Episode 198: Strikesplaining
In Episode 198, “Strikesplaining,” Elizabeth and Flourish are joined by screenwriter, executive producer, and longtime friend of the podcast Javier Grillo-Marxuach to talk about the Writers Guild of America strike. Javi breaks down how television writing, production, and compensation have changed drastically in his three decades in the industry, and how this action is connected to broader labor struggles facing workers today. They also talk about the specific ways this strike touches fandom, including how streamers’ exploitative practices affect everyone from the people making the shows to the people who want to watch them.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:52] Javi did, in fact, first come on the podcast in 2018. You can also find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.
[00:01:39]
[00:04:32] Our interstitial music throughout is “Arcade montage” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:09:54]
[00:24:58] Kudos to our transcriptionist, Rachel, who put this link in a comment at this particular point in the conversation:
[00:31:58] Gawker coming for Javi 15 years in advance:
Due to an arcane by-law in the WGA constitution, no strike can officially be called off until one the Guild's longest-tenured and most visible members appears on television to ritualistically recite the story of Lew Wasserman's Toilet, in which the legendary Hollywood mogul supposedly dismissed the idea of paying residuals by saying, "My plumber doesn't charge me each time I flush the toilet." Thankfully, comedian and tenured Oscar gag-writer Bruce Vilanch completed this curious formality earlier today on CNN, allowing the rest of the strike-cancellation process to proceed as scheduled.
[00:33:54] That Rolling Stone piece is “Inside the Big Battle to Save One Small TV Show.”
[00:40:15] Javi does mean “This Side of Paradise,” aka “The Sex Pollen Episode”:
[00:47:32]
(And while we’re here: BARRY IS THE BEST SHOW ON TELEVISION, WATCH IT NOW, ONLY TWO EPISODES LEFT!!)
[00:56:49]
[01:00:04]
[01:10:57] That’s special episode #9: “No Edith, No Peace,” and EVERY patron gets access to that, even at just $1 a month!
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeeeth.
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining! The podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #198, “Strikesplaining.”
FK: Featuring…Javi Grillo-Marxuach! Yeeeeahhhh!!! [ELM laughs] I’m so excited to have him back.
ELM: A lot of enthusiasm going on right here.
FK: I’m enthusiastic, I love Javi.
ELM: As do I. So, if you…when did Javi come on the first time? I wanna say like, 2017 maybe? 2018? A long time ago.
FK: A long time ago.
ELM: He is a television writer, executive producer, I…what is he known for? So many things. I think currently The Witcher, is what he’s working on?
FK: Yes, yeah, he’s definitely recently been on The Witcher, he had a show called Middleman, he was on Lost… Um, he was on…
ELM: [overlapping] Wait, “on,” you mean “on the writing staff of, and/or showrunning.” He wasn’t, he wasn’t on the island. Yeah.
FK: [almost simultaneous] On the writing staff, yeah, he was not, he was not an actor. [both laugh]
ELM: It’s about an island, right?
FK: Yeah, and of course famously he wrote for The 100, and the whole Clexa incident. Sorry, Javi, it’s part of your story forever now.
ELM: [laughing, overlapping] I mean that’s just famous…that’s just famous to people like us. I don’t, I don’t feel like that’s in the top ten of his writing credits. [FK laughs] But yeah. And recently, I know he was a writer for the new Dark Crystal show, which I know a lot of fans are really into. So, TL;DR, he has been in Hollywood as a TV writer, and I think also executive, early in his career, for decades.
FK: Yes.
ELM: And so, he really, really knows what’s going on, and if you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on, the Writers Guild of America is on strike.
FK: Yes! For, for good reason. And I’m really interested in hearing the way that Javi is framing it, because I feel like I have seen a wide variety of takes, and I want his take.
ELM: To be clear, here’s what’s been happening: Flourish is petulantly—petulantly—refusing to look at Twitter, even though they still have an account.
FK: That’s right. [ELM laughs] So I get all of my information from, from people who are posting things on Instagram, or on Facebook, which is, like, some of my professional colleagues, but mostly I get…bad takes from you. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Flourish—OK. But the thing is, you refuse to open Twitter. Which, no, whatever, no judgment to anyone but Flourish who’s refusing to go on Twitter. But maybe you should delete your account. But, it is very funny that you accidentally yesterday sent me an Instagram post that was a screenshot of a tweet. It was like, “Nope, I would like to just see this as a tweet.” [FK laughs]
FK: It’s true.
ELM: Anyway, the point is, if you’re not on Twitter, a lot of writers have been strikesplaining themselves for the last week, and we should clarify, we’re recording this one week into the strike and it’s another week until this episode comes out, so by the time this is out, this will have been doing on for two weeks. We’re assuming they’re not magically going to come to an agreement in the next week, so hopefully nothing’s wildly out of date here. But a lot of people have been explaining their experiences, being very open and frank about the money issues here and how things work, and all this stuff, and I have been sending you the tweets that are not that. [FK laughs] And so I think I’ve given you somewhat of a skewed perspective of what the conversation is like.
FK: Yeah, you know, pretty much I’m getting real, like…you know, serious business things from people that I used to know in the industry, and then like…your terrible—not your terrible tweets—the terrible tweets you’re sending me! So. [laughs] And occasionally somebody’s saying something to me that just seems like, extremely bananas, who knows that I work in, or have historically worked in the industry, and I’m just like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know anything about this, I need to leave this conversation.” This has happened a couple of times with people.
ELM: Oh no! [laughs]
FK: Like in the church world, where I’m like, “I don’t know, don’t have an opinion, don’t—” Anyway, so I’m really excited to have Javi on, because I feel…you may not be as much in an information vacuum as I am, [both laugh] but I feel like I’m in an information vacuum.
ELM: No, also, while I love reading Javi’s threads about this, I would love for him to deliver a thread directly to our faces. So.
FK: Let’s do it! Should we call him? And have that thread delivered?
ELM: [overlapping] All right, let’s call him! Let’s call him. [laughs]
FK: Yeah!
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right! Let’s welcome Javi back onto the podcast! It’s so good to have you back!
Javier Grillo-Marxuach: Hello! [ELM laughs] Hi, thanks for having me.
ELM: Thanks for coming on during such a busy time.
JGM: It’s my pleasure, you know I’d talk to you guys anytime.
FK: Awwww!
ELM: Anytime. From the picket line, we could’ve had you on.
JGM: I’m, look, I’m angling for a permanent co-host spot with you guys, [ELM and FK laugh] you guys know this, so I don’t know…you know, I’m just sayin’.
FK: All right, Javi, start us off. Please explain like I’m five about what is going on with the writers strike. [ELM and JGM laugh]
JGM: OK. Sounds good. All right, so look. First of all, just to give you some context, I’ve been in the television business for about 30 years now, and I started as a network executive, I have a very good idea of kind of how TV was made before and how it’s made now, and all of that. So when I say “when I started,” I’m talking about the mid-90s, the early 90s even.
Up until very recently, and by “very recently” I mean about 10 years ago, the way television was made was very robust and very profitable. You created shows that networks leased from studios, right, the networks sold advertising space during the airing of those programs, which paid for their overhead. Then the studios would get the shows back after the network showed them a couple times, and then they would sell them to regional and international markets. And in doing that, these studios would earn their money back, because a lot of those shows were deficit-financed, right?
Shows would have 22 episodes, you know, you’d start with an order of 13, you’d get a back 9, so you’d get 22, and you worked year-round. So if you’re a writer and you were working, you would start working May or June, you would work all the way through probably around the next February or April; if your show got a full 22 episodes, you earned an episodic fee, unless you were at the very lower level, in which case you got a weekly fee, right?
And television, there was kind of a quality to that sort of like farming, OK? [FK laughs] You sold pilots at the end of the summer, you wrote the pilots in the fall, [ELM laughs] they figured out which pilots they were gonna do in the winter, you shot the pilots in the spring, and then in the summer you put the shows out in the air, you know, so it was very regimented.
FK: [overlapping] What’s, what’s the manure, the fertilizer in this? Nevermind. [laughs]
ELM: [laughs] Oh wow, Flourish.
JGM: The, uh, the souls of young writers. [all laugh]
FK: OK.
JGM: Yeah. But so, basically, so then you take the streaming version of this, right, and the seeds for this were planted a long time ago, like when DVDs came out, OK, two things happened. One of them was that the people who made DVDs, the producers, the people that writers negotiate against, said, “Our companies have spent a lot of money developing this technology and we don’t know if it’s gonna be popular or not. So we’re gonna give you a very small royalty on the sales of these DVDs,” right?
Then the streaming era came. I was working on Lost when the uh, iTunes video store came out and their first two shows were Desperate Housewives and Lost, and I remember being there going, “Who’s getting paid for this? How are we getting paid for this?” J. J. Abrams, who was a friend of Steve Jobs, like literally there were movies in the Apple Store with J. J. and Steve Jobs talking about iMovie, right, or Final Cut Pro or whatever, didn’t know how we were getting paid, and it was very angering, you know? Because the studios basically took the point of view of, “We’ll just put this up there and see what happens.”
