Welcome to Our Strike!

(A Zagat-style Guide for Picketing Actors)

We knew you could do it! We knew you’d come through! We haven’t done this together since 1960 when Ronald Reagan - of all people - was president of the Screen Actors Guild, the man, who some twenty years later would break the Air Traffic Controllers’ Union.

Our other close sibling, The Director’s Guild (DGA) came to terms with the companies in the midst of our strike. Typical. The DGA plays the role of the first-born favorite. They like to keep a close relationship with the companies, which for the purposes of this analogy I’ll call Mommy and Daddy. The WGA is the problem child. We’re the rebellious middle sibling, who is always causing trouble. We strike. We fire our agents. You guys, SAG/AFTRA are the baby of the family, the charismatic child, who everyone ogles and photographs because you are so damn cute.

DGA always plays WGA off of Mommy and Daddy in hopes of getting special favors for being such a mature, respectful child. The writers and actors are closer siblings because we have more in common. I liken the relationship to that of George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men. We need each other to achieve our dreams, but you are also - much like your acronym (SAG/AFTRA) big and unwieldy and could accidentally strangle our puppies.

DGA would never go on strike. That might make Mommy and Daddy mad. So DGA cuts a deal, which is not as good as they could get if they had stood in solidarity with us. But they don’t care about their two siblings as much as they care about their relationship with Mommy and Daddy. And they are cunning enough to know that whatever we get they will also get eventually. They can settle for less and as a favored child bump up to whatever we hold out for. And they’ll get it without having to stomp around in circles in the hot sun.

Even though we have to admit that in the grand scheme of things, we as actors and writers, are essentially non-essential, the issues facing us are emblematic of the issues facing workers across so many other industries. David Goodman, (former prez and WGA negotiating committee co-chair) calls us “the tip of the spear.” That may sound too romantic and self-important to the average auto worker or meat packer. But if they can fuck with us, a hyper-educated, specialized workforce, they will steamroll everyone else. They have already created conditions that make their “cruel but necessary evil” threat to “allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” laughable. What have we got to lose? We are already used to long stretches of unemployment and inadequate pay in this mean and rapacious Ayn Rand-Milton Friedman-Ronald Reagan-Jack Welch fever dream of predatory capitalism.

Many of you have already swelled our picket lines with your own signs and have upgraded our beauty quotient with what I heard one writer call your “more symmetrical faces.” For those of you first-timers what follows, in no particular order, is a fellow traveler’s guide to our LA picket locations… accompanied by some funny stuff.

Paramount… This!

Residential parking with a two-hour time limit. Lavatories: Hollywood Forever Cemetery where one can find relief in the company of some of show business’s most dearly departed. Choice of many gates, including those across the street at the neighboring Raleigh Studios. Paramount is good if you want to get away from the madding crowd and join a small group at one of the outlying castle gates. I had a wonderful conversation far away from the main action marching with the captain on Van Ness and Lemon Grove, which due to its relative isolation, I dubbed Ice Station Zebra.

Two contract negotiations ago, I was working on a Paramount show. Then, the issues were about bumping up the pension and health numbers, not holding writers to long-term contracts for short-season orders, and getting a bit of paid family leave. The AMPTP offered only rollbacks, not increases. This forced us to take a strike authorization vote. I found it hard to believe that they’d make us strike over these issues. We weren’t fighting over a technological paradigm shift or a structural change in the Minimum Basic Agreement as we are today. It was mainly about numbers. And two sides can always come to a number. We had the trucks loaded, the signs made, and the picket assignments mapped out when literally at the eleventh hour, minutes before the contract expired, the AMPTP settled. Those bastards made us jump through all those hoops to earn our gruel.

At the Paramount picket, I found a blank strike sign where I finally had the chance to write a personalized message. I wrote “AMPTP: Even The Lolipop Guild Hates You!” I stepped back from my handiwork and turned to another writer who happened to be watching.

“I spelled lollipop wrong, didn’t I?”

He nodded and pointed out the missing “L.”

I never said I was a good writer.

The Happiest Picket on Earth!

