Chapo Trap House - BONUS: What’s at Stake in the WGA Writers’ Strike

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Blake Masters (NOT THAT ONE, Blake is the creator of Showtime’s Brotherhood, and writer for Rubicon, Law & Order: LA, and Falling Water among many other shows) joins us to discuss the ongoing WGA writers’ strike. Will and Blake touch on the transforming landscape of Television, fair compensation in the age of streaming, standing creative professionals’ ground against AI, and how entertainment unions fit into the larger world of American organized labor. And also, how all TV writing eventually leads back to Columbo.

All right. Well, hello, it's Will. And you got a bonus episode coming at you today. It's, I guess, another in our ongoing series of strike coverage where I talk about strikes and interview a union member involved in them. So, without further ado, today, of course, we're talking about the writer's strike at the WGA. And my guest today is Blake Masters. No, not that Blake Masters. I can already see your eyes rolling back in your head. No, this is Blake, just for the virtue of differentiating yourself from the Peter Thiel weirdo. Could you tell us, tell me a little bit about yourself, your experience as a TV writer and how you've experienced or lived through some of the changes in the industry that have led to this current

strike? Well, first off, let me say thank you for differentiating me from the robot without a soul who shares my name. I would start by saying that television has vastly changed in the last 15 to 20 years. The biggest piece of it, I would say, is essentially the death of network television. Network television was always the big driver and big main financial engine of everything. So, everything had to conform to that. So, all whole business was built around the way people were paid, the way things were scheduled, was all built around the network calendar. And with the rise of streaming and the death of network television, what it did is it opened a space for people to then pay differently and therefore depress

salaries. And that fundamental shift in the way business is done has led to a, and I can go into it in much more depth, the ways in which writer salaries have been depressed by 40 to 50% over the last 10 to 12 years. I think our listeners are probably generally familiar with the parameters of what's going on here. But just for the sake of clarity, did you describe what residuals are and how the residuals a writer gets for an episode of an aired television show versus the network model versus now the streaming model? Well, you bring up a good point. Residuals are long the way writers got paid the long tail, which is we'd take less money up front and then you'd write an episode of television

and every time it would air, you would get a little piece of money. And if it would air repeated times, you'd get multiple payments and decreasing amounts. One of the things that happened the last time we had a strike in 0708 is that before anybody knew there was going to be such a thing as Disney plus, we negotiated a residual for streaming video on demand residuals. And so we now get residuals on those things. And so one of the things we learned from that strike as writers is that we have to ask early. We have to ask before things start to get our feet in. What has really happened is not the depression of residuals, but the depression of the way in which we're paid. Under the network model,

you got paid basically on the basis of per episode, meaning if you create 22 episodes of a network show, you get paid for 22 increments. If you made a cable show that had 13 episodes, you got paid for 13 increments. One of the things that happened though is with the death of network is orders became shorter and shorter. So if you go from say 13 episodes to 8 episodes, that's a pay cut, especially if those 8 episodes take as long to produce as the 13 episodes and require just as much time. So essentially, you just got a pay cut because the way in which you were paid changed. And one of the things that streaming platforms like is they like to have more tiles, more shows in their little scanner, whereas an over the air network,

what they want is they need to fill hours. And so if they have something good, they want as many hours of that as possible. So what is over the air network wants is more episodes of their best shows. What a streaming network wants is a greater variety of the number of shows. But by producing that same number of episodes over a longer period of time, you've essentially reduced writer salaries. So what were the like you brought up the strike that happened in 07 about 15 years ago now. What was suddenly you mentioned like you got to ask for these things before streaming becomes hegemonic. What were some of the other things that like the experience of that strike taught

you and how does out of the issues for why the strike occurred differ from the current one? Well, that strike was a combination with the ring drivers that strike were essentially pension and health benefits and minimums. Movies were still much more prominent. So there was a way in which the amount in which we were paid for our work needed to be increased. We needed to get better contributions to our pension and health funds so that they were solvent coming out of that period of time. And as this little side thing, they were making these little mini episodes of lost. We thought, okay, well, let's get make sure that's covered

