This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation. The current Hollywood writers strike has drawn international attention to the plight of TV and film writers in the streaming era….
I am pro Union and pro Labor and I support the writers.
But there is like 25% of me that is the part that lives in GA that’s thinking - we’ll take even more of Hollywood if CA doesn’t want it.
That still won’t help the production companies in Georgia if there aren’t any writers.
Although most of the writing for Georgia-filmed television and film projects is done in places like New York and LA, most production crew members who work on set are state residents.
And without new scripts, production in Atlanta will eventually grind to a halt.
“As the whole business is being reassessed, having a strike is essential, the Writers Guild has to strike because they have to protect writers to be able to make a living and to share in the profits,” said Neil Landau, Executive Director of the University of Georgia Master of Fine Arts in Film, Television and Digital Media and a member of the Writers Guild of America since 1987.
Yeah - I get that. That’s why I was talking about GA taking a bigger piece of Hollywood. Moving the epicenter itself enough that you can sustain a non union production industry.
It’s not quite as unlikely as Disney moving to South Carolina over Ron D’s nonsense, but it is not really feasible right now. But I can see more and more of the industry decentralizing away from Hollywood - following the trend of the past 20+ years that has seen a lot of production move away from NY and California to places like Atlanta and Vancouver.
Apparently the writer doesn’t actually know what feudalism entailed.
No one is a bound serf and it’s hardly a fundamental right to be a Hollywood writer. A nice dream but not a right…
I’d save feudalism analogies to situations that actually merit it, like say working class populations with few employment choices having to work under grueling conditions at Amazon warehouses struggling to keep up with robotic systems.
Not some highly educated persons with other choices but pursuing glamorous jobs with Hollywood. Really.
What will all those writers do when their jobs are taken over by AI? All our job are vulnerable.
The writers won’t agree to a contract where the studios refuse to even address AI.
I don’t know how long it will take, but the studios should be nervous. Both SAG and DGA also have contract renewals this summer.
Maybe we can go back to shortening the work week?
My grandfather in the 1920s worked six days a week, my father in the mid-'30s worked five and a half days a week, then five just as WW II started. Today, salaried employees in tech are given pods to sleep in and free meals to keep them at work for way beyond 60 hours a week.
Folks, we had a reasonably nice system that was getting better, and we broke it. Time to reset expectations and use (just as they did in the '20s and ‘30s) advances in technology to improve workers’ lives, not just enrich the latest generation of oligarchs…
Screenwriters come from as varied a background as all of us, and outside the few most famous ones (who worked their asses off to get there), their jobs are not glamorous.
Writers fear that studios will use AI to hire workers, select which shows to produce and, in the worst-case scenario, replace writers altogether.
And rightly so. We’ll get even more schlocky shows. The only change will be that all the sci-fi movies that used to show AI as a disaster as robots kill humans in a dystopia will now have happy endings - of robots killing humans.
except agricultural field work and slaughterhouse work
also, it’s hard
It’s really hard.
Yes, it’s rewarding as well (if one is currently working), but the writing for shows like Succession and The Wire required a lot more from the writers than a glamorous or cushy 40-hour work week.
Nothing has changed in 500 years. The powerful take what they want and back it up with a spear or a gun or financial ruin. The other 99% of us stand around with our thumbs up our collective asses without a clue how we can possibly best the tiny minority who seems to own everything. The 99% always eventually arrive at the same conclusion, but by that point, generations of rage and resentment boil over and it ain’t pretty.
You clearly have not the slightest clue what it takes to be a writer and what the pay is like.
[edited]
AI is total shit. You think online news is bad filled with tedious and stupid clickbait shit? Just wait until AI gets a hold of film scripts. It’ll turn out mindless shit so bad it’ll make the fucking DaVinci Code look like an Orson Welles masterpiece.
The AI question is going to be very difficult to resolve, because the writers themselves will be using AI as a productivity tool to generate ideas and flesh out scripts. I suspect many are already taking advantage of this. It’s going to be tough to ask the studios to refrain from using a tool the writers themselves are using. And of course that just incentivizes the studios to push harder with their own use of AI.
The future will be a very small number of human showrunners who cherry-pick from an infinite variety of AI-generated plot ideas and scripts. It isn’t good enough yet to completely replace the writers so they still have some leverage in the short term. But I think everyone can see where this is going, in an industry where the only thing that matters is how much money is made by those at the top of the pyramid.
“Interesting times” ahead (in the Chinese proverb sense) for everyone trying to make a living in creative work.
Not some highly educated persons with other choices but pursuing glamorous jobs with Hollywood. Really.
It’s a risky profession. Screenwriters know that going in. I have no sympathy for educated people whining about their lives not turning out the way they expected.
Soon NYT Pitchbot will rule us all.
Of course, we will all need to learn to live with what’s coming. We just need to remember that AI is not human. It can not replace our humanity.
Not the ones who I know.
Most showrunners are also creators and head writers who belong to the WGA. They are fighting against this.
The one thing AI cannot do (and I believe will never be able to do) is replicate the human experience, including our individual imperfections and vulnerabilities. Screenwriters (all writers worth their salt) pull from their own lived experiences, which includes those imperfections and vulnerabilities.