Now, two things that happened with DVDs, one of them is they blew up, the studios made billions of dollars off of them and paid us fractions of pennies on the dollar. Which is not great, considering that we create the content. And they wanted to do the same with streaming. The other thing that happened with DVDs is that DVDs brought forth the age of binge-watching. 24 was kinda the first show that people sort of like, saw, it was on, they heard good things, and the DVD set came out and it became the binge show, right? It was 24, was the binge show, right?
FK: [overlapping] Yep. Yep. I, I had that experience. Yep. Absolutely, the first step, the first season of 24. I was stuck on a train that was, like, broken down, and I had my computer and I had the first season of 24, [laughs] I watched that whole season. [ELM laughs]
JGM: Yeah! Yeah. So, we struck in ’07 to make sure that streaming residuals and the amount we got paid for streaming was not the same as the DVDs, OK, on shows that we’d already made. But then here’s what happens: streaming gets really big. People start cutting the cord, and this is all ten years’ worth of history, it’s not even, not recent. So suddenly, streaming’s model becomes “Make eight episodes of anything all at once, throw it in there for people to binge, and then decide whether you make more or not.” You know? And their model isn’t about advertising sales, it’s about driving subscriptions. So basically, I mean it’s kind of a pyramid scheme in that the whole thing is, we’ll just keep making new shows and those shows will drive new subscriptions, you know? The problem is, when it was just Netflix that was fine, now it’s Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Max, Peacock, you know, Pooflinger, Woombi, you know, all of those things, right? [all laugh] So anyway, so…
FK: I can already tell our transcriptionist is gonna have like, an aneurysm about Pooflinger and Woombi. [all laugh]
ELM: No, she’s a Pooflinger subscriber! She’ll get it, don’t worry. [FK laughs]
JGM: [overlapping] Yes, again, Pooflinger’s probably the best, it’s the least known one but it’s one of the best ones. [ELM laughs] They have the reruns of The Middleman there. [FK and ELM laugh] But anyway… [laughs]
So what winds up happening is, you suddenly get into this world where the writers are being asked to come in for six months at a time to write the scripts, right, but then they basically tell everybody to go f— off, they keep the showrunner on staff, that person goes to production. That causes a couple of problems, because writers’ jobs have now shrunk to maybe six months at a time, right? Writers are not going to the set to produce—in the network model you were shooting while you were writing, so a writer would always go on set to make sure that what was being shot was what was on the page, you know? And that way you had quality control, you made sure that the story remained continuous from episode to episode, all that stuff requires writers to be there. That’s been taken away now, because they basically bring you in for six months, you write all the scripts, and then they tell you to leave.
Well what happens on the other end of that is that then the showrunner goes off, and they have eight episodes of a show that they don’t know what production can and can’t do, right? When you’re writing and producing at the same time, you learn very quickly what your production can handle or not. So you take something like The Dark Crystal, literally one executive writer/producer goes off to London with the director, they’ve got ten hours of television to make. We made our best guess of what the puppets could do, then all of a sudden they’re looking at it going, “Oh, there’s about five billion things that puppets can’t do and ten sets we can’t build.” So one person had to do all of that rewriting, because any decision you make on set triggers a rewrite basically.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
JGM: So writers are losing the, their power to go produce, writers are losing their income that they get when they produce, right? Writers are losing the learning and mentorship and education they get when they produce. Worse yet, the way the streamers have sort of Frankensteined around the minimum basic agreement, which again made sure that a writer got paid enough to make a living, is that they’ve turned that six-month period into a weekly. They’ve basically said, “We’re going to unbundle your writing from your producing, and we’re going to pay you scale weekly for the writing. And if we ask you to produce, then we will pay your whole episodic fee,” but what that winds up being…take a writer like me, right, I’m a 30-year veteran, I’ve run shows, I’m an executive-producer-level guy, so my pay is on the upper level of what working writers make. That’s not a humble brag, it’s just the truth, this is where I’m at in my career, right? But when they then put me on a weekly, all of a sudden I’m earning a third of that, then they don’t ask me to go produce, so they never make you whole, right?
FK: Mmmm.
JGM: So two things suffer, one of them is the quality of the show suffers because all the rewriting is put on one person, the showrunner; the quality of the show declines because nobody who is the custodian of the scripts and the story as it was written can be on set the entire time, it can’t just be the showrunner because they’re often off rewriting, right? Writers are paid less, and writers don’t get to work as frequently or for as long a period of time.
So the way that, the knock-on effect of this business is first of all a lot more writers competing for jobs, OK. Because, you know, there’s been a glut of shows, they’ve needed a lot more writers, and also because partially of the golden age of television between, you know, ’04 and 2012, writing has become this more glamorous thing that people now wanna do. People look at it as a career path. So there’s a glut of writers. None of them are working enough hours, none of them are making enough money, and none of them are getting enough experience.
So I can name you off the top of my head 12 writers that I know personally, who have staffed—some of them are early in their career, others are in the middle of their careers, right? They’re not making enough money yearly to make their nut, OK? Now, the industry doesn’t owe anybody the chance to make their nut, but you know, I think that if you have an art form, and an industry that depends on people being able to render that art, that it would be to your benefit to pay those people well so they create good art, give them the tools and the opportunities to be able to know exactly what it is that their art demands of them.
So a lot of the investment that we’re—so what the Writers Guild is asking for the studios is pretty big. Because we’re basically asking them to restructure the entire way television is made, and—they’ve already restructured how TV is made. We’re asking them to restructure because they restructured it, they disrupted it and they restructured it, right? So we’re asking them now to say look, you’ve disrupted and restructured everything, part of that has to be taking care of the writers. Because in the system where writers come and work for six months and then they may not work again for two years, because there’s, or you know, they’re not making enough money during that show to account for the time that they’re not working, writers are not going to get the experience, the education, and the financial standing that they need in order to make this a viable career.
And of course the studios are saying “Who cares?” Because their model is now just pump out as much product as they can to try to keep driving subscriptions. So, they don’t look at it as the writer from this show is gonna wind up in the next, is gonna wind up in the next show, and they don’t look at it as, let’s take a show like Cheers, and let it live for the first low-rated year in the hopes it’ll find an audience. Right? If a show doesn’t work immediately or if they cancel, the writers are thrown to the wind. Everybody’s thrown to the wind. If a show works for them, they keep it for three seasons, because they don’t grow their shows the way the networks used to. The audience for Stranger Things is pretty set, and it’s a big audience, so they can afford to give it a good sendoff and all that, and to make spinoffs and all of that.
But you take a show, for example, like Cowboy Bebop, you know? Which was a show that had a fairly good audience number, the reviews were mixed and some people didn’t like it because of the anime, and they didn’t like what we did or whatever. But the show could’ve done really well, had it been on first run syndication in the ’90s, or the SyFy channel, or even at a network, if it had been allowed to sit there with maybe another more popular show to drive audience to it, and then the ad revenue would increase as the show got more popular, and you know, ultimately you got something that could sustain for four, five, six, seven years.
The streamers don’t have that model. So for them, it’s all about cut and slash, it’s about get a show out, [claps once emphatically] get it out as quickly as you can, put it out there, hope it drives subscriptions, if it doesn’t cancel it in 30 days, which is how most shows—Cowboy Bebop got canceled four weeks into its run.
FK: Mmmm.
JGM: Because their metrics told them that the show wasn’t gonna grow.
ELM: Mmm hmmm.
JGM: And the non-linearity of it kinda makes that a fait accompli because you can’t bundle it, you know, like you used to watch NBC Must-See TV, you know, Mad About You drove viewers into Wings, Wings was a little bit of a lull but then everybody showed up for Seinfeld, and Seinfeld drove everybody to the 9:30 show.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, yep. [laughs] Absolutely.
JGM: And the 9:30 show drove everybody to ER, and though you had some shows that were more popular than others, you had an entire block that worked, and those shows all lasted like, seven, eight, nine, ten years, right?
FK: I have to say that this is such a real thing that I feel like some of our listeners probably never experienced, if they’re younger, which is the, I mean…like, we’re all sitting here nodding, but like, yeah! Absolutely, you know, I would watch on Fox, I would watch The Simpsons, and then Malcolm in the Middle, and then The X-Files. Did I want to watch Malcolm in the Middle? No, but did I, every night? [laughs]
JGM: [overlapping] Right. Mmm hmmm, mmm hmmm. Yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] The things I watched on the WB…you know? Like, that were not Buffy, just because they were there, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
JGM: Yeah. By the way, whatever show NBC put on at 9:30 between, you know, Friends or you know, and ER, after Seinfeld, [laughs] you know? Because a 9:30 show on NBC during Must See TV Thursdays was always kinda iffy, you know? [ELM and FK laugh] It was like, some show starring somebody you kinda knew, who had friends kinda like Friends but they were different, [ELM and FK laugh] I mean like, there were 20 of those shows, you know, but those shows stayed on the air because…they were on after Friends! Course it’s gonna stay on, you know? Whatever.
ELM: [overlapping] Sure, yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: But it is interesting, what I’m hearing is that there’s, in the “disruption” of all of this, that basically what had been previously, like, a fairly stable career in a certain way?
JGM: Yeah.