I have to confess; this is my favorite picket and not just because it’s closest to my house. Wide shade dappled sidewalks. Choice of four gates. One can do a pleasant lap around the entire complex, which includes a shady tree-lined street. Ample free parking. Easy access to a lavatory at Providence St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Interesting note: Across Keystone Street, you’ll notice a row of neatly landscaped houses, each with a porch light on at all times. I’m told these houses are empty. Disney bought the houses with an eye toward expansion, which the City of Burbank nixed. Make up your own horror movie.

There must be something in the human brain that’s wired to make left-hand turns. Whether it’s a NASCAR racetrack in North Carolina, a high school 200-meter relay in Iowa, or a gaggle of writers and actors on a picket line in California, we seem inclined to make left-hand turns. Maybe it has to do with being in the Northern Hemisphere. If we were picketing in Australia or New Zealand, would we circle in the opposite direction?

Disney head, Bob Iger, found our mutual strike “very disturbing” and touted the deal made with the directors as a model for low expectations (nice work DGA!). He worries that the business has suffered enough disruptions and our strike is inflicting undo harm on all of the ancillary workers who depend upon production. This is the same guy who runs theme parks where many of his workers – the people who keep the place clean, sparkling, and running - qualify for food stamps and have to live in their cars. Iger had the gall to say we are “adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.” This is the landscape you created, Bob. You need to fix it. This is why you get paid the big bucks, about $32,000 an hour.

I’ve got to hand it to Fran Drescher. She was hard to read in the lead-up to the contract deadline, but she let ole Bobby have it with both barrels: “If I were that company, I would lock him behind doors and never let him talk to anybody about this, because it’s so obvious that he has no clue as to what is really happening on the ground with hard-working people that don’t make anywhere near the salary he is making.”

In so many ways this negotiation is a battle of the left brains versus the right brains, the bean counters versus the artists. It’s hard for the left brains to appreciate the creative process that makes a show (or as the C-Suite calls it: content.) And maybe we right brains don’t appreciate the pressures they’re under to make their quarterly nut and think we’re telling them how to do their business. After all, they are acting rationally in an insane economic system, which dictates they squeeze us until - to paraphrase Led Zeppelin - the juice runs down our legs.

Picket and Chill

The Netflix picket has a youthful dance club feel. Appropriately enough, Netflix is housed in a shiny new building that, like the latest club, is hard to get into. Early on, Imagine Dragons showed up for an impromptu acoustic set that even made the Netflixers inside - sealed tight in their offices to muffle the constant horn honking – poke their heads out the windows. Not quite the Beatles on the rooftop, but pretty cool nonetheless.

The youth vibe includes a lot of exuberant chanting and people tapping each other’s signs in a ritual I have not experienced on other picket lines. It felt like when basketball players slap five after every foul shot. I have to admit, I got into it.

Difficult parking in a part of a Hollywood gone to seed. Fifteen to twenty minutes from Metro stops. This crowd with their supple, young bladders doesn’t fret the bathrooms.

Netflix has been depicted as the main Big Tech villain in this passion play. They think they can hold out because they are still - in the final analysis – a glorified video store. Do they not remember what happened to Blockbuster? There are only so many times can you rent Tango and Cash.

I had been told this picket is a hook-up destination and that some strikers have marked their signs to signal their availability. I cannot independently confirm this as I am too old and too married to bother cracking the code.

Wait a minute. The sign tapping. Could that have been a signal?

Shit, I may have gotten engaged!

Celebrating Every Story

Mounted on the walls outside the Warner Brothers studio complex are huge posters of some of their most successful movies and TV shows: Casablanca, Lord of the Rings, Friends, ER. At the bottom of each poster, a caption reads “Celebrating Every Story.” Beneath that in parentheses should be “And Screwing Every Storyteller.” A truly honest tagline for Warner’s would be “Celebrating Every Quarterly Report.”

Parking: sparse with those confusing fine print signs stacked on top of each other you need to hire a lawyer to figure out. Across the street from the main gate sits your SAG/AFTRA building, which since the beginning has kindly offered the use of their facilities for their union brothers and sisters. On the other side of the lot, I was directed to a Teamster truck housing three beautiful bathrooms.

Sidewalks aplenty and wide, and this is the only picket where you have the option of marching in front of a gate and also across a street, another way to break the monotony or shake someone you’re tired of talking to. Warners also has a small adjacent studio called “The Ranch.” Some picketers get assigned to the Ranch, which sounds like a form of exile or a euphemism for something darker.

