Writer's Guild Strike of 2023 - Fuck these people

[Kari Kamiya]

Well, now they have a new trauma to put into their writing: Overdue bills.

 

[Alter Ego]

The hilarious part is that the studios can still clearly use AI, they just have to pay some WGA faggot scale (which is nothing) to wrangle it, and they get a credit for it. So some studio head's nephew sells a spec script (that may or may not even exist) to get his WGA card and then becomes the AI guy for the studio. They literally just made it easier and cheaper for a studio to use AI.

That's not really how it's going to work. The agreement specifies that the use of AI has to be mutually agreed upon between the writer and his employer. Perhaps there is a loophole in which a studio can specifically seek out and only hire a writer willing to play along with AI, but the studio would also still have to abide by the new mandatory number and employment duration of writers, unless it can get by with a single writer for the entire production.

 

[Rei is Shit.]

Spicy blind item;

This guild is about to sign a deal that will see them all but eliminated in a decade. They think they are going to get money from the AI stuff because the studios only want it to learn from the scripts. For now they will get paid for half AI/half human written projects. What about when it is all AI? They will get paid zero. The guild let management have the one thing it truly wanted. All the rest was just smoke and mirrors. “SAG-AFTRA”

https://www.crazydaysandnights.net/2023/09/blind-item-2_27.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20230927213242/https://www.crazydaysandnights.net/2023/09/blind-item-2_27.html

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

AI isn't even ready yet to write full scripts anyways, the moment it will be ready the studios will look for the loophole to cut out the human writers entirely (assuming it's not already there).

 

[Flaming Insignias]

AI isn't even ready yet to write full scripts anyways, the moment it will be ready the studios will look for the loophole to cut out the human writers entirely (assuming it's not already there).

I said it before, I'll say it again: the fact that writers feel threatened by a glorified chatbot says more about the quality of their own writing than how greedy studios are. If they truly are so incompetent that a script written by a machine is better than them, then they deserve to be replaced. Hopefully the AI will be smart enough to not slap trannies and niggers into historical periods where they were functionally nonexistent.

 

[DavidS877]

AI isn't even ready yet to write full scripts anyways, the moment it will be ready the studios will look for the loophole to cut out the human writers entirely (assuming it's not already there).

The loophole is the contract is only 3 years.

 

[Super-Chevy454]

These writers celebrated their "victory" just like the World Canadian Bureau.

 

[Alter Ego]

Yeah, there's no way that studios intended on just taking AI-generated scripts and move them straight to the screen in the next three years. They'd want such scripts to at least be proofread by an editor, which is the agreement accounts for by just calling the editor a writer taking credits for the AI script. I'm also pretty sure that the agreement already bans raw, untouched AI-generated scripts by saying "AI-generated material will not be considered source material under the MBA."

In other news, you can now view agreement in detail via this 94-page document.

With this, I saw someone point out a statement about minimum staffing that has me reconsidering what I said before to now believe that the studios may have implemented a loophole to completely undermine that requirement. On page 25, within the section about "staffing", there's the following line:

“This Paragraph M. does not apply when a single writer or team of writers is employed to write all episodes.”

The exception of "a single writer or team of writers" is also used a couple of more times in the following pages. It now seems to me that studios are not restricted to a single writer if they go below the minimum staffing requirement. With a "team of writers", they can actually have whatever number of writers they want. They just have to credit any given episode to the entire team rather than a single writer.

I'd really like to see an expert remark on specific line to confirm or deny whether my suspicion is correct, but I'm not sure if we'll get that. There's no way that the WGA leadership isn't aware of this, which makes me think that it's a loophole that both sides agreed upon to allow the WGA to act like they won on minimum staffing when they really didn't. The perception of victory is very important to the WGA while the studios only care about the real outcome in business.

 

[Pig Cups]

God, don't you just miss the strike already? We were so much better off.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

God, don't you just miss the strike already? We were so much better off.
Ver archivo adjunto 5367223

Gentle reminder that their ridiculous “podcast” that they did with John Oliver was barely watched and it tried too hard to be relatable to people that were still living in their homes, with a regular looking house doing regular people things.

Either way, hope you all have AdBlock, because you can expect to see a lot of these ”late night hosts” have their videos being recommended to you and you don’t even watch or subscribe to their content.

 

[Alter Ego]

As a follow-up, I found further official documentation that describes exactly what the WGA means by a "team of writers":

C. COLLABORATION: A TEAM OF WRITERS

A "team" of writers is defined as two or more writers who collaborate to write a specific piece of literary material. The resulting literary material is attributable to the team as a whole, rather than to an individual member of the team. A waiver from the Guild is required for a team of more than three writers.

