Consider This from NPR - David Simon, Creator Of The Wire, On AI, Television and the WGA Strike

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

The Hollywood writers' strike has meant three weeks of late-night comedy and soap opera reruns for television fans. And for some fans, it might feel familiar. 15 years ago a Writers Guild strike lasted 100 days. And the effect of that strike was felt on shows from Saturday Night Live to Friday Night Lights. NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with veteran TV writer David Simon about the strike and the changing business practices in the entertainment industry.And writer and cultural critic Emily St. James explains how the 2007 WGA strike may have saved the life of an iconic character in Breaking Bad.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. It's been nearly three weeks since Hollywood writers went on strike, sending late-night comedy shows and soap operas into reruns, while other scripted shows with longer turnarounds are braced to feel the effects of the walkouts. Now, if you were looking at the strike from the perspective of a TV fan waiting on new episodes, and if you were also a fan about 15 years ago, this moment might feel familiar. So what was unusual about the 2007-2008 strike was it happened right in the middle of the production season for TV shows. Emily St. James is a TV writer and culture critic.

Today, she is a member of the Writers Guild of America. During the 2007 strike, she covered the TV beat for a California paper. Lost was airing at the time. Each one of us was brought here for a reason. And who brought us here, John? The island. Heroes was airing at the time. The girl. You have to save her.

Friday Night Lights was airing at the time. Clear hands! Full hearts! Can't lose! So many memories. Well, each of those shows had their seasons cut short, or they went on hiatus. Plot lines were interrupted or abandoned. And on Breaking Bad, at least one character's life was saved.

Originally, the plan for that show was to kill off the character of Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul. And let me tell you something else. This ain't chemistry. Okay, this is art. The strike happened and the writers sort of started thinking about, okay, okay, do we want to actually kill Jesse? Aaron Paul's such a good actor, et cetera, et cetera. And they decided not to. If the strike hadn't happened, you know, we can't know that they would have gone forward with their plan. But it seems quite likely to me that the strike saved Jesse Pinkman. Emily St. James says that one misconception of the effect of the 2007 strike

was that it ushered in the age of reality TV. She says that trend was already well underway. For the most part, the reality shows that were successful when the strike began were the reality shows that were successful afterward, and they had usually been around for five years or more. The growing footprint of reality programming was one of many transformations unfolding in the industry back then. DVD sales were booming, streaming was poised to play a bigger role, and those issues around how technology was changing the industry became sticking points in the writers' negotiations with the studios, eventually sparking the 2007 strike. Consider this. Today, the industry has transformed again and writers are striking again.

One of the issues, the role of artificial intelligence in screenwriting. They are now telling us, we don't know what AI is. We don't know how good it's going to be. Let's not litigate what AI can do, what it can't do. They did the same thing in 2007 when it was streaming. Coming up, a conversation with a veteran writer, David Simon, the creator of The Wire. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

It is Monday, May 22nd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. David Simon does not see the Writers' strike ending soon. It's going to be a long fight. I think this is going to go on a while. This is the fight. This is now. This has to happen now. Simon is a member of the Writers Guild of America's Negotiating Committee, which, until the strike began this month, had been negotiating with the studios over a new contract.

In a statement, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the studios, says it offered generous increases in compensation to writers. It calls some of their proposals, quote, incompatible with the creative nature of the industry. But David Simon argues that the nature of the industry has changed, and he has seen that change firsthand. He started writing for TV decades ago. He created The Wire and Treme. And he's overseen production of many TV series. He spoke with my colleague Ari Shapiro about how those changes have affected writers. So you started writing for TV nearly 30 years ago. What are the specific things that you think made your life more comfortable than writers starting today?

Oh, well, for one thing, I grew up with a mentor. Tom Fontana hired me to write for the show Homicide, which was based on a book I wrote in Baltimore. He believed that there was a threshold of creativity that resulted when you had a bunch of writers in a room talking and arguing the material and making scripts better. So I walked into a writer's room and not only did I have the benefit of writers who had more experience than me, uh, uh, well, everybody had more experience than me. I was a police reporter at the time, but Tom did other things. He sent me to set to cover set, uh, and to protect the script on set. He sent me to casting. He sent me, you know, when I was ready, he sent me into editing. Those things made me conscious of what you need to do to write competently and even, you know, write in an advanced way for television.

