What have you observed about the strike as a writer still trying to break into the entertainment industry?
Wake: There's a lot of uncertainty and confusion around the whole thing, but this is really fighting for everyone. I truly believe that this is an existential fight. Like if we don't do this, will we have this field in a few years? It's truly an existential fight for the writers and not just writers in TV, but novelists and other people, too, because who's to say they won't try to do the same thing for other fields? In general, this is sort of like the canary in the coal mine right now. Like can we make sure we keep the rights to tell human stories by humans? I feel like if we don't do this, then, once again, we're opening the floodgates for other people to say, "What can we get away with?"
Has social media had a positive impact on the grassroots organising of the strike so far?
Wake: Absolutely. I've heard about a lot of the strike-like movements happening through social media. Social media has made this a lot easier. I could only imagine how this was done in 2007.
"That's another way that studios f*cked up because they've made us all powerful, knowledgeable people about the ways in which we've been screwed."
Jones:You can hear straight from the writers themselves rather than whatever is filtered through the press. . . . So with social media, you can hear directly from the writers rather than having to guess whether or not the depiction of what's going on is actually accurate.
Fontana: Yes I do. We're in such a different era now, particularly, because we have social media as such a fabric of our lives. It existed in a minor way then but people weren't going on MySpace being like, "My show's cancelled." It's so much more a part of our lives now and individual writers on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are empowered to share their perspectives.
Also, I've never seen so many people whose job it is to actually write good scripts and we would love to just be able to do our job. But all of us now have become de facto experts on how we're being screwed over. That's another way that studios f*cked up, because they've made us all powerful, knowledgeable people about the ways in which we've been screwed.
What are your thoughts about the conversations around AI technology in the entertainment industry and how that may impact writers in the future?
Jones: It's so scary and dystopic. And I know it's not just going to affect the entertainment industry, AI is going to put a lot of people out of jobs. I kind of feel like the Writers Guild is really on the forefront of getting ahead of that fight.
But also, we're already seeing [studios] shrinking writers' rooms. There used to be writers' rooms of 17, 20 people. I've heard about three, four people, and I think the studios want to keep shrinking [them] until it's going to be one person and [AI chat bot] ChatGPT. And, of course, who are they going to keep as the people to fix these scripts? It's probably going to be the already established rich, white male showrunners. So people like me, we're going to be cut out of the industry.