WGA leaders met face-to-face with key CEOs on Tuesday evening as executives sought to pitch the guild on their most recent contract offer in the hopes of ending the nearly four-month-old strike. But the guild characterized the session as “a lecture” that was designed to “get us to cave.”
Following the meeting, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers released details of the contract offer presented to the WGA on Aug. 11. The WGA followed three hours later with a statement critical of the offer, saying it has “limitations and loopholes and omissions [that] failed to sufficiently protect writers from the existential threats that caused us to strike in the first place.”
The AMPTP emphasizes that the offer includes substantial gains in minimums, a commitment to a minimum 10 weeks of employment for most TV series writers and writer-producers and a hike in the formula for foreign residual payments for streaming platforms.
It’s understood that executives including Disney chief Bob Iger, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley met with WGA representatives at a location outside of AMPTP headquarters in Sherman Oaks. The CEOs sought to express their commitment to bringing the strike, now in its 113th day, to an end.
“Our priority is to end the strike so that valued members of the creative community can return to what they do best and to end the hardships that so many people and businesses that service the industry are experiencing. We have come to the table with an offer that meets the priority concerns the writers have expressed. We are deeply committed to ending the strike and are hopeful that the WGA will work toward the same resolution,” said Carol Lombardini, president of AMPTP, in a statement included with the contract offer details.
In its message to members, WGA leaders said they attended the meeting in good faith, but “we were met with a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was.”
“We explained all the ways in which their counter’s limitations and loopholes and omissions failed to sufficiently protect writers from the existential threats that caused us to strike in the first place,” the negotiating committee said in its message. “We told them that a strike has a price, and that price is an answer to all – and not just some – of the problems they have created in the business.But this wasn’t a meeting to make a deal. This was a meeting to get us to cave, which is why, not 20 minutes after we left the meeting, the AMPTP released its summary of their proposals.”
The release of the details of the proposal appears intended to pressure the WGA to make further concessions in order to get a deal. The WGA issued its response behind closed doors last week. But the guild offered only slight adjustments to its original proposals, according to sources familiar with the talks, leaving the two sides far apart on major issues.
The WGA negotiating committee said in its message that it was clear from the meeting that the studios are not interested in negotiating.
“This was the companies’ plan from the beginning – not to bargain, but to jam us,” the committee said. “It is their only strategy – to bet that we will turn on each other.”
The guild said it would release further information about the proposals on Wednesday.
The AMPTP proposal includes new details about several critical issues, including minimum size of a TV writers room, artificial intelligence and transparency in viewership data.
The studios are proposing to allow showrunners to hire at least two writers for at least 20 weeks. The WGA has instead proposed a mandatory minimum room size of at least five writers, with more writers hired on shows with longer seasons. The studio version of the proposal would leave the final say on staffing levels up to the showrunner. The showrunner would be allowed to hire at least two writers for the writers room and two writers for the period of production. The latter provision responds to the WGA’s demand that half the writing staff be allowed to work through production, so that they can gain producing experience.
The streaming platforms are also offering to provide the WGA with the total number of hours viewed for each made-for-streaming show. The data would be shared in confidential quarterly reports, and would “enable the WGA to develop proposals to restructure the current SVOD residual regime in the future.”
The WGA has pushed for a viewership-based residual in the current contract, where writers would be paid more for shows that are more popular.
The AMPTP has also agreed to a WGA proposal to guarantee that written material generated by AI will not be considered “literary material” or “source material” under the contract. That would mean that writers’ compensation and credit would not be reduced if they use generative AI as a tool in the screenwriting process.
“For example, if the Company gives a writer a GAI-produced screenplay and asks the writer to rewrite it, the writer will receive the fee for a screenplay with no assigned material and not a rewrite,” the AMPTP document states. “Or, if the Company gives a writer a GAI-produced story as the basis for a teleplay, the writer will receive the story and teleplay rate.”
The AMPTP also agreed that writers cannot be required to use AI. The document makes no mention of AI training, however. The WGA had proposed that studios should not be able to train their AI systems on members’ work.
The studio offer also includes a guaranteed “second step” — that is, a revision — for writers of original screenplays who make less than 200% of guild minimum. The WGA has pushed for a second step for screenwriters making below 250% of the guild minimum.
The AMPTP is also offering increases to minimums of 5%, 4%, and 3.5% over the three years of the contract, consistent with the terms given to the Directors Guild of America. However, writer-producers would also get a 15% increase in minimums, creating a new higher wage tier in TV.
