The ever-falling dominoes of the last Hollywood strike: the 2007-2008 Writers’ Strike 15 years later
by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn
For the last fifteen years, one event has been seared into every crevice of my mind. It’s something that has affected the film and television industry so profoundly that we’re still trying to process it to this day. So, while it wasn’t the longest strike in WGA history (that honor belongs to the 1988 strike), the Writers’ Strike of 2007-2008 forever changed the landscape of “the industry,” such as it was—particularly in the realm of television.
Okay, so let’s talk about the Guild. The Writers’ Guild of America, which is the Hollywood union for scripted writers, has two divisions—East and West. The WGAW tends to get the most play, and it’s usually the part of the Guild we’re talking about whenever we talk generally about the WGA. It’s, rather famously, at 3rd and Fairfax, across from the Grove and pretty close to the CBS lot and Quentin Tarantino’s theater, The New Beverly. Now, I don’t know that I could tell you, without looking it up, where, in NYC, the WGAE is located.
So, that, coupled with the fact that wga.org, a site you’d think would be for both divisions of the Guild… is actually just the WGAW website (East has a totally different place to find information for its members), gives you a pretty clear indication of which division gets the focus. And part of that is certainly because, between the two divisions of the Guild, the WGAW has more members. Much more of the scripted industry is in Los Angeles (she says, working on a show where everything but post is in New York), but the fact is that the WGAW has over double the number of full-time members as the WGAE.
However, while the Los Angeles based division of the Guild is massive, they can’t call a strike all on their own. The WGAW and the WGAE both have to come together in order to strike and fight for their rights on both coasts. And it’s a fight that’s only happened six times since the founding of the original Screen Writers Guild in 1933, and didn’t happen for the first time until 1960—well after the Guild split into the coastal divisions in 1954.
Those six times include a strike in 1960 (the first one), which lasted 21 weeks and was about (say it with me, kids!!!) residuals! It also overlapped with a SAG strike, led by the SAG President at the time… Ronald Regan. (I hate that man and his history with a great many things is a confounding mystery to me on so many levels!) There wasn’t another WGA strike (or industry strike, in general) until the WGA strike of 1973, which lasted three and a half months. The 1980s, however, found itself with three different writers’ strikes. The advent of “pay TV” where the networks were starting to create their own content, instead of just airing films (which, per the 1960’s strike didn’t actually get the writers any additional residuals), changed the game. The strike in ‘81, which lasted three months, established compensation in this new area of television.
After the success of the ‘81 strike, there was a shorter strike in 1985, which lasted for two weeks and was mainly about residuals over home video (which will, ominously, come up later). However, the 1988 WGA strike would bring the AMPTP (the not-union that all the actual unions continue to strike against and bargain with) to its knees. The strike in ‘88 remains the longest one in WGA history, lasting 22 weeks. The points of contention between the writers and the producers were residuals (big fucking surprise), expanded creative rights, and general cost cutting in other areas. That last one was primarily from the producers, which tracks given the money of it all.
There was a lot of back and forth with the ‘88 strike, which is why it took so long before the Guild and the AMPTP reached an agreement. In July, a few months after the strike had started, a group of smaller producers (about 150 of them) signed an interim contract that the Guild had drawn up. Which… was not something Fox, Paramount, and the “Big Three” television networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) took to kindly. They refused many projects from those independents who’d signed the Guild contract. That ended up leading to the Guild filing an antitrust suit accusing 18 of the studios and networks of mounting a completely illegal boycott.
Eventually, after a bunch of other absolutely bananas shit, they revived talks between the Guild and the AMPTP, before reaching a tentative deal. The studios got the sliding scale for hour-long residuals they’d wanted, while the writers won a fairly modest gain, monetarily, when hour-long shows were sold internationally. There were also wins in the realm of creative rights for screenplays and TV movies. However, the biggest thing that came out of the ‘88 strike was how drastically it messed up the television schedule for the ‘88-’89 season. A theme that would repeat with the ‘07-’08 strike, except it would occur at the end of the season, rather than the beginning.