“What happened to him?”

“You don’t see him no more. He got sent to… the Ranch.”

To give you some idea how these left brains think, Max, in their recent rollout tried to combine writers’, directors’, and producers’ credits into one category they called “creators.” It’s another effort to blur the individual contributions of artists. And I suspect it’s meant to pave the way for AI to join the group of so-called “creators.” We have learned the hard way that if you don’t establish clear rules when a new technology emerges, you will never get another chance. It’s a common corporate trick to delay and delay until they establish a pattern of doing business that slams the door shut tight. It’s why we struck to get our foot in the door on digital media fifteen years ago. At the time they said, “Oh, we’re scared. Let’s do a three-year study. We don’t know how we’re going to monetize programming on the internet.” Well, they figured it out pretty fucking quick. This time it’s AI. They refused to counter our offer and instead suggested we have “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.”

I suggest we lump executive credits into one category called “assholes.”

Rupert’s Dominion

Fox Studios is another one of these massive complexes where most strikers picket back and forth in front of the main gate. Otherwise, you can wander off and get your steps in walking along Motor Avenue up a slight incline, down and then back again. Parking: far away. Bathrooms: thank the Lord for city parks.

Early on, an unnamed executive quoted in Deadline questioned how long we could tolerate walking a picket line. “It’s going to get hot in July,” he said. True, it has gotten hot. But now that production has completely gone dark, let’s see how long this arrogant, wiseass motherfucker can hold onto his phony-baloney job. AI will replace people like him before it replaces people like us. This sensitive flower better hope his golden parachute includes air conditioning.

One of our negotiating committee members once remarked that moral and philosophical arguments do not land with the lawyers of the AMPTP.

When he said that, it occurred to me: “Oh my God! We’re negotiating with AI!”

make.believe…my.ass

Sony’s latest slogan is make.believe (yes, all lowercase and separated by a hip digital dot). Previous slogans included “It’s a Sony” and “We Are Sony.”

And they think they don’t need writers.

Wide sidewalks with trees but not much shade, plentiful gates, and the option of doing a long full circle around the lot. Decent street parking. Lavatories catty-corner to the studio at Veterans Park.

During the previous WGA strike, my friend Lew Schneider liked to entertain the troops by doing a bit where he would suddenly throw down his picket sign, yell “I can’t take it anymore!” then like a desperate East Berliner, make a mad sprint to the security gate to request asylum.

To writers, this is known as a room bit. A room bit is a staple of comedy writers’ rooms and is essentially a short sketch performed by writers to amuse fellow writers during a creative lull or to save face when a joke you just pitched ate the big one. Room bits tend to be broad, physical, and generally not fit for polite company. To Lew, the picket line was merely a writers’ room with a higher ceiling and constant audience turnover.

The security guards at first were alarmed, then amused, then politely requested he stop.

Old Battlefield

Very few outside the business have heard of this lot, but Radford Studios has been home of some of the most iconic shows in television history, going back to Gunsmoke in the fifties, Gilligan’s Island in the sixties, Mary Tyler Moore and The Bob Newhart Show in the seventies, Hill Street Blues in the eighties, Seinfeld in the nineties, and more recently, Malcolm in the Middle and Parks and Rec, all - by the way - written by writers and acted by actors.

Parking: difficult. Lavatory access: better make friends with a restaurant manager on Ventura Blvd. No shade. The sidewalk at the Colfax gate is hazardous with a tall curb. With one false step you could break your ankle or tear your ACL - one big OSHA violation waiting to happen. Fortunately, I have health insurance through my union, which has been referred to as a “Cadillac” plan. In our callous profit-driven American healthcare system, that’s code for “it actually covers things.”

These confined conditions do, however, provide a crowded cocktail party atmosphere where a lot of veteran writers and actors can literally bump into each other and get reacquainted.

Radford was my old stomping ground when I was a captain in The Great War of ’07-’08, The Strike to End All Strikes. Whenever I wear my old red shirt to a picket line, I feel like I just showed up to World War II wearing a World War I helmet. Back then, we marched on a nice wide sidewalk on the other side of the lot where the executives came in. It was good for giving them the stink-eye as they drove through the gate in their BMWs on their way to doing whatever the fuck it is they do. Apparently, some neighborhood ordinance prohibits picketing on that side this time around.