The Guild must presume that when two or more writers comply with the definition of a team and their names appear jointly on the work that is produced, the whole will be judged as a joint contribution unless a specific objection to this assumption is made at the time of the writing. Such objections should be made in writing to the staff of the Credits Department and concurrently to the other writer. It is the Guild's position that a writer who chooses to question the validity of a collaboration should do so openly and frankly at the time the work is done and not several months later in the course of a credit dispute.

If a writer is employed to work as part of a team in collaboration with a writer also employed in an additional capacity (e.g., a producer or director), a writing contract for the team is required in Page 4 order for the writer also employed in an additional capacity to claim co-authorship of the team's material. (See "Section III.B. Production Executives.")

When writers perform services as a team, even if just for a single project, writing credit to the team must be designated with an ampersand (“&”) between the names of the team members. Use of the word "and" between writers' names in a credit indicates that the writers did their work separately, one usually rewriting the other. This distinction is well established in the industry through custom and practice and is not subject to the writers’ preference.

So it appears that the intention of the "team of writers" exception in the agreement is to account for pairings like Game of Thrones' David Benioff & D. B. Weiss ("D&D") who jointly act as showrunner, but it still seems to me that it can be exploited to circumvent the minimum staffing requirement as I previously described as long as it remains that such writers are never credited individually.

In addition, I saw that WGA negotiator and apparent fellow traveler Adam Conover (Adam Ruins Everything), who has already been doing the media circuit on behalf of the WGA before, prioritized an in-person appearance on Hasan's Twitch stream as the place to explain the final agreement:

The point about "a single writer or team of writers" goes completely unmentioned by Adam, and it's not included on the summary table they referred to on stream.

As for AI, he at least provides a little more clarification on the statement I was wondering about that "The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law." According to him, this is just setup for a fight to be had later, so I take it that studios are free to train AI on whatever material they want and the WGA are simply stating their intention to contest it at a later time, likely the next contract negotiation three years from now.

 

[Dixieland Buckaroo]

As for AI, he at least provides a little more clarification on the statement I was wondering about that "The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law." According to him, this is just setup for a fight to be had later, so I take it that studios are free to train AI on whatever material they want and the WGA are simply stating their intention to contest it at a later time, likely the next contract negotiation three years from now.

I wonder if there is a time-based element to this as well- if the studios could argue the training was done prior to the agreement, if that would be an out.

Really, this doesn't look like the huge win the writers and guild are trying to make it out to be- surprise, surprise.

 

[Random Internet Person]

The books don't have to be opened

I'm left wondering if they gave up on that or that was a thing the studios wouldn't do because that's something that'd be wrapped up in the courts for years to settle, which would only prolong the strike and the WGA felt that getting back to work was a more important thing to get done.

the minimum writers i guess helps with the pre-dev rooms but i have a genuinely hard time believing shows before now had less than 9 writers for a series with over 13 episodes. from what i've seen these minimums aren't really that big of a deal, like stranger things had 7 writers for an 8 episode series. outside of the UK you almost never see writers knocking out all the episodes and you'd be surprised how many writers most of these rooms have. its almost theoretically impossible to have less than 9 writers for a 13 episode series, even Aaron Sorkin employed roughly that many. which means these minimums don't mean shit for any tv show aired on actual television.

With this, I saw someone point out a statement about minimum staffing that has me reconsidering what I said before to now believe that the studios may have implemented a loophole to completely undermine that requirement. On page 25, within the section about "staffing", there's the following line:
The exception of "a single writer or team of writers" is also used a couple of more times in the following pages. It now seems to me that studios are not restricted to a single writer if they go below the minimum staffing requirement. With a "team of writers", they can actually have whatever number of writers they want. They just have to credit any given episode to the entire team rather than a single writer.

All I can see is a studio head, or most likely the biggest celebrity name attached to a project, hand picking a select number of writers, saying "here's our writer's room", milking whatever PR that can be milked, and the writers doing a picture together of what they claim to be them in the writer's room captioned "#SQUADGOALS" (especially if it's from the celebrity attached to project route), and then they get high on their own farts, probably make some (what they consider to be) epic/dramatic/awesome penname with a backstory to match (like what Stepthen King did with Richard Bachmann, just to a more pompous scale), and then try to go into business for themselves as the next biggest thing for themselves as some sort of production collective with project ideas out the ass stretched to at least the end of the decade.

Also can't wait for the next hypocritical movie plot of "oh those evil right wingers hate AI and are against progress, while us liberals are all for love and progress".

And then the AI goes Full Skynet, and you get audiences rooting FOR The Age Of Machines to become reality.

The entire thing is based on how many episodes are ordered, so they'll just order 8-10 episodes to save money.

