From our correspondent in California,
“What do we want? Fair contracts. When do we want them? We want them now! “In front of the Sony Pictures studios in Culver City, in the western suburbs of Los Angeles, several dozen screenwriters give voice this Wednesday morning.
On the second day of the first massive strike for fifteen years, all of the 11,500 members of the powerful Writers Guild of America, who decided to put away the keyboards, reassembled. On the one hand against the studios, which distribute record bonuses to the bosses of Disney and Warner Brothers. On the other against streaming platforms, which “make employment more precarious”. In question, shortened seasons and fixed residual rights which do not allow screenwriters to reap the fruits of a planetary cardboard like Stranger Things, like in the days of series sold to other channels and internationally.
In the absence of an agreement with the producers’ union on an increase in remuneration, the strike could turn into trench warfare: in 2007-2008, the conflict lasted 100 days and cost Hollywood more than 2 billion dollars, with many shortened or postponed series.
Odd jobs
“A living wage” – a “decent” wage that allows you to live “a middle-class life”: the expression is on everyone’s lips. At the bottom of the scale, the “staff writers”, screenwriters who are not producers, earn a median salary of 90,000 dollars for a series of ten episodes broadcast in streaming by Netflix or Amazon. If the figure may seem high seen from France, it must be placed in the context of the cost of living in the United States, where the median salary is twice as high as in France, particularly in the face of health and education expenses. astronomical.
The strikers want to put it into perspective. They sometimes work twelve hours a day for six months, and then nothing for a year or two when a series is cancelled. They often have to pay an agent or a manager, and take a small job in a coffee shop or as an Uber driver in the meantime to pay their bills.
It is against this “gig economy” that they are angry. Like Darren Bluestone, a 30-year-old who says he’s ready for a long-term movement: “This whole city was built on the backs of screenwriters, our stories, real stories, not written by AI, and we deserve to be paid a living wage and to be respected by these huge corporations. »
Our report in Culver City can be found above in video