and that work is covered. And one of the things that happened is we held together for a 10 week strike that went over the holidays and we didn't bend and we got what we wanted out of it. And what that taught the union is, if we stick together, we can actually make a dent against the producers and the powerful people in Hollywood who tell writers you're a bunch of worthless people, which confirms our own self-loathing that we're worthless people. So as a result, over the intervening years, the Guild had gotten incredibly more organized coming out of that strike, such that we realized there was a point where our own agents had

financial incentive to screw us over. So we went on a campaign to eliminate this arcane thing called packaging fees. And we won a bunch of chaotic self-loathing writers, beat CIA, ICM, William Morrison, Devere, and we won, flat out. And what it taught us is that the power of union is enough so that we can stand up to people who traditionally think they can run us roughshod over us. And so when it came to the suppression of writer salaries, because companies were taking advantage of accounting tricks, essentially, in the wake of the death of the network model, and I can get into the details of there's a lot of minutiae there, we said, no, we're

not going to allow you to essentially work around ways to pay us less for the same labor. And so that was the main driver when the strike began. There's a funny thing that happened. We got to the negotiating table. Because we learned the lesson of we had to ask for streaming residuals early, we put on the table this throwaway thing about AI, that a writer was a person, not a machine. And the studios refused to even consider it. They rejected it out of hand in a way that said to us, oh, that's important. Their rejection has really changed what this strike is about from, okay, you're suppressing our salaries, we need to go codify how we get paid in a way so we get our proper money to, oh, there's an existential threat

here that you already are planning for. And so the strike really has shifted from being strictly a financial thing to now being a much more existential thing, where very clearly they are planning to take 900 scripts worth of episodes worth of law and order, pump it into a machine and have it start pumping out law and order scripts with no humans involved, which essentially you're taking the copyrighted work of those writers and not paying them for it to produce more episodes by feeding them into a computer. And then they're gonna have one writer who polishes what comes out. And we go, that's not writing and that's not creativity. And really, it does go to a deeper

philosophical idea of what is this stuff that comes into our houses? Is it designed to ennoble, enlighten, be artistic, challenge us? Or is it there to strictly anesthetize us? Yeah. I mean, like, and that to me is the most fascinating aspect of this current labor action and the issues of like the entire entertainment industry, because like you talked about how like each sort of stage of technological change, whether it be, you know, the cable networks are now streaming, of course, like the studios are going to do or you know, what any business owner is going to always do with technological innovation is use it to stiff their employees. However, with this AI business now, and the fact that you said that like, that was the

thing that they wouldn't negotiate over is that they were trying to hold on to this idea that like, oh, a writer is just like, it could be a computer program that produces words at like, that's not really about, like, I mean, yeah, it's about stiffing writers, but it's also about just like stiffing the entire concept of writing and human culture, like as a positive good. Like, I mean, like, these studio bosses, they must be talking about how to use an AI to write a TV show. Now, if not, they're already doing it. Yeah. And we thought, okay, we're getting in early. And their reaction was so vehement. It made us realize they don't understand what writers do. Fundamentally, they don't understand

because yes, could an AI probably produce a usable script of some show there's an existing thousand episodes of with some human help, probably, but no AI would ever come up with the Sopranos because the Sopranos was breaking all of television that had come before. None would come up with even Gray's Anatomy because Gray's Anatomy changed structure of television in ways that had never been done before. In fact, it was a reaction to the way television had been done before. It would never come up with Atlanta. It would never come up with, you know, so many shows, which the impetus for was in fact a repudiation of what was television. It was to reinvent television away because they were frustrated with the boundaries of television. And what AI does is

all it does is it takes all the knowledge we have and produces a reasonable facsimile of it. That difference is called creativity and invention. And that's not what AI does. AI is a synthesis of like, take everything, you know, put it in a blender and split out a milkshake of it. And the idea that the future of entertainment is just a bunch of milkshakes. I find that incredibly depressing. And I also don't think it will work commercially. I think in the long run, people watch something because it's familiar, but eventually they want something that's new. There's something they haven't seen before. And that's where the only thing that can do that is human interaction. And if I can just go deep for just a half a second, here's why law and order

