‘So Bad, So Depressed, So Scared’: the Human Toll of Summer’s Strike
by 
If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
“Everyone is bleeding.” That was the recent assessment by an award-winning film and television producer when asked about the collateral damage caused by the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes — and the studios’ refusal to meet their demands — reverberating across the industry. A recent report estimated that the dual strike already has cost the California economy at least $3 billion. And seemingly no one has been spared. Below the line talent. Above the line talent. Lawyers, agents, managers, publicists and vendors. Even creative executives at the most insulated studios and streamers have spent their traditionally carefree months sweating over just how much longer their newly trigger-happy bosses will want to keep paying regular paychecks.
Because frankly, for many, there hasn’t been that much to do.
“It’s like a mutual fucking and both sides just seem to suck right now and the only loser is everyone,” says a top manager at a firm that recently asked its principals to take salary cuts to avoid laying off any assistants or staffers.
“I just don’t see any winners in any of this. Oh yeah, and the consumer? They’re just watching re-runs and getting even more hooked on video games.”
“If I don’t come to picket before I go to my new freaking restaurant job, I’m going to drive my car into a mountain. Otherwise you feel so alone. And that’s what [the studios] want.” – actress Addie Weyrich
The idea that the strike appears to be stretching into the fall is no small matter, both psychically and logistically. Over the past eight years, thanks to streaming’s non-stop churn, the film and television industry has become less seasonal but the coming months traditionally have remained one of the busiest periods of production in L.A. Films that shoot in the fall typically are required to wrap by mid-December to avoid the surcharge on productions that occurs when shooting over the holiday. According to several executives, the further the strike extends into fall, the more likely that certain projects won’t get an official greenlight till the New Year — 2024 — even if a deal is struck weeks earlier.
And with festival season and Oscar season about to kick off, the predictable get-your-engines-started high-wattage start of awards season (not to mention fall TV) is zero-to-sluggish, at best. Worse, just a few days ago, the mood within the industry was hopeful. The silence surrounding negotiations suggested that progress was being made and that a tentative deal could be announced at any moment. But after the AMPTP released details of its Aug., 11 offer, recriminations recommenced, likely setting back a deal by at least several weeks.
“Everyone is anxious and concerned, even actors who aren’t financially hurt by this. They’re affected by it mentally,” says a veteran industry publicist. “Nobody knows how this is going to end but more importantly no one knows when it’s going to end.”
The following is a snapshot of quotes and anecdotes from various corners of the industry feeling pain, including law firms, managers, agencies, below the line, writers and PR:
Though writers and actors on picket lines suggest their resolve remains intact, “it’s been really tough but I know the cost of not having this fight is greater than the cost of having it,” says writer Leah Folta (Mech-X4, Under the Dome), who picked up a part-time job doing data entry for a friend’s father’s company to help cover her living costs during the strike.
The nine years that actor Chivonne Michelle spent as a bartender “after graduating with a very expensive degree from NYU” have taught her some life lessons. “This isn’t new,” says Michelle (Shaft, The Devil Has a Name). “I know exactly how to stretch pennies, let alone dollars, because that’s how my generation has been compensated.”
Other writers and actors, however, speaking in private say they are “depressed”— even the privileged ones who don’t have to worry about money. Days simply bleed into the next, they say, and other then picket or take to social media to vent spleen, they have little else to do.
“Out here? It’s awesome. Home alone? Bad. Me, home alone — so bad, so depressed,” actress Addie Weyrich (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Mack and Rita) told us from the Netflix picket line in early August, who, like so many others on the picket lines, would rather be working. “All my friends — so bad, so depressed, so scared.”
That’s why she’s on the picket lines, sign in hand, talking with fellow strikers and bonding with, say, Starbucks workers who are looking to unionize. All of that has been “inspiring,” and motivation to keep going. “If I don’t come to picket before I go to my new freaking restaurant job, I’m going to drive my car into a mountain. Otherwise you feel so alone. And that’s what [the studios] want. They don’t want us to have solidarity. That’s the tyranny of the minority up there.”
She adds, “The insane part is that I have gotten residual checks for $3 or $7 from the four different TV shows I have been on and the two big budget movies I shot during [the last few years]. It’s not like those residual checks are supposed to replace having a survival job, but if they were a more fair and rational amount I would be able to pay my bills and afford to go to the dentist… I just straight up cannot afford to do right now.”
WGA and SAG blame the studios for all this; Disney CEO Bob Iger blamed them for not being “realistic.” Regardless, overall deals have disappeared, productions are ground to a halt, and the white-collar machinery that is the professional backend for the town is pin-drop quiet. Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel said earlier this month that the strikes cost his company about $25 million per month in revenue. (With the representation business taking a 15 percent cut, that would reflect more than $150 million in lost deals for clients — per month. Ouch.)