FK: Like you would be on a show for a longer period of time, and also if you stop being on that show, then you knew when you would potentially get another show, and how long that would be and so forth. It was kinda stable. And now, it’s like…very unstable, there’s lots of different things, it’s much shorter periods of time, and you’re sort of being tossed around, like gig work. Which, it seems like before, it was still kinda like gig work in that you were on a show, not on a network or something, but they were so much longer that it was like, very long gigs. [laughs]
JGM: Yep. Yeah. Exactly, your gig would at the very least be eight or nine months, in which case if your show got canceled you could get another gig for a year, you could live on that. And look, people always, like, when I tell my parents or people who are not in the business how much I earn per episode, they think that I’m Scrooge McDuck and I’m literally swimming in a pool of money, right? [FK and ELM laugh] The reason why writers’ salaries are as high as they are, or have been, or if I tell you what my weekly is on the TV show that I work on, you’re gonna be like, “Well what are you complaining about?” The problem is, is that then it stops. You know? And there’s no, there’s no way that you can financially take the lulls that you used to get, on the kind of money that you earn on these weeklies, you know?
The other thing that’s gone missing from the television landscape is, in the network model, you used to make pilots. So you’d literally spend, you’d sell a show in the summer, you’d spend all the fall developing that show with your executives, like a book with editors, and you made that pilot, and then you saw it, and then you saw, do the actors work? Do the sets work? Is the writing working? You got a shakedown cruise, right? Instead of doing that, what they do now is they have these mini-rooms.
So I was on a show for a channel that shall remain nameless, but its initials are Disney+. [FK and ELM laugh] And this was, um…maybe eight months ago. I was on the second mini-room for this show—they’d already had a mini-room, because they had a property they liked, they had somebody write a pilot script, and they had that person write two more scripts, but they were kind of iffy on the content, so they brought in a bunch of writers to help work out the content. So then we did that. And then they did another mini-room. You know, they, all of us were there for like, four months on weeklies, and then they got rid of all of us and they—and that’s a way of kind of like, sort of workshopping the material, but it doesn’t really lead to pilots being made the way that it used to, because they don’t have any incentive to make these things.
In the network world, you had to have pilots, because you had to have shows to launch in the fall. And you had open timeslots that had to be filled. So now, without the incentive or that time pressure to get a show made, many rooms are cheap, because the writers are there on weekly at scale, which is the least amount of money they can pay us. So they can just keep throwing money at mini-rooms, but the problem is then you get writers working for nothing for like, a protracted period of time, producing very little, you know, and then they go off back into the wolves and they don’t know when the next job is gonna be, and technically they’ve been on a staff but they really haven’t. So the mini-room has created this sort of prolonged limbo of development for new shows, and by and large they don’t get made!
ELM: That’s so interesting, because it feels like, that model feels very much like it comes from tech. I don’t know—would you say that, that, there’s a direct line there? I just say, having been recently working in the tech industry.
JGM: Weirdly, I mean I was actually in the first, one of the first ever mini-rooms, because Lost, the president of ABC wanted Lost so badly that he commissioned the script at the regular time, the script came in in December, he didn’t like it, they threw that script out, and then they basically got J. J. and Damon and a bunch of the Alias writers to start creating Lost, and the show got greenlit off of an outline and they hired me, Paul Dini, Jennifer Johnson, and Christian Taylor to basically workshop that show while they were shooting the pilot.
So it’s, it wasn’t unheard of in television. I mean, whether it comes from tech or not, I don’t know, but I mean look…it’s a, it’s a crappy model, because it’s basically, you’re sitting there working out—like, in tech, if you’ve got people coding you can put the thing up on its feet and look at it, you know? You’re working on an app.
ELM: Right.
JGM: In TV, you’re working on scripts, and scripts are gonna depend on the president of the studio, the network, the streamer, looking at them and what they can visualize. So the improvement or lack thereof in it is so subjective. And you can just keep throwing mini-rooms at it until you get tired of it, you know?
ELM: Yeah, it’s interesting to hear that there were versions of this before the tech industry kind of…disrupted. Because, you know, in a big tech company, too, you’ll have I think what I could describe as mini-rooms of different, you know, them trying different products, and spinning different things up, and prototyping, et cetera, and then, ah, it doesn’t have enough users, they kill it, whatever, who cares. Right?
JGM: Right.
ELM: But, they still have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people working there, staff, salaried, making core products that they’re not doing anything with, and these are just kind of offshoots. It can’t be the basis for an industry.
JGM: No. No. And look, I think it’s really easy to look at this and say, “Well, you’re complaining because your jobs are shorter” or whatever, you know, yes, I am. And the studio’s gonna say, “Well this is just how we do things now, we can’t give you a living, just give you a living for no reason,” and what I’m saying is, it’s not no reason. You need a system that actually grooms, educates, and pushes writers through an apprenticeship-journeyman-master process, you know? One of the big problems with television right now is like, you literally…somebody does a Twitter, you know, My Year of Not Eating Beans, [ELM snorts] you know, and it’s a really funny Twitter about how they didn’t eat beans for a year, right, and somebody goes, “This would be a great sitcom,” [ELM and FK laugh] so let’s get the beans guy.
So they get the beans guy, right? But here’s what they’re doing, and this has happened—I mean look, it’s like you see this with playwrights, you see this with writers from other, from feature films, you see this with people who do blogs, it’s, I’m using a risible kind of example, but by the way that’s how Shit My Dad Says got made, OK? [FK laughs] Here’s the thing, you can’t take somebody who does a Twitter, and tell them, “You’re now a showrunner.”
FK: Right.
JGM: Showrunning is the end—for me, it was the end of 12 years of being on shows that you’ve heard of, that you know, shows like Lost, and Medium, and The Pretender, and Charmed, learning how to manage a startup corporation with a budget that could go up to between $50 and $100 million, with a workforce of 250. The people who generate the shows and create the shows ultimately, in the way the business is structured now, and what I think has made writing really great, and what has made TV great in the last 20 years, is to have a pipeline where the writers are educated in the process so that they can be present and actually demand material that is…has some fidelity to what they have in their minds, and what the text is, because the generation of those stories and of those concepts is where the profit is coming from. So it is profitable to have the people who actually create the stuff be present for a prolonged period of time, so that they can oversee and do quality control on the product. That may seem weird to you, I don’t know, to me it makes kind of sense. [FK laughs]
ELM: Well, I feel like too, it’s interesting to me…sorry I just mentioned that I was working in tech, but mostly I’m a journalist and an editor, right, and I work in the media, and…it’s interesting to listen to this, and I’ve been following all this pretty closely, because part of me in the back of my mind, I’m like, “Oh man, you’re gonna lose your health insurance? I’ve never had health insurance, and I’ve worked in the media for 15 years!” Right? But then I’m like, “OK, we’re the ones who are—you have a union,” right? it would be super cool if the media had one big union, and we could use that power.
JGM: Hey, do you know how I got, do you know how I got insurance? A strike.
ELM: Right!
JGM: You know how I got residuals? A strike. You know how I got a pension? A strike.
ELM: [laughs] Yeah!
JGM: By the way, that’s how I’m not pounding the pavement, I may not—look, my career’s in the mature phase, and frankly this disruption, this decade, has literally taken away the highest income earning years of my life. Somebody who has been working in television steadily the way that I have, my income has probably declined about…between 20 to 40% depending on the year, because of the way that TV works now. The land that I was promised is not the land I’m living in, it’s not the land I’m gonna get. That doesn’t mean that the world owed me wealth, but you know, certainly based on what my contemporaries made earlier in the life of this medium, it should be a very different life that I have, or at least one that’s significantly better compensated, you know?
So I’m not striking for—and yes, everyone should have a union, by the way, because the one thing about the strike that—and I wanna talk to you about residuals and royalties also, ‘cause that’s a big part of this also. But the one thing that this strike has that the strike of ’07 didn’t have? The strike of ’07 seemed to everybody to be real inside baseball. And we had to message, “Guys, it’s because TV’s gonna come through the internet in the future, [FK and ELM laugh] and we want our cut.” And everybody was like, “Well, you people are dicks.”
ELM: [laughs] Yeah.
JGM: You know? But here’s the thing, the difference between ’07 and now is that a lot of people are really tired of being fucked over by billionaires. [FK and ELM both hum agreement] OK? People who drive Uber are sick and tired of that. Anybody who is in a profession where somebody built an app that allows you to hire people who do that job without healthcare? Be it a massage therapist, a dog walker, whatever, right, anybody who’s fallen victim to the gig economy knows what we’re fighting for.
FK: Mmmm hmmm.
JGM: And that is, and I think that the biggest difference in our—like, Joe Biden just said, you’ve heard of him right? [ELM and FK laugh]
ELM: Oh yeah, that guy! [JGM laughs] Robinette! [laughs]
JGM: Literally knows about the strike, and said, thinks that writers should get a fair deal, you know?
ELM: Mmmm hmmm.
JGM: I mean, every union in this country is going through some version of this struggle. And the struggle is that late capitalism is all about cutting every cost possible to create the illusion of profitability. Now, I know that I’ve been monologuing and you guys are trying to ask me questions and I’m just going on, but you know…
ELM: [overlapping] No. It’s great, it’s great.
