One of the leaders of the Writers Guild of America’s 2023 negotiations is calling on studios and streamers to return to the bargaining table and to “envision a solution” to the labor standoff that has brought scripted film and TV production in the U.S. to a standstill.
In an over 17-minute video message addressed in part to writers and in part to major entertainment companies, sent to WGA members on Wednesday, negotiating committee co-chair Chris Keyser (Julia) insisted that writers are not the companies’ “enemies” but “your partners and your greatest asset.” He added, addressing companies, “by accident or design, and it doesn’t really matter anymore, the business you are running no longer works for those who work for you. What is the point in continuing to deny that? Why deny it when everyone else in the business, to a person, tells you it’s true? Do you think it’s a coincidence that two unions are on strike against you for the first time since Eisenhower was President?”
He added, “If you want instead to invest in something that will reap you fortunes, I have a tip. And if you are visionaries, envision a solution, not a stalemate. Because this isn’t a war we’re in, it’s a negotiation. It’s just a negotiation. There is no face-saving here for either side because there is no winner or loser. It’s just a deal. And when you come to remember that again, we will be here, as we have been here all along.”
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios and streamers, for comment.
Earlier in the video, the union leader played up the fierce competition between the companies that comprise the AMPTP. “As they face the future, their interests and business models could not be more different, from Disney to Sony to Netflix to Amazon,” Keyser said. “We root for their success, all of them. They root for each other’s failure.”
Keyser — known among writers for particularly rousing speeches during the 2023 strike — described the studios as being in “what increasingly seems like a mutual suicide pact,” given that amid simultaneous writers’ and performers’ strikes, “the 2023-24 broadcast season and the 2024-25 movie schedule and its streaming shows disappear, melt away, week by week.”
Pointedly, he said that “either together or separately, as their divergent interests might suggest, they [Hollywood companies] will come back to us,” suggesting that members of the AMPTP might break off and form their own deals with the union. Keyser also cited Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos’ recent comments that he grew up in a union family, with a unionized electrician father and a July 11 Deadline story that reported a studio executive as saying “The endgame [of the WGA strike] is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
Keyser said, “Since we know they come from union families themselves, and since they denied that even in Hollywood, you have got to be kidding me, [the] ugliness of threatening to starve us out and leave us homeless, which we assume they understand also means making our children become homeless, they will come back to us. Although I will say they took a long time to deny that statement, longer than I would have had it been ascribed to me.”
Now around 13 weeks into the writers’ ongoing strike, the WGA and the AMPTP have not yet returned to the bargaining table to begin hashing out their differences. WGA leaders have repeatedly said that they believe it is up to the AMPTP to make the first move.
Keyser argued that the WGA’s leverage is “increasing every day” at this juncture in the strike. He acknowledged how difficult the strike has been for members and encouraged them to stay resolved: “These companies understand the cruelty of what they’re doing. it’s their plan: starve us, just a little,” he said, calling it “societally accepted economic torture.”
His argued that while companies are fighting for a “dollar,” “we are fighting for survival.” He continued, “We are fighting for our home. Writing is where we live, and we will defend that home with the bravery and stamina and ferocity that you will come to understand someday. Which is why you cannot break us. You cannot outlast us.”