exists. Law and order exists because Dick Wolf worked on Miami Vice and he hated Michael Mayer because Michael Mayer wanted to make movies and Dick wanted to make television. And so Dick said, I'm going to make a show where the visuals don't matter. And it's 1990. And the biggest financial driver is essentially reruns. And nobody wants our reruns. So I'm going to make a show where I can break it into two 30 minute shows and syndicate it that way. And that's how we came up with the idea for law and order, all of which was a repudiation of television at that point. Now, no, I would ever come up with that motivation for making a show. And if this AI model is just essentially recycling culture and creativity that's

also existed and to do a rather bad or just create this stuck culture of this never ending present. But I think the important point that you bring up is that it's still utilizing human creativity. The base material that it's going off of is still a writer who has been paid for their work and is now not being paid for their work as it makes up the bones of the prompts that you give to one of these algorithms to write a script for you. Imagine somebody took every script I'd ever wrote that I'd ever been paid for, threw it into an AI and said, here's a Blakemaster script based on his predilections. You just robbed me of my intellectual property. You just used my labor. And that's kind of the sticking point in this AI negotiation,

which is that there is an intellectual property value of meanness that you are going to, and I'm not saying they'll do it for me, they'll do it for Sorkin or David Chase or somebody valuable, but the idea that you could feed all their David Mamet, you feed all the David Mamet works into an AI and say, spit out David Mamet. Well, you've just stolen from David Mamet. Whether you like his politics or not, you've stolen him from his intellectual work. That would be producing contemporary David Mamet scripts. Maybe David Mamet has been replaced by an AI. Blake, I want to go back to the comparison to the 2007 strike because I remember that very well. I mean, maybe some of our listeners don't. But in terms of like, this was pre-streaming

hegemony. And the way people watch TV back then was very different than the way they watch TV now. And the thing is, the thing that people realized very quickly during that writer strike is that it ruined television and that it ruined laws, that ruined heroes. Like, everyone's favorite shows got really shitty for a while. Conan was on TV spinning his wedding ring every night. However, that was because back then TV was like, okay, it's eight o'clock, I'm watching my show. And then like, either it's there or it's not. And it's very much mediated by like the TV schedule. And now with streaming where you have this like, almost limitless library of like every show that's ever existed at your fingertips, do you worry that people will

not feel the effect as deeply as they did back in 2007? I think, well, there's two things. One is, for every show like Heroes that was ruined, Breaking Bad wouldn't exist in its current form without the writer strike. In fact, they were fumbling around trying to figure out what the show was when the strike gave them a break and they had to cut their first season short. And so the show realized during the strike what that show needed to become. I mean, Vince has talked about this openly that the strike actually gave them a window to almost create where that show was going to go. So there are benefits created. I think, no, I think there is a demand for something new because I think if I would just watch my own

children, they don't want to watch Casablanca. They don't want to watch Hill Street Blues. They don't want to watch Northern Exposure. They want to watch something that feels tapped into the contemporary now. You know, if you ask, I ask younger writers all the time, they're all in like, if you told them euphoria wasn't coming back for X number of years because of a writer strike, they'd be pissed. There are shows that are tapped into the now that I think there is a demand for. Now, the deeper piece is once you go into a library and you fumble around a certain point, you're kind of tired of that library and you cancel that service. And service cancelling is a generational thing. I think younger viewers are much more likely to do it. And that's the thing

that's going to hit Netflix and Amazon, well, not Amazon, but Disney Plus. And that's the thing that's going to start to hurt is they'll see their numbers. They'll see their viewership numbers going down. People will start gaming more. People will start, I don't know, talking to each other. God, no, no, we don't want that to happen. We don't want that to happen, please. I don't think that the strike in 08 was settled because people got upset they didn't have their shows. What it got to be is it got to be that they weren't getting shows on the air for which they could get paid. They, you know, that their financials were starting to get hit. And also, going into this strike, I think everybody needs to be prepared is that both sides prepared for an