Inviting young people into a writer's room with more experienced writers, bringing people onto set, those sound like good actions for a mentor to take with a mentee. Should they be written into a contract? Absolutely. If something doesn't require a certain number of writers to get the job done, why should a studio be required to hire that number of writers? Well, they never did. It was never written into the contract because it was always assumed that this was a viable form. Why has that changed? It's changed because of greed.

I mean, you now have Wall Street analysts and CEOs who are basically saying, if we can make television for cheaper, let's try. Well, the other way of describing that would be if a show requires five people, why should we be required to have 10? Nobody's saying you should have 10. They're now saying that there should be no fundamental standard for any. And showrunners, people who are doing the job of producing and running the show have been left alone on set and in post production. Can you give me another example or two of something that was standard when you began that today is no longer the case that you think makes beginning writers? Of course, I can entice somebody who is a good writer, who knows how to write dialogue and move and, and, and, and move pages and, and, and can write from a television

show that is complex and sophisticated and, you know, can, can sustain itself narratively over 12 episodes if I can offer them some decent employment. But if a studio comes to me and says, look, we're just going to have a mini room, you know. People might not be familiar with the term mini room. Pre-production room that might go six or eight or 10 weeks, or maybe only three weeks. And they say, give us all your ideas. And oh, by the way, then go off on your own and write a script. Or they might not even say write a script because there's money in the script fee too. They might say, thanks for your ideas.

We're not hiring you. But thanks for participating in our room. Go with God. Nobody who wants to make a living writing television is going to be able to be sustained that way. You can't live on three weeks salary. That's what's happening now. When I came on Homicide, a network show that had 22 episodes, I had 30 weeks of employment. I can live on that. I can have a career. I can actually seriously consider writing television for a living. I offer what's available on these shorter run shows now to writers. I can't sustain them.

So you're arguing writers should be paid by the time commitment rather than by the episode. Good news. It's called term employment. And that is what this strike is about. It's saying, look, hire people for a certain amount of time to do the work and have them there on set and afterwards in editing when writing is happening. Some of the most fundamental decisions about writing are in editing or in reconceptualizing a scene because you've lost a location or because an actor is struggling with a line. That's writer's work, and we do it on set.

It's why television was able to get to the place of sophistication that it did. Let's talk about residuals. You get checks from The Wire, which started production more than 20 years ago, and if that show debuted today on a streaming service, how would the checks that you get look different? They'd be tiny. They'd be tiny.

The amount of streaming residuals that we've gotten as compared to broadcast is relatively minimal. And we have to fight our way to a better and more plausible formula with the studios. And we had to do that with cable when it first arrived. And we have to do that with every technology. Every time a new technology comes in, the greed says, oh, you know, we don't know how much we're going to make with this.

We don't know whether it's actually viable. This is what they said to us in the last strike in 2007. They said, we don't know about this streaming thing. We don't know if this is the future. We're not sure. Give us three more years or six years. Well, we agree to talk about it. That's literally what they said. And we said, no, the future is now. And we went on strike. We got our foot in the door and that's why we have some measure of address over streaming residuals, but we need more. We need the formulas to become plausible and compensators for

the fact that this is now the delivery system for a lot of the content. Okay. So you've spent your career creating television without AI. And I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems or saying, boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. I don't think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition. I'd rather put a gun in my mouth. I'd rather put a gun in my mouth. You would rather put a gun in your mouth. I mean, what you're saying to me effectively is there's no original way to do anything.

No, that seems like a kind of absolutist take. Not only I think is it a fundamental violation of the integrity of writers and also of copyright. You know, when I sold all the scripts I sold, uh, you know, 150 to HBO and, you know, maybe another 50 to NBC, I didn't sell them so that they could be thrown into a computer with other people's and be used again by a corporation. So would you ever agree to a contract that saw any role for AI at all? No, I would not. If that's where this industry is going, it's going to infantilize itself. We're all going to be watching stuff we've watched before, only worse.

Do you think that position is where this is likely to end up? I mean, if a writer wants to play around with AI as the writer and see if it helps him, I mean, I regard it as no different than him having a thesaurus or a dictionary on his desk or a book of quotable quotes, play around with it. If it starts to lead the way in the sense that a studio exec comes to you and says, hey, I gave us this story that we want. That's not why I got into storytelling. And it's not where I'll stay if that's what storytelling is. That was David Simon, creator of The Wire,

Treme, and other HBO series, speaking with my co-host, Ari Shapiro. It's Consider This. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, Thank you.