FK: It’s a good monologue.
ELM: Yeah, I love it. No notes.
JGM: Well, thank you. [all laugh] I should write it down. Um, the Writers Guild, first of all, again, there’s this perception that writers are these narcissistic dilettantes who kind of do this fun thing every once in a while for way too much money. I mean literally, like, any writer who works in television will tell you they’ve had that conversation with their parents, you know?
FK: Yeah, film is even worse, right?
JGM: Oh yeah.
FK: Because with film you get like, hundreds of thousands of dollars for a script, and then of course you don’t sell another script for several years, so like…how does that wage work out? But, you know?
JGM: Exactly. Yeah. But here’s the thing. And just so we talk about the hack-and-slash late capitalism, the profit-only mentality, OK, it ignores that a professional—you wouldn’t want to go to a hospital where they don’t have, you know, people who are learning how to be doctors at that hospital. That’s part of what’s understood as the mandate of a hospital, is you gotta have interns, you gotta have residents, you gotta have people who are learning how to be better doctors, so that when the person gets to do brain surgery, they’ve been around a little bit, right? Nobody questions that. [ELM laughs]
In television that wheel has broken completely, but you need a professional class of writers to do good television. You just do. And I think that that system is one of the reasons why American television has such a global hegemony. I think there’s two reasons. One is, writers go through a very robust—or, used to go through a very robust period of learning, mentorship, and apprenticeship, and also we had to write to commercials, so there was a cliffhanger every ten minutes, so you know, even when our shows play in nations where there aren’t commercial breaks, you’re still getting, always getting an escalating dramatic action. And I think that formula alone is a huge part of American cultural hegemony, believe it or not.
So. The six men—and they are men—who run the six major media companies, OK? Bob Chapek who just got fired from Disney, Bob Iger who replaced him at Disney and had been at Disney before him, Rupert Murdoch, Reed Hastings, Ted Sarandos, and David Zaslov, right? Discovery, two men from Netflix, two guys from Disney, and Rupert Murdoch, who’s just from Hell, right? [ELM and FK laugh] That’s what he—anyway, we can talk about that later, sorry.
But um, those six men, in their stewardship of those media companies, made $773 million in 2021. Partially because they exercised stock options, previous deals they had, so that number may be, you know. In 2022 that number may go down to hover around maybe $400 million, OK? Let’s take that one banner year, $773 million in one year. You look at everything the writers are asking for: longer spans of time at work; protection for the times between when your show, you’re finished writing, the show gets produced, and whether they pick it up because then they can’t just expect you to sit on your hands and have a deal where you can’t go work elsewhere until they decide whether to pick up the show while they’re taking eight months to make the show, right? Span protection, improvements to pension and healthcare, bigger minimums, all of that stuff. That would cost all of $498 million a year to cover. So, yearly then, we’re talking about just slightly over $200 million or less, than the compensation of the six top employees at this company.
And think about what the six next employees are making! They’re not making, it’s not like Rupert Murdoch is making $50 million and then his vice president is making, you know, $20 bucks an hour. [laughs] I mean, everyone down the line is getting these huge compensation packages through the executive ranks, you know? Look at the Writers Guild pension. The Writers Guild’s entire pension and healthcare fund is $2.1 billion. It is the interest and management of that fund that provides retirement and healthcare for every working and retired writer in Hollywood right now. With the year those men had in 2021, if they had three years in a row like that, they could basically cover all retirement and healthcare for every writer, in perpetuity.
So when people talk about the greedy writers, and we want too much, and we’re lucky to be employed, just think about what six top employees are earning in only six of the companies that we’re striking against.
FK: I have to say, [laughs] it’s so refreshing for me to hear the…extremely concrete realities of this, because I feel like so much of the stuff I’m seeing people talk about with this is things like… “Oh, this is all about AI,” or, “Oh, this is all about, like, memes.” I don’t know how memes get involved in this, but like, you know? People on Twitter talking about—like, all sorts of stuff that just seems…
ELM: [overlapping] I’ve been sending Flourish some bad…bad takes. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, you’ve been sending me some bad takes. But there are a lot of bad takes out there, right, and a lot of the bad takes make this seem like it’s about, you know, either something like AI, which is not actually currently here taking writers’ jobs—I’m not saying it won’t ever, but I’m just saying it’s not doing it right now—or like—
JGM: Yeah, it’s a concern.
FK: Yeah, I get it, I’m not saying it won’t ever, I’m just saying that like, it’s a very different thing than being like, no no no, right now, [laughs] in this moment…
JGM: Yeah.
FK: ...not looking to the future, just to the now.
JGM: [overlapping] And let me give you another sort of, big financial reality. But here’s the other thing, it’s like, so. We talked about how, in the old model, you made your show, the broadcast network showed your show, the studios got it back, they sold it regionally and internationally, right? Every time your show re-ran, you got a residual. You got a royalty. OK? Because why, because you created it.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
JGM: So you deserve to get paid every time somebody profits from it, OK? I think it was Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner, one of the big old-timey guys would say “Well, I don’t have to pay the plumber every time I flush the toilet.” All right. If you had to pay the plumb—anyway, I don’t even want to get into that metaphor. [ELM and FK laugh] But the point is, this is different. We are creating artisanal—like, look, you can look at television as industrialized, but every episode has to be written by hand by somebody and made by hand by people.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
JGM: So the residuals were also a way in which you, as a writer, if say you got a job on Law & Order SVU, you worked on that for a year, maybe you didn’t work again for a little while, when your episode got aired again you got paid the exact amount of your script fee and then the second time it re-ran you got half of that, and then it kept kind of decreasing on a sliding scale, but you had a robust way of continuing to put together a living, you know, based on the work that you did, because it was a recognition that it is unique.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
JGM: Every episode of TV is a unique thing, no matter how formulaic you think the show is.
FK: And every time it airs, people make more money off of it, right?
JGM: Exactly.
FK: It’s like, it’s, I mean they’re not literally selling tickets, but it’s a little bit like selling tickets to a show. They’re making some money, and so you deserve a cut of the money every time.
JGM: Yeah. Absolutely. So now, you make a show, it gets on Netflix, and it just stays there. Right? And Netflix is not transparent about its—nor are any of the streamers—so you don’t know how much viewership that show has, or what kind of income it’s driving for the streamer. So the way that they work around the royalties issue is they created a buyout system. Which means that based on metrics you don’t see, they determine an amount of money that you can’t negotiate, for what they’re going to pay you for a show that you don’t know how many people are watching. As you might imagine, those sums of money are not particularly commensurate to what we used to make in the old system. [FK laughs] Even though their profits are significantly higher.
ELM: Sure.
JGM: So again, that’s another way that writers have been deprived of a long-term living and a long-term possibility of being in the trade long enough to become great at it.
FK: It is astounding how the streamers managed to just…decide not to share information about, that had previously been understood.
ELM: Can I just say, this is reminding me of, how bananas is this, right, on both sides? I don’t know if you saw the article recently in Rolling Stone about the Shadow and Bone people, who were like—fans—who were, like, watching the show 100 times because they’re like, if only Netflix will see, right?
JGM: Right, right.
ELM: Rack up those numbers, not that we have any idea whether an individual viewer watching it 100 times maybe just counts as one view in their eyes, right? Because it’s not a new signup. So you have this, like, extreme fear, paranoia, on the fan side, leading them to watch shows over and over again, and then absolutely nothing—like, that’s not more money in the pockets of the people who made Shadow and Bone.
JGM: Yeah. Nope. Nope.
ELM: So it’s just like, it’s this awful, gaping black box of a void in the middle, that they’ve created, that kinda pits the writers versus the fans, kind of against each other even.
JGM: I mean look, it’s also, it is also happen—I mean I say that this shit happened at the speed of capitalism, you know? [FK laughs] Things like unions and collective bargaining are not necessarily rigged to pivot at high speed when the industry pivots, the way that it has, because the technology has grown so quickly. Look, 15 years ago when we struck, Netflix was primarily a DVD mail-order service. 17 years ago during the strike of ’07, you know?
FK: Yeah.
JGM: I don’t know how many that…math is hard. But you know what I’m saying. So it’s moved so quickly that it’s like, literally we were still negotiating against the DVD formula, and then five years later DVDs just stopped existing as a… [laughs]
ELM: Right.
JGM: It’s weird, you know? It’s very fast, and again it’s like, we are, we’re negotiating against a tidal wave, and this is the time when we need to literally put up some barricades and be like, “Dude, this tidal wave has to stop, and reconsider what it wants to destroy.” And frankly, look, I think the streamers also have to reconsider their own business model.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: [simultaneous] Mm hmm.
JGM: Because ultimately, they’re not state subsidized, you know, so they don’t have a base of income that’s guaranteed to them, and they are based on the idea of unlimited growth, which is, you know, uh…a tough one when America has saturated this industry.