8 to 10 week strike because there are certain financial trickeries that the companies can play after 8 to 10 weeks where they can, what's called force majority, basically cancel existing contracts because of a quote, active God, and a strike qualifies as an active God, apparently. So they've made a bunch of bad deals that they can get out of, but blame the writers rather than their own stupidity for making the deals. So there's a degree to which the companies have a financial incentive to extend the strike to a certain length before reaching an agreement. And that was the truth in 08 as well. So I think in the end, what will bring people to the table is these people actually do need new content, and they're going to start to see their numbers go

down, their user numbers go down, and they'll have instantaneous heartbeat monitoring, which they won't share, but Netflix knows how many people sign in every day. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you pay attention to their numbers, it's like the entire planet is watching, I don't know, the latest, watching Bird Box or whatever. Well, let's talk about like the strike as it stands now. It's in its, what, like about second week so far. What is your take on like, what is the current state of the strike? Are there negotiations ongoing? Is there anyone at the table? And what is being negotiated over here? I think where negotiations are. And the writer's guilt keeps it relatively close to the vest. They don't want to get publicly negotiate

with anyone. The negotiations are a little bit at a standstill. The writer's guilt is absolutely willing to come to the table, discuss things at any time. There are areas where the producers are, have essentially said, we won't negotiate those areas. So there's a bit of a standstill, but not a lack of negotiation, not a lack of engagement. There are rumors true or not that there are divisions within the producer entities. What's one of the weird things is, it's kind of antitrust, but these companies are all allowed to negotiate as one giant body. And yet Netflix's financial incentives are very different from Amazon's, very different from Disney, ABC's, very different from, you know, sort of NBC Comcast, but they're able to negotiate as

one. And so there is rumor that there is a schism between the more traditional old media companies like Comcast and CBS Paramount versus Netflix because they earn their revenues different ways. Could you talk about that? Like, what is it? What is that? Would that potentially be like something to exploit in terms of the difference in interest between like NBC Comcast or Netflix, Amazon? Like, how do their interests differ? Well, one of the interesting things is over the last couple of negotiations, Netflix didn't have a full seat at the table until the last two negotiations. And their model is completely based on subscription. They don't have a theatrical element. They don't have over the air. They don't have commercials. Their interest, and they also

have been the most aggressive in trying to skirt the existing pain rules to reduce writer salaries. Whereas, media that has a traditional legacy element left, say Disney, which has ABC and also has Freeform and also has Disney Junior and all these other outlets that they have to cover, gets money not just from subscriptions to Disney Plus and Hulu, but they get it from over the air commercials. They also get it from the commercials that air in your Hulu if you don't pay full freight for Hulu. So they have multiple ways in which they get money and some of which does require them to actually have things to air, meaning if there's no programming on ABC this fall, Disney takes a financial hit that's bigger because they have to go sell in May at up fronts what they're putting

on the air in the fall. It's more dangerous to their sale of commercials, whereas Netflix doesn't have that because there's money becomes absolutely only through subscription services. But outside the contractual issues, how do you see the streaming revolution as changing TV writing or just the way people interact with and view entertainment? Because on the one hand, I think streaming enables a lot of people to discover a lot of good work or get into TV shows that are very accessible that they otherwise wouldn't have or miss the first time around. But you mentioned the Netflix model. It's not just about you want your best show and you want as many episodes of it as possible. The streaming model is just this constant deluge of just content

and it doesn't matter really what it is. And I would imagine that the pressures to keep writing this stuff is done under tighter and tighter constrictions. Well, I can talk about it. There's a way in which television is made has changed fundamentally, but it's also changed the degree to which television is consumed and also the way sort of creative side of television. And those are three different things. I mean, one of the first things that happened in streaming is Netflix and Amazon insisted the audience, our numbers tell us the audience wants all the episodes at once, because that's what they want. And what they didn't ask their numbers is yes, but what will maximize viewers, which is you give them three, then you roll them out once a week.

So there can be cultural conversation between you and your friends so that you can all get into the show, catch up, be watching at the same time when the episode drops once a week and have a cultural conversation and your show builds an audience as it airs. And they were convinced they were right and they were wrong. And now they're all coming around to the same the old model of dropping episodes. In terms of the way in which we as people consume media, the loss of what's on right now has led to this sort of ultimate choice, but also a degree to which it's hard to seek out stuff. People find this with music sometimes that there's just too much choice. I'll just put on the Rolling Stones because I can't think too

much. And I think that that's one of the reasons things like friends do so well on streaming. It's just like fine, just put on friends in the background, it's noise. While there's been nitrification, you know, smaller groups for smaller shows and audiences all over the place, the bigger thing is when you're producing something that people can catch up on, you can tell a more serialized story. In fact, they want a slightly more serialized story because they want you to click next episode. Whereas in an over the air model, if you missed it, you missed it. And so as a result, you had to build a show where somebody missed a week, they could still continue to enjoy the show. And so that's one of the creative ways

