How I Hijacked Hollywood: Part 2.5, WGA Strike Edition

At 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, May 2nd – the exact moment the WGA declared writers must put their pencils down – I am driving a Prius Hybrid to LAX to pick up my best friend who is also my ex-manager, who is now my agent. Things had become unbearably Hollywood. 

I feel like the ground is about to drop out from under my feet. Not because of the strike, but because the Prius’ chassis is groaning – explicitly, like the rusty bedsprings in a roadhouse. Three days ago, I bought two new tires, because I couldn’t afford four new tires. The original right front wheel had virtually no tread and was thin and as bald as a mud flap. It had already been patched twice from two different nails. I now have a balance of negative $36 in my checking account due to service fees from TD Bank, billed as “America’s most convenient bank”.    

I thought things might be easier a year after having written and produced a smash hit at Sundance.    

You might wonder why I’m broke. That would make two of us, since I’ve been working on a half dozen scripts-slash-rewrites over the last two years, for a slew of a half dozen Hollywood producers. I guess that’s why there’s a strike. I sure have been doing a lot of unpaid work.

I make coffee, at home, to save money, by putting a metal strainer from a juicer balanced on the rim of a bowl with two wooden chopsticks. I put the filter in the strainer, then pour the coffee from the bowl into a mug. It’s my version of a pour-over.    

My nose is stuffy. Also, the dog has allergies. I’ve bought her a bottle of PetArmor antihistamine. The active ingredient – diphenhydramine HCl – is the same thing as what’s in over-the-counter Benadryl. However, PetArmor gives you 100 25mg tablets for $5.99, whereas Benadryl gives you only 48 25mg tablets for $7.99.    

I guess I’ll start buying my own allergy medication from PetCo. I sip my coffee (better than Blue Bottle) as I wonder what other pet products I can shoehorn into my financial survival.    

Then I walk the .6 miles to the WGA picket line at CBS Television Studio. There’s no one there. I’m two hours early. I walk home, sit and wait, write a few pages, then walk back. I pick up a sign from a stack of pre-written signs, that has #WGAstrong scrawled on it in blue Sharpie.    

The guild member recording intake asks me for my union card. I tell her the WGA told me I’m one point short to join, and even though the guild didn’t correctly arbitrate my last credit in my humble opinion, I’m still here to support. She looks annoyed. I’m annoyed too, I suppose, but then I get a free T-shirt.    

I slog along with about 150 other writers holding their signs against the wind blowing down Beverly Boulevard.    

Only now, looking at the “witticisms” scrawled on the other signs, do I realize that the other side of mine says, “Getting my steps in.” I absolutely hate it. Here I am with a bad joke on my sign, asking for more money. Maybe AI will write some better lines.    

A guild member with a megaphone attempts to coax rally cries from us. Honestly, a writer shouldn’t be doing that. The megaphone amplifies his meek writer’s voice to the decibel-level of a non-writer’s indoor speaking voice: “This is CBS, where they do The Price is Right, and tell me, is the price right?” I hear two or three of the 150 writers mutter, “No.” 

Leave it to writers, bless their sweet souls, to put on the most toothless protest in human history. God bless them. I am one of them, god bless us. I am one of those who didn’t muster a response.    

After a few circles around the crosswalks – it feels like I’m walking the wheel with the inmates in Midnight Express – I ditch my passive-aggressive sign along a flowered fence and head down Fairfax. But a vehicle rockets out of a CBS parking lot and nearly runs me over. A WGA strike observer happens to see it – (the WGA has observers, like the blue helmets in a war) – and he snaps a picture of the license plate. 

As I walk toward the CBS parking kiosk, license number in hand, a security guard yells at me to get off the property. When I insist on reporting the incident, he tells me to take it up with the LAPD. Then he denies it happened at all. When I point to the several cameras around us and tell him they have it on tape, he says, “No we don’t.”    

I try to speak reason to him. “This is a big deal,” I say, “I almost got hit, I could have been seriously hurt!” The CBS security guard shrugs, smugly enjoying his power. So, I say, “What if I almost punched you in the face, would you do something about that?” If you’re shocked, remember I’m not only a writer, I’m also a Hollywood producer, so I have that umph.    

The security guard’s mouth curls into a smile, and he says, “I’d kill you.” Behind him, the buildings of CBS Television City loom like a dystopian state. The way he threatened it, so sweetly as if he was lovingly reassuring me, would have sent a shiver down Kafka’s spine.    