FK: [overlapping] Hasn’t worked so far… [FK and ELM laugh]
JGM: Hasn’t worked so far, you know, for the planet. [ELM laughs] For the majority of business and capitalism in general, so really we might wanna reconsider that. [laughs]
ELM: OK, so, but like, future-proofing this, right, and again, my admiration for unionized writers being able to do this, right, just to say, because—not to draw too many bleak comparisons to the media industry, which is fragmentally unionized, but like, they’re bringing up AI over here too, and, unless you’re at certain organizations, there are no protections, right? And so I absolutely understand and um…support, like, and envy you guys.
But I don’t know, I’m just curious to know what your read on the AI situation is, because I feel like watching a lot of fan responses, or audience responses over the last week, I think there’s been a lot of misunderstanding of what we’re even talking about. I think that there’s been a perception that studio executives, or development people, are…idiots? Which doesn’t seem like, like a great generalization? Like they couldn’t tell the difference between an AI-generated script and a human-generated script—and maybe you’re thinking of particular ones that couldn’t, but I think on a whole most of them probably can? I don’t know. Go ahead, you tell me. [laughs]
JGM: I don’t know, look. It’s, this technology’s in its infancy, and I, I got a, I bought a ChatGPT Davinci client and I have been playing around with it. So I created this TV show The Middleman, it’s pretty obscure, so the first thing I did was, “Pitch me an episode of The Middleman.” And it did! And at first blush it seemed like something, and then I looked at it and I’m like, hmm. Let’s look at this third act here. [ELM laughs] Somehow, Wendy is able to defeat the villains and learn a valuable lesson about herself…OK. [ELM and FK laugh] You know, like, look, it’s…
ELM: [laughs] Yes.
JGM: We’re talking about a fancy—right now, as it exists—AI is a fancy aggregator system that has some very very powerful algorithms in order to create meaning, intuit meaning, and put things together in a way that appears meaningful to it based on what it’s programmed, right?
FK: It doesn’t even, it doesn’t even intuit meaning, right? It doesn’t even know what meaning is. It’s just like…
JGM: No. No.
ELM: Sure.
FK: Anyway.
JGM: It understands signposts of what is meaning, so that it can organize them contextually in some way, right?
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
JGM: I looked at that Middleman story and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m out of a job!” and then I read it and I was like, “Well, maybe I still have a job.” [ELM and FK laugh] The other thing I’ll tell you about AI is like, here’s the thing that I love whenever people talk about AI, it just makes me batty. They’re like, “Well, you know, I think AI could write the next Fast and the Furious movie, but I can’t imagine it ever writing Succession.” And I’m like, “What the fuck do you think Succession is?” [ELM laughs] I mean, it’s a wonderful show. But it’s a pastiche of Dynasty by way of Paddy Chayefsky by way of King Lear, right, it is every bit the sum of its influences as The Fast and the Furious is, and they’re both as hard to put together, it’s just they’re hard to put together in different ways, and your sensibility may not be pleased by one of them.
If AI gets to the point where it can write real scripts, it’s gonna write real scripts for everything it’s gonna be…you know. And if it gets there, the real question for me is, not whether it will get there. I think at this point in life you should count on the worst technological case scenario for everything, because it’s all happened as horribly as we could’ve predicted. But I also think that then, if we’re worried about that, instead of, you know, look, I think the WGA needs to legislate this. And I think that there should maybe be some algorithms made to figure out what the sources are the AIs are using to compile all of this stuff, and to see what the percentages are in order to see whether somebody actually needs to be credited or not.
Legally, there are standards for this, you know? If a musicologist testifies to a jury and is able to convince that jury that more than 50% of your song was actually written by Tom Petty, you know, then you have to share credit with Tom Petty, right? The Writers Guild has an arbitration model. That arbitration model says they read 500 drafts of the script, they figure out who made the biggest contribution to the script, and they assign credit accordingly. These are not old concepts. And if you have a highly mechanized system that can do this, there assuredly can be a highly mechanized system that can track what it’s doing.
But the other thing you have to realize is, AI right now is doing nothing different than a young artist would do. OK? Which is looking at all of these influences, putting them together into something vaguely sensical. Most young artists, that’s exactly, they’re literally saying “Oh, I saw an episode of Star Trek I liked,” [typing noises] and then they write a story that weirdly resembles, uh, “Children of Paradise” quite a bit, you know? [FK laughs] So…
FK: Is that your favorite—nevermind, we’re gonna move on.
JGM: No, it’s, “This Side of—”? No, “Children of Paradise,” the one with the, with the hippies who like, uh, I don’t… [mumbles incoherently] Um. So anyway, the point being, the idea that artists or, you know, might aggregate certain influences into meaningful is not a new one. AI is doing it differently, but it’s not a new idea. So, I feel like that part of it can very easily be monitored and regulated, you know?
But the other part of it is this. If we writers actually embrace this technology and start doing things with it, right, like I have a friend who’s a fine art photographer. Really great film director, incredible director, great photographer, right? And what he does is he puts prompts into an AI program, he gets what the AI program spits back, and then he modifies it himself. So he’s already getting something that’s been mediated by the AI, but he’s getting basically something that he can work off of, and then he creates the image he wants, and by the time he’s done with it that image is more than 50% different from the image that he got originally.
But that’s what a real artist does. So if he’s using AI to generate a kind of sketch, he’s still inputting the parameters for what he wants into the AI, he’s telling the AI what he thinks artistically he wants to work on, what exactly the picture is he wants, he gets that, and then he changes it, and it becomes an individual work of art. That is the artistic process, much as I understand it, you know? So, I don’t know, it’s like, can it be regulated? Yes. Should we be afraid of it? How about we maybe grab it and start defining how to use it so that other people don’t?
FK: Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting how much I see…I mean I guess different people have different feelings about this, but one of the things I keep thinking about is, [laughs] different strategies that people have had to try and save their jobs from mechanization. And which of those strategies have been successful, and which of them have not been. And AI’s not there yet, but it seems like there’s a lot of fear around it, but there’s not a lot of clarity of like, well, if you really think it can do all those things, then why would anybody have a job? You know? Like, we don’t pay people to build cars by hand, we have robots that make cars, that may not be good for all the people, but it’s ultimately how it happened.
JGM: You know I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy 3 this weekend, and weirdly there was a line in it—not weirdly, it’s a perfectly fine movie [ELM laughs]—there’s a line in it that sort of encapsulated everything that I think about AI, which is, to get a script out of an AI, you have to put something in it that prompts it, OK?
FK: Mmm hmmm.
JGM: And then when you get the script, you should read the script and make sure it’s any good, right, and somebody’s probably going to have to rewrite it, or you’re going to have to prompt notes into the AI to tell it what you need that it isn’t giving you, so that it can rewrite. All of which, in Guardians of the Galaxy, there was a line that the High Evolutionary says, where he says, “They can only think thoughts that have already been thought.” And that’s where I think, it’s not about what the AI can do, it’s about who’s feeding it the questions, who’s giving it the prompts, and who’s telling it what to do and why.
I had an interesting interaction with somebody online about this, and this was a person who owns a branding company. And the branding company was named after a city in a superhero comic, and the logo for the branding company was done in the same font and the same style as the superhero comic, with a similar color scheme. And this person was basically ripping me a new one about AI stealing art. [FK laughs] And how it’s all based on theft, and how theft is a bad thing. So I pointed out, I said, “Well look, I mean, you’re running a company that does branding for comic book artists and comic books, it’s named after a city in a famous comic book, and it’s actually in the font, in the classic font of that comic book’s logo. And I don’t think you’re stealing from anybody, but I think you’ve looked at your influences, and you’ve created something that speaks to those influences, right?”
So I can’t look at AI and say I’m being robbed—first of all I haven’t had a picture that I did directly taken from me and then sort of modified by an AI, only enough that it still looks like my photo and somebody’s profiting from it, so, you know. I could be being glib about it, but I also said, “Look, you’re clearly, if I look at what you literally have on your Twitter page, how is that any different from an AI looks at a bunch of influences prompted by somebody and creates something?” You know? That is, you know?
And the guy wrote me back, “Well, the logo didn’t have a CMYK thing, and this and that, and are you telling me I’m a thief,” I’m like, “No, I’m saying you have influences like the rest of us.” And I think that you need to look at also what AI is doing in terms of what it is that artists normally do. I’m not saying AI is an artist, but I’m saying like, I mean, I’ve seen things that I’ve written quoted, I’ve seen sequences that I’ve written that, you know, other shows have done things like it, if you put stuff into the zeitgeist it’s in the goddamn zeitgeist. If you want your stuff to not be looked at by other artists, and if not worked on, at least influencing other artists, you shouldn’t publish it.
FK: Yeah, so I guess it feels like some of this stuff is red herrings, I’m wondering…I’ve seen a lot of fans sort of talk about, “Oh, this is what we can do to support the strike, this is what we can do, that’s what we can do,” and then sometimes it feels like it’s going down these rabbit holes [laughs] that are not really necessarily very helpful. So, what should people be focused on, what should fans especially be doing or thinking, like is there anything that they can do to…you know, to support what you’re doing?
JGM: I think, first of all, you know, social media is getting a lot of attention. It’s like I think the ’07 strike was the strike that social media made anyway. So I think, amplifying, the first and easiest thing, you can just amplify our message. And help us defeat the narrative that we are out of touch, narcissistic dilettantes sitting here over our wine and cheese, fighting for money that we shouldn’t have gotten in the first place.