things have changed. In terms of how it's written, the first thing is there's been a change in the timetable. It used to be shows were on once a year, like every network show, it starts in September, runs to May every year, we do it every year the same way. Cable shows originally followed that we're on once a year for 13 weeks. What's happened and came on early in is that the streaming streamers specifically Amazon and Netflix shift to a 14 month model, because they figured out in their according to their numbers, however they ask the questions, because you make numbers say fucking anything, 14 months was they could stretch to 14 months. Now, if you think about it, let's say you're making 13 episodes a year, instead of then you're

making 13 episodes every 14 months, you just got to pay cut as a writer. Because you're making the same number of episodes over more time. And they're paying you not for time, but for episode. It also means that the engagement between seasons is a little different and it's easier to drop off. And that's a negative. Originally, when things started to get crazy, there was this huge freedom because nobody knew what would stick. And people did stuff. More and more, they're sort of putting more and more hands in and thinking, ah, we the network know what the audience wants in the same way that sort of Marvel proved to their executives, we the Marvel popes up here know what the audience wants and we're going to give it to them. What the Marvel popes have forgotten is the movie

business change every 14 years. It's a completely different business every 14 years. So the Marvel model will work for about 14 years in that it will die because people will get forward and move on to the next thing. The same way the action movie model died, the same way in which the 70s died, the same way in which the 50s died. Things don't work forever because the audience gets bored. And this is why there's actually going to be demand for new content always. Because every so often you can feed the audience something for so long and they love it, but eventually it's played out and they get bored. And that's the problem with entertainment as a business model. The greatest business model ever is Cheerios. Because you can make the same fucking Cheerios

the same fucking way at Infinitum forever, pay the same amount of marketing and make the same profit margin and it's always predictable. And stocks love a predictable revenue. You can make the same two hour movie with all the same artists and one will be worth $300 million, but it's opening weekend and the other one will be worth $20 million this opening weekend. It's completely unpredictable and they fucking hate that. They want to be making Cheerios. That's why they love Marvel. It's also why they love television because when you get a hit in television you get to make it for eight years. So Blake, I've been observing on social media some of the picket lines and seeing the placards and the slogans and whatnot. And I've noticed that one figure has sort of

emerged as kind of the villain of this saga. And that's David Zaslav, who is CEO of Warner Discovery. Why has he been the focus of so much IR? And do you agree with the assessment of him being cast in this sort of the entertainment oligarch? I think he's at the table of oligarchs. I think that he's an easier target because he was so public in the way he canceled Batgirl and he sort of came in like an Adrenaline Bound Gorilla from basically a reality-based network, Discovery Networks, which is HGTV and all of that, and sort of stomped all over the HBO brand. They literally pulled HBO off HBO Max, not realizing, wait, HBO is the thing that sells, like, no, no, no, we want the Max part. And so he's become a very, because he's been vocal

and been very unself-aware about the company his company bought is why he's become the villain. But I don't think he's, I don't think he's any more of a villain than the people running Netflix. He's just more, his name is more known, you know. Zaslav sounds like kind of a villain name. If you were writing this story. I mean, he did have that rather, I mean, you talk about lack of self-awareness. He did have that quote the other week where he said, I believe I love of work will bring this strike to a close. Yeah, he's not somebody who came out of scripted entertainment. He came out of unscripted entertainment and the lessons he learned from that he thinks apply and it's also,

there's a degree to which Warner Brothers HBO was always a sort of marquee, the equivalent of the Tiffany network within all of this. HBO was a mark of a certain type of quality that's on HBO. It must be good, whether it is or not is beside the point. And his disregard for that and for the ideas when an artist puts their heart into stuff, it's just fine if for corporate reasons we can put it in a shelf and no one will ever see it again. Because artists don't do this strictly because they're getting paid. They're doing it because they want to actually put work out there. And if you have artists go out and make a movie and then you stuff it in the closet and say for tax purposes, we're never going to let anyone see it, whether it's good,

bad or indifferent. You're essentially telling the artist, the reason you do this is completely unimportant to me, the person who pays you for it. And thus there's going to be animus. He's made himself into that place. But I think when it comes to the negotiating table, I actually would be more frightened by the Netflix executives than I would the than I would Zasloff. But Zasloff, again, he's got the great name and he's made himself a villain. So that's why you see him on the sides. Another issue that's, I guess, like to the layperson, they're probably not aware of. But this was brought up by George R. R. Martin in his comments in support of the W. J. Strike. He brought up the issue of something called mini rooms and referred to them as an abomination.