If there is no resolution in the coming month, ‘We’re going to have to make some really tough staffing decisions’ – a top PR executive
Billing hours at law firms like Santa Monica-based Reder & Feig, which services clients in the motion picture and series content industries, have plummeted. According to a source with knowledge of the firm, two dozen projects it’s lawyers were working on — almost all of which were with Amazon Studios — have disappeared (Reder & Feig declined to comment). Independent PR, run by Jodi Gottlieb, who represents Adam Driver and Bryan Cranston, was forced to furlough one of her staffers as red carpets totally dry up. “What I’m hearing is that all the PR shops that rely on talent representation and the fees that come with it are waiting another month to see where things stand. That’s when we’re going to have to make some really tough staffing decisions,” says a top industry publicist, noting how fall’s film festival circuit — kicking off next week — is now largely dormant. These festivals are typically cash-cow events for the industry’s ecosystem of publicists, managers and stylists. For films at any of these major festivals which don’t have distribution, a publicist can earn a flat fee somewhere $15,000-25,000 per film just for a single festival. When times are flush, a top PR firm can handle several films at a single festival.
Though CAA is laying off 60 employees (whether caused by the strike or related to redundancies tied to CAA’s year-old merger with ICM is an open question), a number of sources have noted that the large talent agencies at least have strategic advantages to weather the strike because of legacy commissions (package fees, brand deals, or commissions from clients who had points or ownership stakes in TV shows of films, for example) that can date back years if not decades. Furthermore, the influx of private equity has allowed CAA, WME and UTA — Endeavor-owned-WME more so than others — to diversify, while smaller agencies like A3 and Verve were forced to implement layoffs earlier this summer.
Some of the smaller management companies, meanwhile, have it even worse. Unlike agents who customarily receive base pay plus a year-end discretionary bonus, compensation for a manager at a smaller outfit is often directly dependent on the commissions they are bringing in which, at least right now, isn’t very much.
Once the WGA went on strike on May 2, it didn’t take long before executives at the networks and streamers including Amazon, HBO, Warner Bros. TV, NBCUniversal, Disney and CBS Studios hit pause on dozens of overall deals that they had in place with writers — regardless of stature. Overall deals help cover the overhead for a writer’s company and provide funding to develop projects while first-look deals give writers financial support and in return networks get right of first refusal or the right of first offer.
On May 8, not even a week after the strike commenced, The Wire creator David Simon announced on Twitter that his deal with HBO had been suspended. “On the day that HBO called to suspend my deal after 25 years of writing television for them, I was doing the write thing,” read Simon’s Tweet, that included video of him marching on a picket line.
The WGA strike also has blown past the 90-day threshold for a work stoppage that has historically allowed the studios, networks and streamers to start terminating these overall deals via force majeure clauses. So far, however, those terminations haven’t started.
When it was just the WGA on strike, many figured there would at least be some production that could help get them through the summer. Local on-location film production in L.A. dropped by almost 30 percent in the second quarter of 2023, marking the sixth consecutive quarterly production drop according to data provided by FilmLA; the third quarter — ending in September — likely will reveal a near standstill. Whatever local production was occurring all but ended after SAG-AFTRA’s decision to join the writers on July 14, which sent independent producers scrambling to apply for production waivers — currently the only game in town (SAG-AFTRA waivers now only apply to productions that shoot outside the U.S.).
When you move beyond the rank and file of the WGA and SAG, the righteous principles which prompted the strike are starting to yield to real-world desperation as each passing week depletes a town’s savings.
“We’ve been poor for years. I was nearly homeless for the first half of my career,” says costumer and IATSE Local 705 member Mike Knudsen from the Warner Bros. picket on a sweltering day. “Five years of struggling and [I’m] still not doing much better now. So we have nothing to lose and so much more to gain.”
In an effort to supplement lost income, hair and makeup artists — whose guild minimum on a dramatic TV series is $523 for eight hours of work — have been signing up for GlamSquad, an app that allows consumers to book professional hair and makeup services at home. “There’s been no work probably since fall of last year,” says costumer Mearygrace Gato (Blonde, 9-1-1), who has been relying on a combination of unemployment, savings and odd jobs for friends. As the great streaming reckoning resulted in waves of un-orders and cancelations of shows even before the strike, and with word on the street that producers already were looking to ease up on production in the months before, Gato says, “It’s been a slow choke-out since last year.”