Isn't "limited series" already happening in that regard so you don't have to worry about the studio renewing in order to get your whole story told from start to finish? Honestly, I think the biggest thing that'll happen is you'll get a 20 episode order for the whole damn series, produce the whole thing, and the studio will split that in half, call each half a season, and it'll make the show look more impressive and longer lasting than it really is.

While giving everyone an NDA to sign about all of this. Something like Mindy Kaling's Velma could be a prime example of what I'm talking about

The hilarious part is that the studios can still clearly use AI, they just have to pay some WGA faggot scale (which is nothing) to wrangle it, and they get a credit for it. So some studio head's nephew sells a spec script (that may or may not even exist) to get his WGA card and then becomes the AI guy for the studio. They literally just made it easier and cheaper for a studio to use AI.

Will NBC, CBS, HBO, Disney will start airing their onlind shows to avoid the Streaming Only clause?

I doubt it, because I think a lot of the streaming stuff was only done because so much stuff was greenlit because it's a place to dump the shit that wouldn't fit on network or cable.

tAI isn't even ready yet to write full scripts anyways, the moment it will be ready the studios will look for the loophole to cut out the human writers entirely (assuming it's not already there).

I said it before, I'll say it again: the fact that writers feel threatened by a glorified chatbot says more about the quality of their own writing than how greedy studios are. If they truly are so incompetent that a script written by a machine is better than them, then they deserve to be replaced. Hopefully the AI will be smart enough to not slap trannies and niggers into historical periods where they were functionally nonexistent.

TBH, I think that's a matter of what you teach the AI, and I'm not sure about woke because right now, I think you can just have it be words on whatever, and it's the actors that matter on how it's delivered, and you'll probably only get super woke of you teach/program AI to be that way.

If anything, the actors may have leverage over AI because they can just say that anything from AI comes out as stilted and robotic and giving straight away the fact it came from a computer. Look at all those AI voice covers, as impressive as some of them are.

Yeah, there's no way that studios intended on just taking AI-generated scripts and move them straight to the screen in the next three years. They'd want such scripts to at least be proofread by an editor, which is the agreement accounts for by just calling the editor a writer taking credits for the AI script. I'm also pretty sure that the agreement already bans raw, untouched AI-generated scripts by saying "AI-generated material will not be considered source material under the MBA."

I think that's just the next target for the WGA knives.

As for AI, he at least provides a little more clarification on the statement I was wondering about that "The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law." According to him, this is just setup for a fight to be had later, so I take it that studios are free to train AI on whatever material they want and the WGA are simply stating their intention to contest it at a later time, likely the next contract negotiation three years from now.

I think that's just the next target for the WGA knives. It's feeling like a "control the means of production" thing.

I wonder if there is a time-based element to this as well- if the studios could argue the training was done prior to the agreement, if that would be an out.

Really, this doesn't look like the huge win the writers and guild are trying to make it out to be- surprise, surprise.

How long do these deals usually pan out for. Normally, the idea is to have it so you don't have to worry about it until the deal is time to come up again.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

Another big thing i don't think these writers realize is if you're going to have an AI, you don't need to train it on WGA scripts. They can just openly cheat by going internationally. If you want an AI to write you a Cowboy BeeBop episode, you don't need to train it on Sex and the City and Transparent and Dear White People, you can train it just well by having the anime to train on. Its especially true of something like One Piece which has thousands of episodes, thats going to make it a lot more enjoyable to fans and normies than training it on Blackish. For fucks sake the biggest show of the year was writing by a British dude and guess how many of his prior works are WGA scripts? almost 0, meaning if you did want to make the next Succession or Succession type tv show, you don't have to rely on WGA material to do it, because this asshole has hundreds of episodes in the UK you can steal from.

Even if those unions in other countries lock shit down people forget the internet exists when talking about AI, you know how a decade ago everyone whined about corporations using your social media in nefarious ways? turns out that could still happen. If you wanted to make a tv show about socialism or trans issues or any other liberal bullshit, you're probably better off training the AI on stuff that isn't unionized, such as college humor or creek&cave podcasts or any writings from reddit or twitter or numerous other places. Especially because if we're being honest the under 30 don't watch most union stuff as it is, unless its to snark on it later.

Beyond that is the whole "public domain" factor as well, You want to make a new Zorro film? well guess what your AI can use as a template, i'll give you a hint, its not whatever gay porn Gregg Araki made for tv recently. And thats beyond the real nugget of this whole AI bullshit, how could you possibly know? they're not going to be able to bust open the books and look into these machine's input and if its done well enough they're going to be unable to see the influence either. Outside of just accusing every AI and hoping to be proven right we literally just saw the unions fail to even get viewship numbers or residuals fixed. these corporations will 100% be able to starve off any attempts to see the AI's inner workings

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

Definitely worth keeping in mind that no matter what the actual deal entails, win or lose, the union leadership of a strike will always posture as having won. It's a face-saving measure directed at both the public and the union membership when there would otherwise be turmoil if failure is admitted.