Because you talk about what mini rooms are and how they're particularly affecting young writers to that. Sure. Well, first, again, this goes back to that historical context I started at the beginning. It used to be a show would get ordered in May and you'd have to have it on in September and you have to make 22 episodes. So you had to pile a whole bunch of writers in a room, you had to be shooting in six weeks. And so you would essentially build a room of writers when you greenlit the show, meaning we're committing to making it. And we then pay episodic to these writers and they would produce all the scripts and we'd make the episodes. What has happened is when you go to small orders that don't have to be on the air every year, the network specifically

that started with AMC and then Netflix is you say, we're not greenlighting the show. We're doing some R&D work. So we're going to hire a bunch of writers in a room to produce stories and scripts. But because the show isn't greenlit, we're not going to pay you per your full freight, what you get normally get paid for these episodes. We're going to pay you the guild minimum salary per week. So we're going to pay you for 10, 12, 15 weeks at guild minimum, which is much less than you would get per episode. So let's say you go for 10 weeks instead of 10 episodes, you're getting a 60% pay cut. And after those 10 weeks, they take all your work, fire you, take your contracts up, we're no longer including you. And then we greenlight the show. So we don't

have to pay your producing fee, but we take all the work that you would have done under that producing fee. And we produce the show with it. And what happens is there's one producer left the show runner who then is responsible for rewriting everybody's work during production. And the people actually produced it are basically on the street after having been underpaid for their work. Which is abomination enough. The deeper abomination is the way television is always run is as essentially there's a degree of apprenticeship. You're hired as a young writer to work under senior writers who teach you not just how to write, but how to write, how to deal with production, how to deal with a set, how to deal with the edit room, all of these things. And one of the great

traditions of television and why I love it is that you pass it down. I can tell you I was taught by a man named Henry Bamel, who was taught by David Chase, who was taught by Josh Brand, who was taught by, you know, also Tom Fontana, everything goes back to Colombo. Honestly, if you go and look at who wrote on Colombo, and you see that writer's list, you can follow everybody in television, their ancestors wrote for Colombo, you know, Cannell, Bochko, all of those guys. And so what happens when you do these mini rooms where the young writers are never on set, they never learn how to do their job. They never learn how to go from being a staff writer to being a showrunner, because all those steps in between are designed to train you to do all the things you need to do

as a showrunner. And so essentially what you're doing is they are essentially amputating their future workforce. So when I'm old and retired and living in Bochko, the people who are going to have my job won't know how to do the job, because they've never been given the opportunity to be fully involved beginning to end with creating an episode of television. Now that's one side of it. The other side is there's the pay element, there's that, there's a third element. The way television is made, directors come in two or three weeks before production. They don't really have time to know their own script, much less the whole season. So the idea is the writer is there because they are the keepers of the story. They know in this moment, although it's not in dialogue, that character

knows she's about to have an abortion, so you got to put the camera on her. That's the writer's job on set to be the keeper of story. And so if you eliminate writer's on set, the person directing episode five doesn't know they're setting up episode eight. The person who's directing episode five doesn't know that this was set up in episode three. They don't even know how it fits in. It's the writer's job to make sure that all 10 parts of this thing work together. And so that's the third reason why it's so important to have writers involved through production is the audience gets a better show because the episodes work together. I mean, the great thing about writer's rooms, the whole purpose of a writer's when I teach this is to allow writers to work in parallel

to create two episodes side by side at the same time that exists sequentially for the audience. You mentioned producers, and they have their guild, too. What is the role of producers in all this? Are they halfway in between you guys and the studios and the platforms? What is their role in all this? Do you see them as partners in this, adversaries, somewhere in between? You have to be clear what you mean by producer because writers, as they grow in seniority, get producer credits. Ashriners, you called an executive producer. The number twos are called co-EPs and on down all the way to staff writer. So there's the writers who are producers, which are one thing. And those are full-on writers. There are issues. They're in the guild. They're on board.