I joke to the WGA observer that I should have let myself get hit by the car and sued CBS – then I’d actually get paid. “But then you’d have a lot of money, and you’d be one of them,” the observer says wryly, nodding at CBS. But – aren’t we out here striking for money? Why are writers inherently allergic to cash?    

I believe if the WGA had actually asked for more to start with at the negotiating table, perhaps they would have ended up getting even more than the crumbs they’re now striking for, and the whole thing could have been avoided. It’s all a sunlit nightmare.    

I’ve already written three new spec screenplays in 2023: Ascetic, about a demonically possessed girl who starts a cult who act a lot like Jesus’s disciples; Max’s Family, a charming yet edgy romantic comedy; and Klepto, about a girl who takes her obsession with stealing to a dark extreme. I thought I’d come into the new year firing on all cylinders – but the clock had struck 12:01, and now I was dead in the water. 

I spent the weekend before the strike – as the shutdown loomed, as my three projects in development withered on the vine – watching the films of William Friedkin. With all the stress, I guess you could say I was Friedkin out.    

I watched Sorcerer, and then I watched Cruising. The period grit and grime that seemed to rub off on me through the screen agitated the recurring dream I’d been having since I arrived in Los Angeles two years ago – I am on a lake whose water is fairy-tale pure. It is Skaneateles Lake, where I grew up, before it became polluted because the local government there failed to prevent overdevelopment. In Fellini-esque swoops, set against the sounds of my own breathing, I float across the lambent water, between two video rental stores. The first is in the same building as a bowling alley and smells like lane oil and cigarettes; the second is attached to a laundry mat and smells cloyingly sweet of dirt and detergent. The hundreds of VHS tapes seem like sacred objects sitting on the shelves. I am dreaming about when I loved movies. When I wake up, I’m not sure I do anymore. 

My god, I’m 40 – and I’ve written nearly a hundred scripts in my life, and here I am in a slump I didn’t think I’d be in. I do the math – a hundred scripts times a hundred pages each, divided by 28 (the years I’ve written) multiplied by 365 – adding in piles of outlines and treatments – I realize I’d been writing more than a page a day since I was 12 years old, seven days a week, and here I am dead in the water. And I was just about to close some big deals – before the strike hit.    

I go back to doing the math on pet supplies fit for human consumption. In an interview the night before, Kevin Durant had said he was a junkyard dog. Maybe that’s what I’m becoming – the junk obviously being all my rejected ideas and piles of moldering scripts, and yet here I am barking away with a creeping bitterness, and literally buying my meds from PetCo.    

The conversation with my agent is usually the same, though we trade parts, like actors in a Sam Shepherd play on different nights: “Hey man, do you think everything’s going to work out,” one of us asks. And the other says, “Of course it is, man.”    

But the night the strike hit, Ben and I have a different conversation. “Not good,” one of us said. The other one said, “Not good.”    

My restless brain sought order in chaos – some semblance of meaning from disparate parts of what might not actually be a whole. As a slipstream of my unrest flashed before me, I sat down at my computer on the first day of the WGA strike and typed FADE IN: – as per my general coping mechanism.    

While outlining a new sci-fi script, I was also now writing a spec called The Iguana Hunter loosely based on these very articles. It all telescoped like a Droste effect, like I was paradoxically standing outside myself while sinking into the void. I was like one of those outcasts who weld together metal sculptures in their front yard. I had set a goal to write one screenplay every month of 2023, and I was keeping that goal though the strike would probably go on for months. The more impossible the industry seemed, the faster I wrote. Maybe I was just the dog barking at the junk. 

Meanwhile, I wondered how many drivers beeping their horns in support of the picket lines – and how many of those holding the signs – were going home at night and plopping down in front of the streaming services they’d been at war with earlier in the day. I scrolled on Instagram, looking at all the WGA strike selfies union members took, which were by their nature suppling droves of data to the AI algorithms they were striking against.    

And I thought – seeing how Netflix alone now has over four years’ worth of content stockpiled – meaning you’d have to watch Netflix 24/7 for four straight years of your life to see everything available before you even thought about watching the additional years of nonstop viewing available on Hulu and Disney+ and the myriad other platforms – perhaps it would have been wise for the WGA to strike a bit sooner. But what do I know? I’m not even in the union.    

So, if you wanted to know, that’s what it’s like being a writer during the WGA strike.