From what I remember, a couple of the last pro sports strikes resulted in deals that weren't as good for the players as the last pre-strike offer despite the players unions saying the agreed-upon deal was a good thing, should be ratified, etc. It seems as if the longer a strike drags out, the less likely it is either side gets most of what it wanted.

I'm guessing that the WGA thinks that they'll be in a stronger position to negotiate in 2026...? If that's the case, fucking LOL (LMAO, even!)

I have a feeling that the increase of both streaming services and streaming in general has the WGA concerned enough to want even higher residual rates with the next contract, and I believe they are concerned enough about recent inflation rates that they don't want to be locked into a ten-year contract that won't keep up with inflation further exacerbated by California's already sky high costs of living.

And the moment that happens, the reality of how fucking dismal the actual viewing numbers for streaming exclusive shows are would be known to everyone and the whole fucking streaming service house of cards would collapse.

If it's trust that people are slowly reviewing their streaming subscriptions to see which ones can be canceled, especially with a number of services already proposing higher monthly fees, I'd expect to see a decrease over the next three years because average normies who have to live on a budget won't put up with being nickeled and dimed to death by the increasing number of streaming service charging monthly fees for content not available anywhere else.

If and when Hollywood is required to open the books, the house of cards will definitely fall. The $64000 question, though, is would the WGA ever have the fortitude to request those numbers knowing full well inflated numbers would be bad for their membership as much as it would be for the Hollywood execs.

E-begging must go on!
Ver archivo adjunto 5363241

Hmm, 87% of the SAG-AFTRA membership makes less than $26,000 per year. Does that make the a-list celebs the 1% of the membership -- similar to the 1% that was the subject of the Occupy Wall Street protests who argued the top 1% of the wealthy didn't deserve their money and they should share it with those making little to nothing? Goodness forbid the top celebs do more than slacktivism to help those union members on the bottom end of the pay scale.

So much for Union Solidarity Forever.
Edit: I can't spell on weekends.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Peak TV Is Over. A Different Hollywood Is Coming. Link is archive.

Kind of interesting, but nothing earth shattering. New content being released is dropping, stock prices of streaming companies is dropping, the prices they're charging are increasing.

The most important win was that, as in traditional TV, the talent will get paid more in success. Shows watched by at least 20% of a streamer’s domestic subscriber base in the first 90 days of release—or the first 90 days of subsequent years—will get a bonus.

I wonder how often that happens, if you're not Stranger Things or Cobra Kai? I wonder how they'll even track this, since it isn't like there's a ton more disclosure coming.

 

[Back me up!]

Peak TV Is Over. A Different Hollywood Is Coming. Link is archive.

Kind of interesting, but nothing earth shattering. New content being released is dropping, stock prices of streaming companies is dropping, the prices they're charging are increasing.


I wonder how often that happens, if you're not Stranger Things or Cobra Kai? I wonder how they'll even track this, since it isn't like there's a ton more disclosure coming.

Isn't that whole "talent will get paid more in success" a major poison pill through? Why bring on a woke dipshit as a head writer if you know it will cost you a more money?

 

[Kane Lives]

Isn't that whole "talent will get paid more in success" a major poison pill through? Why bring on a woke dipshit as a head writer if you know it will cost you a more money?

The midwit wokies think they're the 20%. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires and all that. Of course they'd cheer for this (and then regret it later).

 

[marvlouslie]

God, don't you just miss the strike already? We were so much better off.
Ver archivo adjunto 5367223

Well, there goes our peace and quiet.

 

[Ralph Barnhardt]

Before everyone gets too settled in for the winter, it seems the actors, who pretty much everyone forgot about, have hit a "snag".

https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1712304521416741296

https://twitter.com/JohnDijonCarey/status/1712369255008850280

https://twitter.com/BrunoAmato_1/status/1712372391874318388

So my very little understanding of the actors strike is that all the execs did a big ol' fuck you by offering them less than what their expired contract gave them and then walking away. This seems very odd to me considering that they met the bare minimum on the writer's end. As far as I can tell this means that Hollywood is still at a standstill without their actors, unless of course they go full AI and...

https://twitter.com/Lilfellow25/status/1712426998063116708

I just was looking for an excuse to share this because it's funny and someone publicly admitted to watching Prom Pact.

It's the shittiest John Hughes movie that he never made. Do you remember the 80's, fellow kids?

Null keeps talking in his MATI streams about how the media execs are purposely tanking their companies so they can make a profit and I could buy it, at least from the very, very top. However I really just think that too many people have drank the retard juice and the infection of retardation has spread so far and so deep that it's everywhere and terminal. Well, at least it would be terminal if everything wasn't so fake and gay and inconsequential.