There are what are called non-writing producers. And mostly they're involved in the development phase of a show where they try to put together, they found a piece of material, they find a writer, they try to help sell it to a network and all of that. What's interesting is those exist in two places. In the main, they don't get paid a lot of money until the show is on the air and they get paid per episode. And in fact, they've been getting screwed over on their rates for years. So people who are like, used to produce one, two movies a year now trying to produce a television series in there, are finding their rates are suppressed and finding with essentially the way contracts are done. Because now we get back to residuals going full circle, they would get

their money out in what was called back end, which means after the first airing of the show, when the show is either syndicated, i.e. sent for reruns, or in the streaming purposes, the long tail, that's where they would get their money. But if Netflix owns the thing in perpetuity, there is no back end. And that's where the producers made their money. And so the producers aren't making money either. The producers are actually way more concerned with the lack of residuals than the writers are at this point. Because writer residuals, while they're great, we've got something in for streaming. And we've lost the back end. But people are getting so screwed on the front end, we can't fight that fight. So I'd say that the individual nonwriting producers are on our side,

but their issues are different. Then, although it's called the producer's guild, what it really is, is it's the corporate guild. It's the council, it's the, you know, I don't know, it's, it's all the companies you know, Sony, Warner Brothers, you know, CBS Paramount, they make a giant papal council and come down and say, you will now accept less money. And we go, no, no, we won't. I guess like that leads into my next question is just for you as a professional writer, what is being in a guild like the WJA means to you? It's one of those things that I actually feel kind of emotional about, because I really do believe that everything that I get was won by people before me. And while I could really be using this

time to make some more money and pay my mortgage, everything I'm doing will make sure the people after me get paid the same way the people before me got paid. That there really is a community in writers, which is rare among writers, writers generally, generally pretty solitary. But this idea that we have a debt to the people who came before us, and that we pass it on to the people after us is really important to me. Because again, it goes back to the way television is taught, it goes back to the way staffs are built. It goes to the idea that we're out there on the picket line, basically fighting for things that may not come into play during our own career, but we'll make sure this career is here for people after us. And that actually means we

actually give a shit about human beings beyond ourselves and our narcissistic assholes, which I consider kind of good. It's sort of like if you're a writer with a union card, it's like you're stamped as a human being and not just some sort of brain in a jar. Exactly. We may be missing throws. We may not like interacting with individual people, but humanity in general, we'll let it go. Well, I guess my last question for you is I've now interviewed on this show. We've talked to railroad workers. We've talked to teachers union members. We've talked to Starbucks employees who are trying to unionize right now, and now you are a member of the WGA who's in the middle of a labor action. How do you view

yourself as a writer and a WGA member? I guess like the creative professional class. How do you view yourself as part of a larger American labor movement? And how do you view your place in what's going on in a lot of other areas of America's economy right now in terms of employees and employers and people getting the money that they deserve? Well, I think while we don't look like a typical union, we're fatter and like muffins more, I do think that what we're fighting for and the fact that we have been successful in our last several labor actions, to me, my hope is that it encourages people out there who are considering unionization to say that it is possible in this pro corporate environment to actually stand up

for the rights of you and your fellow employees, that we hopefully are, you can look at us and say, wait, they stood up to those giant corporations in one? And we're like, yeah, it's possible. And you do have to understand is that as writers, when we go to set, we're next to teamsters, we're next to IOTC members, we're next to, you know, there are five or six different unions on all our sets. We work as one union in a giant union shop. And so we're aware that we're not just fighting for ourselves, that the whole project of unionization reflects fair pay for the creations of our labor. And so I like to think that although we don't look like it, we are absolutely part of the American labor movement. And hopefully, we're going to go out and win.

And that when people see that because of our profile, people go like, wait, unions can win. And since Reagan screwed it all up back when I was a child, that hasn't been the story. And it needs to be the story. Unions can win. Blake Masters, I'm going to leave it there for you today. Best of luck with the ongoing strike. We're all with you in solidarity with the WGA. So best of luck. Thank you very much.