s goal. But they can’t do it by not paying us fairly and not compensating for re-use. Both of those are huge, but one of them all guilds and unions face. Many IATSE workers feel they folded too soon and that isn’t great for morale. In a way, I think the ‘above the line’ guilds need to set a precedent to help IATSE next time around. It is really time for the people who make the things to work together.
AB: That feels like a great wrap up. This place runs on relationships, and not the Kumbaya kind, but the mutual benefit kind. So it makes sense to shore up the relationships that help us the most.
Also, since Matt mentioned creative rights, I went and looked up both guilds’ creative rights and these things are always great to know. Here are links to both.
DGA creative rights WGA creative rights
Also each guild has a handy handbook you can download:
DGA creative rights handbook WGA creative rights handbook WGA creative rights wallet card
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