Yeah, sure.

Universal Tools

This is one of the tougher gigs on the tour, as the studio has blocked much of the already buckling sidewalk with construction that began suspiciously close to the day our contract expired. I parked for free in a transit parking lot by pretending to use the Metro. Universal did have the healthiest snacks, featuring some Beyond Meat jerky instead of the standard pizza and donuts. This may be another reason Universal is not the most popular picket.

A word about horn honking. Mainly, we love the support. Although sometimes, when the honking car is sitting at a red light, the incessant support can get a little irritating, especially when I’m in the middle of a conversation. I feel like Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. I want to pound on the hood, “Hey! I’m pontificating here!”

On the other hand, I’ll never forget early on when a Teamster driving a semi laid on his horn as he made a U-turn away from the gate we were patrolling. To hear the heart-stopping, body-shaking, primeval roar of a big rig makes you feel like you just turned away T-Rex at Jurassic Park. And you did it armed with a cardboard sign perched on top of a popsicle stick.

This is anecdotal, but the upscale Teslas seem rather mute. Maybe it’s not their fault. They have no grills. Their blank front ends make it look like their mouths are taped shut.

The only unfriendly jab I personally encountered was someone in a Subaru shouting, “Get a job!”

I thought David Zaslav would be driving a better car.

Prime Plantation

Amazon occupies the former Culver Studios, where much of Gone With The Wind was filmed. A great white colonial mansion on the grounds resembles Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara house. You don’t have to be Toni Morrison to appreciate the symbolism of a plantation house associated with Amazon.

This may be the quietest picket of them all because the gate to the Amazon office is on a residential side street. Very Zen. Fewer cars mean less honking. Very pleasant L-shaped walk from the main gate to a secondary gate to a left-hand turn around an orange cone marking the other gate and back again. Relatively easy street parking and a beautiful lavatory only steps away. If this venue wasn’t so far away, I’d make it my home picket.

These tech companies are new players in our business and may be most responsible for the gig worker ethos that now pervades the industry. Unlike Netflix, however, entertainment is a tiny portion of Amazon’s and Apple’s revenues. Apple still makes its money selling iPhones and laptops, and Amazon is much too busy hollowing out Main Street. They probably can hold out the longest. It will be interesting to see how long the legacy companies will hang with them.

Pro tip: While the full circle pickets offer a constant change of scenery and the temporary illusion that you are actually walking toward a destination, it can be awkward to disengage with the person you’re with if you’ve run out of shit to say. It’s much easier to mingle between multiple people while walking back and forth in front of a gate. Not surprisingly, many writers are introverts. You’ll recognize them by their air pods. They are listening to music or a podcast or maybe nothing, having just stuck these things in their ears as a signal to “do not disturb.” There is another species of introvert, I call “the lone wolf.” The lone wolves frequently march briskly in the opposite direction from everyone else. Be careful when approaching and try not to make direct eye contact as they may interpret that as a threat.

The Turn Is Right!

TV City houses shows like The Price is Right, Real Time with Bill Maher, and the late Late Late Show with James Corden. During the previous strike, someone’s manager tried to bull through a picket line in his SUV and struck a picketer. The member wasn’t hurt badly but the reputation of the manager was. At least among us. I guess it depends on – as the old union song goes – which side you are on.

This is the picket closest to WGA headquarters in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles and down the street from the famous Farmer’s Market and The Grove, where there’s plenty of parking if you’re willing to pay. Lavatories there and at Pan Pacific Park another long block away. Only two gates, but busy streets that offer plentiful honking. TV City is the only picket where the groups walking back and forth make right-hand turns. Sure enough, I got home that evening and felt my right calf tighten up. It ain’t natural, I tell ya!

I have had occasion to talk to aspiring writers who do not yet qualify for the union but are still out here marching with us. The conversation usually turns to how important it is to learn from other experienced writers. That’s how I learned, and from some of the best: Larry David, Phil Rosenthal, Jay Kogen, Larry Charles. I watched them work through the entire process, not just breaking stories at the beginning, but solving problems on the stage, re-blocking a scene at a run-through, giving actors productive notes, addressing network notes, rewriting after a table read or rehearsal, editing, sound mixing, casting, learning the difference between a writing problem and an acting problem. Eventually, they let me try some of those things myself, knowing they could jump in if I messed up. This is definitely something the AMPTP and their corporate overlords do not appreciate. When young writers are used up and spit out after a couple of months of pre-production and don’t experience the entire soup-to-nuts process, how are they going to know how to make the shows of the future? Then again, maybe the left brains don’t care. By the time those chickens come home to roost, they’ll have already cashed in their shares and said, “So long, suckas!”