Because the other thing is, I think that the issues we’re dealing with in this particular strike are issues that are going to be universal to all labor. As Elizabeth is pointing out with her work in tech, I think I’ve spoken to a lot of journalists, they’re looking at the same thing basically, getting turned into gig workers, you know, like, their work being recycled endlessly without them getting paid for it. Things like that are happening across the board in a lot of other industries, and even when you look at trades that aren’t creative trades, but you look at people who are driving Uber, you look at, you know, people who are doing any kind of gig-type work. They’re getting ripped off the same way that writers are.
So I think that if we can all work on getting out an understanding of universality of this message for this moment, you know, there’s a reason why IATSE, SAG, the DGA and the Teamsters have come out and supported the Writers Guild in this, and it’s because we’re all, we may have different particulars, but we’re all looking down the barrel of a billionaire oligarch late capitalist gig world, and the only people it’s good for is going to be the billionaires. And we need to take a stand.
ELM: I absolutely see that, but that sort of feels like, why, like any human should support you. [laughs] Or any worker, or anyone who cares about workers or whatever. But fans in particular, I feel like…I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit—I mean I kind of hinted at it earlier talking about like, oh, Netflix numbers or whoever, whatever streamer, is like this awful black box, and you know, one thing that Flourish and I have talked a lot about in the last few months is—and I’m sure you’ve seen this too—this kind of anxiety from fans. They have no idea…you know, why even get invested in a show? Because you have no idea the metrics of why things are getting yanked, right, or like… Do you watch Barry? Javi?
JGM: I know the show, but I haven’t watched it.
ELM: You’ve seen the scene where the show gets canceled after being on the, on the streamer for like 12 hours, right, and they’re like, the algorithm—
JGM: Yes, I saw that. Yes, I’ve seen that, yeah.
ELM: [laughs] Right? And that’s what it feels like. So, I’m wondering, you know, it seems like that’s the direct stake that a lot of fans have in this, is like…and not necessarily about the current shows that people might like, or the current films or franchises or whatever, but for what’s gonna happen in five years, you know? This is gonna be everything. Like, then why bother getting invested in anything at all, if it’s just gonna be yanked out from under you? You know?
JGM: Yeah. Look, I wish that I had an answer for that, because frankly I would love to work on a show that goes on for seven years and you’re able to actually develop a very rich universe around it. One of the things I miss most about the writers’ room as it used to be was that sense that we started with this core premise, and then over the first year especially and in the second year, you built this huge universe around it, and you put stuff all around that you could pick up later and make story with, and all that. That process is so fulfilling, and the longer it goes, the richer the show gets, you know? And I honestly, I wish I could tell you that I had an idea how to address that, but I think that that’s something that’s definitely been lost, you know?
So I, look, I think that anytime that fans can communicate with streamers or with the networks or with whatever, you know, like any times that they’re sending a message, the message, the message for me is “support the writers.” But I hope that part of that message can also be like, “keep the shows on longer.” [all laugh] Let the shows find their audience, figure out a way of doing that. Figure out a way of actually leveraging the popular shows to maybe drive people to the less popular shows. Like, look, I used to say there should be an app, and this is, this shit is bananas, ready? Where they should maybe release a single episode weekly at a certain time, you know? [ELM and FK laugh] So people always knew when the show was coming out? You know?
ELM: That’s a pretty cool idea.
JGM: I know, I know, I know, it’s never gonna work. [ELM laughs] But look, I think, I mean Netflix is now talking about going ad-supported and stuff like that, I think eventually all of these, all of these organizations are gonna have to figure out that they’re making television. You look at Amazon with their Freevee thing, and literally Freevee is the way that they’re kinda emulating television as best they can. You know what my favorite app is to watch actually?
ELM: Which one?
JGM: It’s Pluto.
ELM: Hmmm.
JGM: Because I can actually use Pluto the way that I used to use cable TV, I can just sit there and channel surf. [FK laughs] And maybe find something that I didn’t know I wanted, and then watch that. You know?
ELM: [overlapping] Do you—OK, here’s a question, where do the commercials come on though? Because I watched a show that I loved on the Roku channel, and because it didn’t originally have commercials, it would just be in the middle of—not even the middle of a sentence, but the middle of a character saying a word. Boom, worst ad you’ve ever seen in your life. And it’s like, how do I pay to make this stop? Oh, I can’t. [laughs]
JGM: Look, I wish—I honestly think that, you know, writers, especially the newer, more chichi writers, make fun of the four- and five-act structure we used to have, you know, teaser five or whatever, but I gotta tell you, like…as a limitation, it created so much great drama. And it continues to, you know, because it gives, it tells you, you have to build up to something to pause.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
JGM: It’s not the formula for everybody, but I honestly think that, look, I think what you’re seeing is a real sort of interesting offshoot of this bizarro universe we’re living in, where everything is disrupted, nobody knows what the format looks for anything, and look, I don’t know if we’re gonna get to the point where anything is standard anymore.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: [simultaneous] Hmmm.
JGM: It’s something you might have to live with. But by the way, if you hate that, write your streamers about it too. [all laugh]
ELM: OK wait, but just so it’s, just so we say it out loud here, because I’ve seen it written a bunch and shared on Tumblr a lot—you, the WGA, you guys do not want people to cancel their streaming subscriptions currently, right?
JGM: You know, I do not know where the WGA stands on that, I can’t imagine that that helps anybody, but, I’m not entirely sure what the official platform is.
ELM: OK. But yeah, generally it’s like, well then you’re just cutting off any last little bits…
JGM: [overlapping] Your nose to spite your face, yeah.
ELM: Yeah, yeah, exactly, right, right, OK.
FK: Wait, and this is a similar question, because I saw somebody writing, “Hey fans, don’t cross the picket line, if somebody wants to develop your…you know, your thing on Wattpad or whatever, if somebody reaches out to you to develop that into a show, say no! Don’t cross the picket line!” What is that? What is the stance within that on—because my instinct was, development takes a long time, this is not actually competing, like by the point that gets to anything this is all going to be over one way or the other. But I’m curious as to what…what the real take is, not the… [laughs]
JGM: For my money, you do that, you’re crossing the picket line, you’re a scab and I don’t wanna know you.
ELM: Mmmm.
JGM: You know what, there is nothing in development you’re gonna get that you’re not gonna get by saying “Wait until after the Writers Guild strike.” And if they’re calling you that way, it’s because they want to circumvent the strike. [FK makes a noise of understanding] Right now, any call for any services is them trying to circumvent the strike. And honestly, like, if you get something on Wattpad that they want, they’re gonna want it when the strike is done.
FK: Wow.
JGM: Look, I sold a pilot the week before the strike was declared, and the people to whom I sold the pilot, like, I mean, deals now are taking months to close, I mean they take forever. They closed the deal in 36 hours.
FK: Whoo!
JGM: If they want something, they want—if they’re into you, they’re into you. If they’re into you, they’re into you and you’ll know it. And you know, they’re either calling you because they love your work, or they’re calling you because they saw it and they feel like they can do something with it to circumvent the strike, and you want the one where they really want you.
ELM: To clarify, Flourish, though, what you’re saying, the Tweets that you’re referring to specifically kind of shove together a bunch of different things. So they were like, yeah, the Wattpad, or “don’t enter any script writing contests,” right, you know, submit a, whatever. But then it also said, “don’t make any fancasts, or any Tumblr posts about the thing you love, because you’ll be giving them ideas.” And I think that was where it kinda broke down into this sort of like… “Don’t do anything!” It just, like…
JGM: Who’s, who’s getting an idea from, from, [FK laughs] who’s giving who the idea?
ELM: [overlapping] Like, a studio, a studio executive? Getting an idea from a fancast, which…I think is a misunderstanding of how things are developed, and cast.
JGM: Yeahhh. Yeahhh.
ELM: [laughs] And I don’t think that seeing a moodboard is…
JGM: [overlapping] No, do your fancast, do your moodboard, whatever you want, yeah, get in there.
ELM: But I think, I think your—the distinction here is like, if they’re explicitly saying, like, a real studio, or streamer or whatever, is like, “We would like to make your piece of fiction a television show,” like, that’s when you’re in the territory of— Which is not a, to me that’s not a fan activity. It was kind of a muddling of…of fan activities and…
FK: [overlapping] It’s also just not a common…it’s just not a common activity. Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: No.
FK: That’s a fantasy that people have, maybe.
JGM: Yeah.
FK: But it is good to know, because my instinct on that one was it’s gonna take a long time, so whatever, but it’s good to know that that’s something that people are actually stopping and not doing.
JGM: I would say, I would say this. If you’re a fan, right, and you love a show, and you wanna write fanfic for it, or you’re creating something online that, you know, requires that you create fiction or whatever, like, do it. I mean, don’t stop being creative because the Writers Guild are on strike, just don’t sell anything to the studios. And it doesn’t matter—look, first of all, they’re not, if they’re looking at your stuff and getting ideas, they can’t do anything with that until the strike is done anyway. [FK laughs]
ELM: Sure. Right.