Instead of starting in late-September/early-October, the fall season of ‘88 began in late-October/November, with some shows even starting in December. This was the first of three major times this has ever happened in American television, with 9/11 coverage being the second, and the COVID-19 Pandemic being the third. With a massive gap in programming, networks turned to reruns and sports to fill in their gaps. And since animation writers weren’t in the WGA, and therefore weren’t striking, a lot of animated specials ended up airing for the holiday season. (Now, this is still a very big and complicated issue. Animation writers are generally covered under IATSE, instead of the WGA and often WGA writers have to get exemptions to write animation.)
Historically, there has also been a claim that the 1988 strike was the catalyst for reality television. It’s not really true, upon further investigations of treads and the general timeline of network pitches. There is a notable exception, however, which is the creation and rise in popularity of the reality TV series COPS on FOX. That one? That one was commissioned as a direct result of the strike.
And that brings us nicely to the 2007-2008 Writers’ Strike, an event so monumental that the effects are still being felt to this day. Now, I say it brings us nicely there because one of the biggest effects of the ‘07-’08 strike was that it’s actually a major cause of the rise of reality television—unlike the ‘88 strike. Not that reality television wasn’t “having a moment,” so to speak, but the lack of scripted contented at the time when they were actively lacking programming, the cheapness of making the shows, and the fact that very few guilds (of any kind) had to be involved, meant that reality television boomed once the scripted shows hit the end of their runways.
But okay, let’s back it up. What was even happening in 2007? In January, the first iPhone was shown off before it was released later that year, in June. In February, Tumblr was launched (absolutely iconic for so many, shockingly relevant, reasons). And in November two big things happened. First was the start of the WGA strike… and then fucking WikiLeaks happened. While the Streaming Wars were but a glint in the eye of the film and television industry, Netflix launched the streaming aspect of its site in January of 2007. The year before, in 2006, is when Amazon Prime Video launched. Hulu put itself on the scene only a week before the strike began. Basically, all the elements were there for what would eventually be a big point of contention for the WGA and the AMPTP and their contracts for… the rest of time. All the dominoes were being set up.
Wait. I forgot to mention something rather important. Every three years the WGA and the AMPTP negotiate a basic contract by which the WGA members would be employed for the following years. (It’s called the Minimum Basic Agreement, or MBA.) However, in 2007, that negotiation did not go as smoothly as it had in years previous, and the WGA membership voted to strike against the AMPTP on Friday, November 2nd with the strike beginning the following Monday, November 5th.
So, like many strikes before it, there were some sticking points. DVD residuals (classic), “new media,” and jurisdiction in reality and animation were the three main points of contention causing the negotiation to break down. Ultimately, only “new media” had any real changes made to it before the strike ended—which was fine to a lot of the WGA because they viewed “new media” as the Big Issue of the MBA.
It didn’t matter that the DVD residuals weren’t changing, despite the fact that the home video market was making more money for studios than the theatrical experience, or that the WGA would remain in an eternal fight with IATSE about who should represent animation writers. Let alone that no union really had any control over reality television and the people who were working in it. No, “new media” was the most important issue of 2007… and they weren’t entirely wrong about that. But they weren’t entirely correct either. When you don’t know where the dominoes are laid out, it’s a bit hard to see them coming back around for you once you tip them over. But we’ll get back to reality in a moment.
Let’s talk about “new media.” Thanks to Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and their deal with Viacom over South Park (they’re animation writers, remember, so they weren’t bound by WGA contracts), the members of the WGA began to see “new media” as critically important for the future of scripted narrative storytelling in both film and television. Before the strike there was no arrangement between the WGA and the AMPTP about content online—not about the residuals or what would eventually come into play: writing for streaming.
It was predicted by many that what has, indeed, come to pass would happen: streaming would unseat home video and streaming platforms (many of which did not exist yet) would eventually create original content. The AMPTP argued that they couldn’t add to, or change up, the MBA on something so unproven and untested as the online market. This was also the argument they made about the DVD residuals (VHS residuals in the ‘88 negotiation), despite the fact that their numbers were saying they were making money hand-over-fist through home media. The WGA members were still feeling the burn of the negotiation from the eighties and refused to let “new media” fall by the wayside.
Because this was the piece of their negotiation that the WGA would not back down on, they secured the future of scripted writing online. By establishing the groundwork for residuals and rights in streaming (even if it wasn’t original content yet), the Guild made it so that streamers were obligated to hire WGA writers once they started producing original content in the coming years. In the end, the actual numbers ended up being the same as the deal negotiated by the DGA.