I’ve heard some writer friends of mine - in relation to our proposal for mandatory minimums in staffing - parrot the AMPTP talking point that we “can’t tell the companies how to run their business.” That’s just wrong. It’s done all the time. Throughout history, either through negotiation or legislation, we’ve been telling companies how to run their business. That’s why there are, among many other examples, seat belts in cars, scrubbers on smokestacks, mandatory staffing requirements in the nursing and teaching professions, and even in the arts for musicians and directors. Sure, the companies don’t like it. And as I recall, we fought a Civil War in the 1860s because Southern plantation owners didn’t want anyone telling them how to run their business. Writers could throw it right back at them. The writers’ room is our business. That’s our domain. We know how it works better than any executive. Maybe they shouldn’t tell us how to run our business. When we fought for residuals, for minimum wages, health and pension contributions, family leave, all of that was telling the companies how to do their business. There is no sacrosanct constitutional principle that says this particular demand is somehow going too far.

The only real question is: do we have the power to do it?

Road Trip! (Location, Location, Location)

We also picket specific productions shooting outside the studios to disrupt and slow down shooting thereby costing them more money. This is not a picket just anyone can join. You have to be a member on the Rapid Response team. It’s more suited to the more adrenalized among us, who trade the monotony of marching back and forth across a studio gate for the thrill of a commando mission in the field. I know some people who traveled as far as New Mexico to picket a production there. For my first one, I had to get up at 4:00 in the morning, which was fine because I usually have to pee around that time anyway.

Now that all production has shut down, the Rapid Response team has been engaging in solidarity pickets. We showed up for the Teamsters at an Amazon fulfillment center in Valencia and sent teams to Orange County to support the workers at Medieval Times, who are striking over inadequate pay, animal abuse, and some serious sexual harassment that reportedly extends to rape.

In the past, location picketing has been controversial. Some members, especially the more aristocratic in our group, found blocking trucks and making noise to disrupt shooting not quite cricket. I spent a few weeks in Tel Aviv helping out on the Israeli version of Everybody Loves Raymond. One night, I was asked to speak at the Israeli writers’ union. Afterwards, they took me out to dinner and regaled me with stories of a wildcat strike they had conducted, which was almost exclusively location picketing. All these Israeli writers had mandatory two years of military training and told me how they disrupted location shoots by ziplining into camera range roaring like Tarzan as soon as the director called “Action!”

Wildcat strike? Ziplining? Here, we get yelled at if we cross against the light.

When I went to my first informational meeting about this negotiation, it had been five years since I had been on a writing staff. I did not recognize the workplace our leaders described. In five years! I’m in the twilight of my career. The business has been on strike against me long before I started walking these picket lines. But no tears for me. I’ve been lucky, the beneficiary of being born at the right time, a Boomer in the boom years, vested in the health plan with a solid pension.

So maybe because you’ve joined our strike many of those other entertainment unions supporting us won’t have to. I feel confident in the righteousness of our cause and proud to be part of a union and what I hope is more union representation across all industries. The private equity pirates on Wall Street don’t appreciate that, historically, businesses thrive when unions are strong. And when unions are strong and workers make a living wage, the middle class thrives. And when the middle class thrives, the economy thrives and so does democracy, providing these Masters of the Universe with a stable country and robust markets in which to do their business. In the end, we’re trying to save them from themselves.

We’re told it’s bound to be a long haul. Often, the forces arrayed against us feel overwhelming. But if we’re going to go down, I plan to go down in my hiking boots making left-hand turns.

Music Credits:

William Tell Overture (Finale) - Gioachino Rossini

Try It – Joe Crotty

Infraction- Acid Music provided by Infraction No Copyright Music

Tara’s Theme - The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra

The Unit (From "The Unit"/Extended Remix) - Robert Duncan