JGM: So…
FK: Oh, we have this great fancast, wouldn’t it be great [ELM laughs] if someone could write the thing for...! [laughs] Yeah.
ELM: [laughs] There’s gonna be piles of fancasts, people are just waiting to act on…
FK: If only I could, if only this was a video podcast [ELM laughs] and we could get the face Javi just made.
JGM: I mean, look, it’s like, ideas can come from anywhere, and you should not stop being creative, but you should stop, uh…you know, helping the studios if you’re actually, if that’s something that your work might do. Which, unless you’re taking a meeting at a studio and writing a script for them, you’re not. You’re OK.
ELM: Right. And to clarify what I had read, you can tell me if this is incorrect, is…if you do do something like this, the WGA will never let you in.
JGM: Um…
ELM: Or do you think that’s too—it’ll count against you.
JGM: I mean here’s the thing, if you’re not a member of, of…no, you should not scab. [laughs] You know?
ELM: Yeah. Well, I mean, morally, yes.
JGM: [overlapping] You can be, look, you can not be in the Guild and still, you know obviously ask for Guild minimums and things like that, you’re still, you know, you’re working with Guild signatories, so you still get like, whatever. But I mean, yeah. You don’t wanna not be in the Writers Guild if you’re, you know, and you don’t want to, um…be a scab.
ELM: Right. People, all these people tweeting about how this is not your moment to break through, no one’s ever… [FK laughs]
JGM: No. No, it’s not.
ELM: [overlapping] …broken through by scabbing. Exactly. Right, right, right.
JGM: I mean look, if you do and you become the next Taylor Sheridan, more power to you. I’ll hate you. [ELM laughs] I won’t wanna work with you. I’ll tell all my friends not to work with you. I mean, is that a, I don’t know if that’s enough of a deterrent, I don’t know, but like, I don’t think—you know, look, it’s like, how long, what’s six months to you? What’s the length—like, the last strike was 100 days, let’s say we go twice that long, so six months? What’s that to anybody?
ELM: Well, I think the argument, if you wanted to be a scab, which obviously you shouldn’t in any context, would be like, this is your moment because they really need a writer. But like, no, obviously not. Do you cast curses on people? Are you a curse…person?
JGM: [considering] Mmm….no.
ELM: Just a hater.
JGM: No, I just ha—just dislike them, [FK laughs] and I seethe…and really obsess about it…
FK: [laughing, overlapping] I like that Javi won’t even go as far as hater. “I just dislike them.”
ELM: [laughs] And not a hater. Look, I’m asking this because, I’m Italian, I’m Italian-American, I just watched Moonstruck for the first time, and there’s a little old lady—I can’t believe I’d never seen it, it’s not appropriate that I waited so long—and uh…
JGM: Wow. Yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna take your membership card. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, I know! [laughs] And the little old lady, like, casts a curse on the plane, and I was like, “That’s right, we are a cursing people.” So now I’m going around asking [JGM laughs] all sorts of people from different backgrounds if they come from a cursing people. You’re just a gentle disliker. For life.
JGM: Yeah—no, I’m, when I hate something, it just, I, it’s inside. I don’t put it out there, [ELM and FK laugh] it’s just, it’s inside, you know? You become a tumor, not a curse, you know? [ELM laughs]
FK: Wow. Wow. Wow!
JGM: Yeah.
FK: That’s a gross note to end on, thank you, Javi, for that gross note.
ELM: We don’t…this…
JGM: Don’t make me hate you! [ELM laughs] Because you’ll become a tumor! OK, OK. Well, should we say something nice to end on?
ELM: Yeah, we’re not ending there, we’re, let’s end on a nicer note. [FK laughs] Javi.
JGM: Yeah, it was, uh…I…
ELM: That’s your…
JGM: I gotta come up with a—OK.
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, I thought someone was a professional writer, in the Writers Guild of America?
JGM: Oh, yeah, but I’m on strike. [all laugh] Ah…no, look, look, if we’re gonna end on a nice note it’s this, I think the struggle that we’re on is real, I think it’s valid. It is not one that is being made out of greed, but it is one that is being made against greed. I think the individual people who work at the corporations, many of them I have great relationships with, but corporations are not people, the people who make up corporations are not the corporation. You know? We are fighting against a system that basically was both put together and also which was empowered by circumstance to be really horrible, and frankly I think all labor should be looking at this strike and saying, “When do we get our cut?” Otherwise, you know, we’re gonna be living in a gig economy hellscape and I promise you you don’t want—that’s like Ready Player One shit, you’re gonna be in like an Airstream trailer on a scaffold someplace, you know, with your headset, you don’t want that. [JGM and ELM laugh]
FK: There are many reasons I don’t want Ready Player One. Many reasons. [ELM laughs]
JGM: [in the tone of “sick burn!”] Oh! [Laughs]
FK: Many reasons.
ELM: All right, well, we, obviously you have a thousand percent of our support, and we wish you luck, and…
JGM: Thank you guys, I appreciate it.
ELM: Will you keep us posted if there’s anything we can share with our listeners?
JGM: You bet! And also just, thank you guys for, for just having me on so frequently and all of that, I really appreciate it. [laughs] It’s so much fun to talk to you guys.
ELM: Next time you come on we can not talk about your job, we can talk about like, the current thing you’re excited about. Maybe that’s what you’re excited about actually, is striking.
JGM: When you’re ready to do the Dune one, when you’re ready to do the one about Dune, call me, because I literally just finished reading all the Dune novels. All of them.
FK: [overlapping] Oh…this, the spice…must…flow! [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Maybe the two of you could do that by yourselves. [laughs]
JGM: Wait, like, I literally met somebody, I literally met the only other person I’ve met in person who read like, all the trilogies, you know? And we started talking about The Butlerian Jihad, and I was like…
FK: [overlapping] The, the bad ones? You’ve read the bad ones. You didn’t tap out?
JGM: You know what, I, I had a great time. [ELM laughs] I didn’t come to them expecting like, high literature, I just came expecting like, basically Star Wars Expanded Universe novels in the Dune world, and I got exactly that, and they’re great! They're so entertaining!
FK: [overlapping] Which is what they are! Yeah, that’s right, that’s about right. [ELM still laughing] Yeah, I mean, with Kevin J. Anderson, of course it’s Star Wars Expanded Universe, he wrote all those too! [laughs]
JGM: Yeah! And by the way, like, literally, young Paul Atreides running away from Caladan to join, like, a troop of jongleurs. It’s like, the best—[FK and ELM laugh] I loved it, I have no issues with anything they did. I’m a huge fan, like there’s, yes, there’s parts of it that are kinda ridiculous, but you know, somebody who’s worked on longitudinal narrative, I’m like, yeah! They were probably sitting at midnight trying to figure out the plot for this, and that’s what they got and that’s what they made, I’m good.
FK: [laughing] Great! Next time: Dune. The Dune Expanded Universe.
ELM: [laughing] That’ll be a special one for the two of you. Just like I’ll do my one with someone else about Frasier. We’ll start doing one-offs without each other, Flourish. [laughs]
FK: That’s great! [laughs]
JGM: Hey, you know what, whenever you’re ready, I’m in.
FK: [still laughing] All right.
JGM: I have seen every version of the David Lynch movie, and both the aired and the director’s cut of the miniseries.
ELM: Oh, with young James McAvoy? That’s…yeah, very young James McAvoy.
FK: [overlapping] Now you’re getting, now you’re getting back on, Elizabeth… [laughs]
JGM: [simultaneous] Oh yes, yes, well the first one had a, other young people in it.
ELM: I’ll come and only talk about the pictures I’ve seen of young James McAvoy. [ELM and JGM laugh]
FK: Wow.
JGM: Cool. Lemme know. [ELM and FK laugh] I’m here for you.
FK: Thank you, Javi.
ELM: Yeah, thank you so much for coming on.
JGM: Take care, guys.
ELM: Bye.
JGM: OK, see you soon.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right! Well, at the beginning of this episode, you said that you wanted Javi to “deliver a thread directly to our faces,” and we effectively DoorDashed that thread and it was delivered. And it was great. [laughs]
ELM: I can’t believe after all that, you’re gonna use a metaphor from the gig economy.
FK: [laughs] That’s the joke, that's the joke!
ELM: In fact, what I did was went directly to the restaurant, to the Javi restaurant’s website, [FK laughs] and ordered directly from them. Maybe I even called them on the phone. I literally called Javi on the phone, just like I would with my local restaurant.
FK: Great. Great. We have now established [both laugh] the true situation here.
ELM: My actual favorite thing to do, do you do this too? I like to go and order takeout with my face.
FK: I rarely do that.
ELM: Interesting!
FK: But I like it when I do do it.
ELM: Yeah, just get to talk it through, get to point at the paper menu that’s like, sitting up at the counter by the register…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. It’s good when you do that, it’s good.
ELM: I like awkwardly sitting in the like, one…a table with one chair they’ve set up for the person waiting for their food.
FK: Yes, yes!
ELM: Love that seat.
FK: Yeah, exactly, exactly. [ELM laughs] Particularly, it’s like a certain class of restaurant that does a lot of takeout that has exactly this, and it’s usually like, slightly fancy—nevermind, we’re going down a rabbit hole here. [ELM laughs] We are going down a rabbit hole.
