(Los Angeles) Thousands of American television and film screenwriters began a strike on Tuesday due to the failure of negotiations with the main studios and platforms relating in particular to an increase in their remuneration.
In Los Angeles as in New York, pickets formed in front of the studios.
“The screenwriters are not paid enough”, especially given their “long hours” of work, said Louis Jones, a scriptwriter on strike interviewed by AFP in front of the Netflix studios in Los Angeles.
This social movement will result in the immediate interruption of successful programs, such as “late-night shows”, and significant delays for television series and films scheduled for release this year.
The studios’ responses to the requests have been “totally insufficient, given the existential crisis that screenwriters face”, justified the powerful screenwriters’ union, the Writers Guild of America (WGA).
The strike call was relayed on social networks. “Drop your pens! “, thus urged on Twitter Caroline Renard, screenwriter of several series.
Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert, famous hosts of two popular late-night shows, showed their support at the Met Gala in New York on Monday night.
“I support my team”, assured Jimmy Fallon, specifying that he “could not produce the show without them”.
For Stephen Colbert, “the demands of the screenwriters are not unreasonable”.
“I am a member of the union and I support collective bargaining. This country owes a lot to the trade unions”, he added.
The last major social movement in Hollywood dates back to the scriptwriters’ strike which paralyzed the American audiovisual industry in 2007-2008. A 100-day conflict that had cost the sector two billion dollars.
Growth of digital broadcasting
Major studios and platforms, including Disney and Netflix, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) announced on Monday evening that talks with the WGA “had concluded without an agreement”.
Screenwriters are demanding higher pay, minimum guarantees for stable employment and a greater share of the profits generated by the rise of digital broadcasting. Their employers, they say, make a profit and raise the salaries of their leaders.
They believe that they have never been so numerous to work at the minimum wage fixed by the unions, while the television networks hire fewer people to write increasingly short series.
For their part, studios say they have to cut costs due to economic pressures.
If the AMPTP claims to have offered screenwriters an increase in remuneration, it opposes several demands, in particular the revision of the remuneration of screenwriters of series broadcast on the internet, which often remain visible on platforms for years.
For decades, screenwriters have collected “residual rights” for the reuse of their works, for example in television reruns or DVD sales.
High pressure
It is either a percentage of the revenue earned by the studios for the film or show, or a fixed sum paid for each rerun of an episode.
With digital distribution, authors receive a fixed amount each year, even in the event of worldwide success of their work as for the series Bridgerton Or Stranger Thingsviewed by hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide.
The WGA is calling for the revaluation of these amounts.
The studios point out that the “residual rights” paid to screenwriters reached a record level of $494 million in 2021, against $333 million ten years earlier, largely thanks to the explosion in screenwriter jobs linked to the increasing demand for digital broadcasting.
Having been spendthrift in recent years, when rival broadcasters have sought to boost subscriber numbers at all costs, the bosses say they are now under heavy pressure from investors to cut spending and make a profit.
And they deny pretexting economic difficulties to strengthen their position in negotiations with screenwriters.