With the Writers Guild of America strike now in its third month — and a potential Screen Actors Guild strike on the horizon — nobody truly knows when Hollywood will be able to resume normal operations. Some saw the Directors Guild of America’s recent deal with the AMPTP as cause for optimism, but one of TV’s top showrunners isn’t so sure.
In a new appearance on the People I (Mostly) Admire podcast, “The Wire” creator David Simon encouraged striking writers to manage their expectations about returning to work and cautioned them to settle in for the long haul.
“I heard a very funny thing,” Simon said. “It may be apocryphal, but somebody, the vice president of the East, she assured me the other day that she had it on good authority that all of the rental yachts from Santa Barbara down to San Diego had been rented through the end of summer. All the execs are gone for the summer.”
Simon explained that even if the anecdote is false, he sees it as indicative of a larger truth about the studios’ relaxed timeline for resolving the strike.
“I don’t know if that’s true or not,” he said. “What I do feel is that this is being dictated by Wall Street and by the people who answer to Wall Street. And their metrics are ambitious in the sense of preserving A.I. and eliminating term employment for film and TV writers. They have a ways to go before they give up on that notion. And they’re going to spend the summer, at least, inflicting pain on us as we walk the line.”
In Simon’s view, companies won’t come to the negotiating table in good faith until the strike has lasted long enough for streaming services to see real drops in customer engagement due to the lack of new content.
“And only until the such time as we start burning off whatever excess of production we’ve left them with for broadcast,” he said. “Only until that such time as they start seeing their audiences wobble and seeing the churn in terms of their subscriptions on the cable and streaming platforms, until they start seeing that go a little bit negative or become static, and realize they’re going to need some more content soon. And I think that means several months on the line. I do.”