ELM: Anyway…um, it was so pleasant to just have this all very clearly and logically explained by Javi. And…you know, I think it really underscores, I mean, I think for folks who maybe aren’t spending a lot of time seeing writers give these long factual tweet threads on Twitter, it can be hard to really understand the actual realities. Like, you know, understanding the residual models, or the reason the strike in 2007 happened, right, the specific like, models and economic factors and stuff like that.
And I think it’s easy, at least for me, to be like, “Yeah, there’s a strike happening somewhere, yeahhh, support it!” But like, [laughs] often it doesn’t go deeper than that, but I feel like for this—and why we were bringing fans into it—I think understanding how totally screwed up all the different divisions of work in Hollywood are, and we should say, I don’t think we even got to this in the conversation, but the Directors Guild, which is the equivalent for directors, and SAG-AFTRA, which is all the actors, including like, movie stars, all the way down to, you know, background work, right?
FK: Yup.
ELM: Their contracts are up at the end of June, and so part of this is like a solidarity thing, like Javi was mentioning, and with the Teamsters and stuff, too, do like, you know, move things around, et cetera et cetera on set.
FK: Yes.
ELM: But part of that is they are going to have contract negotiations, and it’s likely that they might strike as well, right? So it’s like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: My point here is like, actually hearing the specifics of how screwed up these models are, I think explains a lot about why television in particular is the way it is right now, and that also affects us as viewers and us as fans. Right? And not to just like, “Oh, I’m worried they’re gonna cancel my show because of the super unstable models that the streamers have created,” but also the quality of the writing, as Javi was talking about, how much it suffers creatively to not have an apprenticeship situation, or these mini-rooms or whatever, and I think of how many shows—particularly on Netflix—I’ve seen and I’m like, “Did this get… [FK laughs] This could’ve used several more drafts.” And it’s like, do I think their writers are bad writers? No. I mean I don’t know, maybe some of them are. But like, I think, but they’ve been given a set of limitations, and they’re doing what they can, but they don’t, they’re not being given the full creative space to really, you know, kick that draft into the shape that it needs to be to make really good television.
FK: I think that’s all correct, and I also, you know, something that really struck me was…I guess because of having worked adjacent to all of this stuff for so long, it didn’t occur to me, as vividly as Javi pushed it home, how weird the structure is, and the payments, and the way that this all is functioning is, compared to the way most people, like, get a paycheck, [ELM laughs] and do their job. Right?
ELM: Sure. Right.
FK: [laughs] And like, right? And I think that that’s the other thing, is that we can be rah rah rah, you know, on a strike all we want, but ultimately if you’re gonna go talk to your aunt or your uncle or your friends who don’t care about any of this or know about any of this, I do think it’s important for us to know like, how those pay structures work, how those people are like, putting together their careers, so that we can say, “No, the fact that somebody gets paid this large amount isn’t crazy, because they’re also gonna be out of work after that. So it all evens—” You know what I mean, just some of those basic realities I think are really important to talk about and understand.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And they don’t come up, you know? I mean, when I think of this from a fandom perspective, when I think about the way that I thought about it and the way I know people continue to think about it, it is just sort of like this black box of kind of glamor? I mean glamor may be a silly way to put it, but when you don’t really know the specifics of how that stuff is made, you can’t advocate for the things that like, we want as fans as well as the things that are going to be fair to the actual workers who are working and making this.
ELM: Yeah, it’s interesting…one thing that I was thinking of while we were talking to Javi is I had seen a tweet earlier that day—and I have no idea who wrote it so I’ll never find it again—was saying that like, a lot of the writers sharing some of this stuff really frankly over the last week had been validating for this person who was a WGA member as well, because they had thought that everyone else was really successful [FK laughs] and like, doing really well.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Because part of this too is you know the big difference between 2007 and now, and this is true across the creative industries, is you know, a lot of them are on Twitter, a lot of them are on Instagram or whatever, they have built brands, and you have these writers coming—I mean, the folks that have made a lot of press are multiple writers from The Bear, which is like, I love The Bear, it’s depressing, some of them have no money, they’re talking about how like, the one guy was saying that when they were going to one of the award shows to win for best new show or whatever, his friends had to rent him or buy him his suit, because he couldn’t afford a suit, you know? And it’s just like…but, before that, you know, you just saw the picture of him with the award and the suit! And you’re like, “I’m sure that guy’s rich now.” You know, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And because people want to project that—to each other, too, you wanna show, like, oh, here are my lots of successes.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You don’t wanna be like, oh actually I’ve been working at Target in between my shows or whatever. Obviously nothing wrong with working at Target, but like, this is supposed to—as Javi was saying—this is supposed to be a career, your career.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You don’t wanna have to get a second job, right, you know?
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: [overlapping] Just to make sure that you can like, stay in your house or whatever. So.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: All right.
ELM: So…you know, it seems like this is gonna go on for a while, at least if, I feel like it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna budge until the end of June with the other, the other unions.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So…I think obviously we’re gonna keep an eye on this, but I would just say, for fandom, I mean you know, I put a note about this in “The Rec Center” the first Friday after this started, mentioning how pleased I have been, because I’ve seen a lot of posts from fans being like, “I don’t even, I don’t care if my show is delayed, I don’t care—I mean I care if it’s canceled, but like, I would rather my show be canceled than this to continue.”
FK: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t want my show to continue with scabs. [both laugh] Like, no.
ELM: Right, or like, the next show that I’m really into, just be like, built on this precarious model or whatever. And like, as fans, we are directly affected, because…Interview With the Vampire is supposed to be filming, I actually don’t know what they’re doing, I assume they’re paused. You know, because they were in the middle of things.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, I, I hope, kind of. [laughs] You know? Because it seems like if they’re not then it’s gonna be bad.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, it seems like most of these—yeah. Right, which I can’t imagine. But whatever, I would wait as long as it takes, I would wait even longer if that meant that everyone could be fairly compensated or whatever.
FK: Agreed.
ELM: So like, I think that’s been an, a sign of maturity from fandom, and I really, I really appreciate people saying that, and actually this post going around on Tumblr that’s like, “I think it should take longer to make shows. I think people should work normal hours. I think that there’s no, like, fans can wait, we can wait, there’s no reason these things have to be so, pushed through at a breakneck speed.” And it had tens of thousands of notes, and it’s like, this is great, I wish there was a way we could financially signal to these streamers that we would like to have [FK laughs] less, better content, that’s made at a reasonable pace. Fine.
FK: And paying everybody a fair amount. Yeah.
ELM: Yes. Yes.
FK: Well, but there’s no way to signal anything to a streamer, so. Except for striking!
ELM: Yes. We can’t do it, but…I mean, we could write them letters.
FK: Yeah. All right. Well, I’m really glad we had Javi on, this was a great episode. We do have to mention the way that we make this show. [laughs] Neither of us are members of the WGA, so this show will be continuing.
ELM: What if I went on strike for you to give me more wages?
FK: I don’t give you your wages, we’re partners. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] I like how you—[laughs] I technically, and I technically, now I give you your wages, since you have a diminished…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, right? In the current setup…
ELM: Flourish has a diminished labor role on this podcast, [FK laughs] not to…lift up the curtain too much here. So.
FK: Anyway.
ELM: You can strike against me if you want. [laughs]
FK: Uh, what would that even consist of? Whatever.
ELM: You would stand outside my house with a sign. [laughs]
FK: Can you imagine? All right. All right. We make this show—
ELM: I’m on, I’m on such a high floor…all right, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. [both laugh]
FK: We make this show with the help of our listeners, which people can offer on Patreon.com/Fansplaining! And there are lots of rewards for different levels of support that you pledge to us, ranging from having access to our special episodes, including one featuring Javi, to cute little tiny pins, to having your name in the credits, to having the occasional Tiny Zine sent to you, all this can be yours if you wish to chuck us some cash!
ELM: Yeah, let’s note, the Javi episode is like the teaser reward for $1/month. So if you wanna hear Javi—again—you could pay $1.
FK: Perfect.
ELM: But, if you pay $2 more than that, $3/month, you get access to like, tens of special episodes. [both laugh]
FK: Tens! Anyway…
ELM: [laughing] I don’t know why I said it that way…
FK: If you don’t have money, or don’t wanna give us money, you can still support the podcast by spreading the word about us, especially about our transcripts, which are complete and show up at the same time as the episode, every… [pause] time that an episode comes out. Biweekly. Anyway, movin’ on.
And, you could also write in, you can send an email to fansplaining at gmail.com, drop a note in our ask box, that’s fansplaining.tumblr.com. There’s also a box at Fansplaining.com you can use. Or give us a phone call at 1-401-526-FANS, and give us your comments, your questions, ideas for future episodes, all of those things really help us, you know, develop our content. I don’t know why I’m saying this so weirdly, help me, Elizabeth.
ELM: Flourish, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The way I develop content is by creepin’ on fans’ fancasts.
FK: [laughs] OK, oh my God, Elizabeth, get outta here.
ELM: [laughs] All right. Goodbye, Flourish!
FK: [laughs] Goodbye, Elizabeth.
[Outro music]