So, while all that chess was being played, and the sacrifices for DVD residuals and control over animation and reality were happening, a lot of other things were popping off in the world of, specifically, television. The season didn’t get a late start, as many scripts had been written and were in the process of being shot, but we were at a time where many broadcast TV shows were still sitting pretty at 22 episodes a season. They were, by no means, done with the seasons by the time the strike happened—they were just getting started. Many shows had their season order cut because of the strike, or had it drastically reduced because of time. Episodes were made, once the strike ended, but for a lot of shows there just wasn’t time.
Additionally, while members of the WGA were not permitted to write during the strike, lots of writers actually wear many hats during the creation of a television series. Showrunners, and other hyphenate writers, refused to cross picket lines during that first week. Soon, though, the AMPTP had production companies send out breach-of-contract letters, suspending many of them without pay.
The strike, which lasted 100 days, ended on February 12th, 2008. It’s estimated by the AMPTP that the WGA writers and the crew members in IATSE, many of whom lost their jobs when their shows shut down due to the strike, lost nearly $350 million in wages. The general cost to the industry, as a whole, is usually put somewhere between $1.5-2 billion. It’s been fifteen years since the strike started, though, and we’re at a point in American culture where we (both the audience and the industry) could not bear the monetary burden of another strike. From any union.
Sorry, wait. Did I not say that before? I know it’s in the title but let me reiterate it here because it’s important. The 2007-2008 Writers’ Strike was, at the present moment in history, the last Hollywood strike. There hasn’t been one since. We’ve been close, sure, but it’s been fifteen years since a strike shut down this machine. (COVID is a whole other thing, though.) Like, as I was moving to Los Angeles in 2017, there was another Writers’ Strike on the horizon. The WGA gave the authority to call a strike when their contract expired and it was so close to happening, but never came to fruition. And this time last year we nearly had an IATSE strike. They called it and everything, but we narrowly missed the members of what is, quite possibly, the biggest union in Hollywood actually striking.
In the same way that this strike (and COVID more recently) has proven that the film and television industry will always find a way, this strike was a stark reminder that, in the modern era, no one can afford to strike. Never again. And it’s been fifteen years, so the audience expectations of media are even higher than they once were, so there’s basically no way that the AMPTP would probably let a strike happen. There are only so many times we can rewatch old content and even reality TV gets old after a while.
But does it? Those dominoes I talked about earlier, the ones that the WGA (and even the AMPTP) didn’t know were laid out in any specific kind of way? Those are finally circling back on us in the form of things like the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. A nightmare of a thing that truly seems to be all the chickens coming home to roost for the WGA not pushing harder on the jurisdiction over reality and animation. Not that it’s their fault, but it’s a completely unintended consequence of letting that piece of the negotiation fall away. “New media” was important, though. I really can’t understate how important it was, honestly. But the rise of modern reality television, especially through corporate means like Discovery, is… bad. It’s really not good at all. Since the merger we’ve seen that professional asshat, David Zaslav, is more than willing to let scripted content, especially animation, fall apart and become part of a taxable loss right off. So many shows are now effectively lost artifacts, many of which never saw a physical release and never will. (The conversation about media preservation in the digital era is near and dear to my heart.)
The fact of the matter is that reality television is cheap to make, profitable beyond all expectations, and without union involvement in most of it… it remains the best way to make money fast. It’s no wonder that Discovery is gutting Warner Bros. and its scripted programming in favor of reality. It is, ultimately, the greatest consequence of the 2007-2008 Writers’ Strike, and it was completely unintentional.
Now, I don’t know what the future of television looks like. Even as a professional person working in the industry, it’s actually really hard to imagine a world where we don’t have scripted programming. Even working on a HBO Max show as all the terrifying news about the merger was happening this year or working on a Netflix show during the layoffs and everything last year, doesn’t make me think that scripted media is coming to an end anytime soon. No matter how scary the landscape might be at the moment. What I think it means is that, if we’re smart, our unions will use the knowledge that no one wants another strike of any kind in Hollywood to negotiate with the AMPTP about the new and terrifying issues of our actual modern day. Just because we can’t fully imagine the horrifying future, doesn’t mean we can’t plan for some of it—even by accident. The film and television industry finds a way, after all. We always have… and we always will.