“The details of the new Writers Guild contract are out,” writer and comedian Adam Conover tweeted Tuesday night. “We won.” It’s hard to argue with Conover’s two-word conclusion. Guaranteed compensation, success-based residuals, AI limitations, staffing minimums, additional production guarantees, and more of the particulars of the WGA’s deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were, Conover continued, “essential protections that the companies told us, to our faces, that they would NEVER give us. But because of our solidarity, because they literally cannot make a dollar without us, they bent, then broke, and gave us what we deserve. WE WON.”
His points are all accurate. But there is one more hard-fought battle worth mentioning, one that ultimately may have lost the AMPTP the war: the PR battle. Because in the all-important court of public opinion, the studios got absolutely wiped out by the scrappy writers union, and none of their high-priced media consultants could do a thing about it.
So how did they do it? First and foremost, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of social media in the equation. When the WGA last went on strike, in 2007-2008, social media was around but not yet a factor — Myspace was dying, and Facebook was still growing (and still used primarily for friend and family communication). Twitter was still in its infancy; Instagram wouldn’t launch for two more years. Some writers took to YouTube to air their grievances, but their demands and arguments were primarily heard by the general public through the filter of traditional media — much of it owned and operated by the very conglomerates whose films and shows were shut down by the strike, so their coverage was slanted accordingly.
There were few such filters in place this time around. WGA members — many of whom had spent the past decade or more building large audiences on social media as part of their personal branding, connectivity and ongoing employment — used the multiple megaphones of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Blusky and more to deliver their message, on a daily or even hourly basis, throughout the 148 days of the strike.
Several members of the guild, including Conover, Chris Keyser and Gina Ippolito, proved especially adept at using those platforms to deliver the idea that they, as writers, were so skilled at crafting. Those who excelled at speaking to the WGA demands, who became (in effect) the faces of the strike, were then noticed and platformed by traditional news media — which, wherever the loyalties of the upper brass may lie, recognize a good sound bite when they hear one.
The AMPTP had no such charismatic, articulate voices to clearly state its case, even on the outlets they owned. If anything, they had the opposite: out-of-touch millionaires and billionaires, who may as well have been spouting Saturday cartoon villainy from their luxury yachts.
Within days of signing a contract extension guaranteeing him $27 million per year (plus bonuses), Disney CEO Bob Iger went on CNBC’s Squawk Box and called the strike “very disturbing.” He added that the strikers had “a level of expectation … that is just not realistic. And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.” (But disruptive is what strikes are supposed to be.) Warner Bros. Discovery, in the most hilariously nearsighted “glass half full” imaginable, announced that it had actually saved $100 million thanks to the work stoppage.
Off the record, execs got ugly — with disastrous results. Most notoriously, in July, unnamed studio executives told Deadline they aimed to “break the WGA” by “not giving in,” instead resorting to means they called “a cruel but necessary evil”: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” Once upon a time, such naked threats might have intimidated the union; this time, they just fired people up. The writers held steady, were patient, held the line, and proved victorious.
How could such seemingly savvy media professionals have misread the room so badly? Put simply, people this rich live in rarefied air and surround themselves with sycophants and yes-men; you don’t stay in the orbits of Hollywood executives by suggesting that their views on Hollywood’s worker class might be a little tone-deaf. No one, it seems, tells these people they’re wrong, not even the crisis management consultants they spend a fortune to hire.
As a result, studio execs spent four-plus months stepping on rakes. Consumers, themselves struggling in a stagnant economy (or looking into opportunities to form unions of their own), sided with the writers. This was especially true for Gen Z and millennials, who might not know the daily struggles of a screenwriter but recognize the inanities of an overpaid, out-of-touch boss. The WGA deal is done. Now it’s time to see if SAG, the UAW and countless other unions — and the bosses they’re battling — learned any lessons about how to craft a sympathetic message and the most efficient methods of spreading it.
Jason Bailey is a film critic and historian. He is the author of “Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It.” This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
