Happy Yom Kippur (War is Over)

And just like that, my strikin' days was over

I’d originally thought that today, in keeping with Lifting Fog’s mission of delivering you the absolute most esoteric writing possible, I would pen a love letter to episode #309 of ‘Reservation Dogs’. Probably five of you, total, have seen this episode and two would care to actually read about it. My readership sweet spot! But then the WGA had to go and make a deal with the AMPTP late Sunday night, and throw those barely considered plans out of whack. So today I’m talking about something only slightly less esoteric: the end of the 2023 Writers Guild strike and — most importantly — how it makes me feel.

One Day Longer, One Day Stronger

📸: Variety

Mostly good! Though none of us yet know any details about the deal achieved last night at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, presumably over a plate of Cheesecake Factory egg rolls, I know I’m not alone in assuming it must have been an excellent one. We’d been striking for 146 days, the second-longest strike in WGA history, and for all its pains, I think all of us would have gone for another 90 more. To put it in ‘Forrest Gump’ terms, “[we] got this far, might as well just keep going.”¹ (This was sort of the central miscalculation of the AMPTP, right? That somehow writers and actors — two professions infamous for navigating mercurial employment — would throw in the towel after a few weeks. But we’ll get back to those fuckwits later!)

I’m incredibly proud of my union. I’m incredibly proud to just be a part of one, especially at what feels like an inflection point in modern labor history. Our sister² guild, SAG-AFTRA, remains on strike. United Auto Workers (UAW) are drawing a visit from President Biden tomorrow. Southern California hotel workers are striking. UPS workers recently avoided one of their own, negotiating a historic contract. You can feel it in the air — not the threat of fall wildfires, but a more metaphorical conflagration. Workers are fed up and, if not ready to torch the whole place down, at least start a controlled burn.

Anger [at] Management

I feel… genuine violence toward the studio heads (as represented by AMPTP but also, far too frequently, themselves) who put us through all this. A whole summer of bullshit all so you could wipe out $5 billion of the California economy, gut half your fall movie lineup (including ‘Challengers’! I was looking forward to that!), and then make a deal you had the opportunity to make at any point over the past five months? You guys must be a Kit-Kat bar because GIMME A BREAK.

What’s craziest to me now, on the other side, is the way their well-documented cruelty (see: “writers should lose their houses,” TreeGate, etc.) feels almost beside the point, second-fiddle to the fact that these douche-nozzles are all just bad at their jobs. “Okay, okay,” I hear some of you saying, “pre-supposing that what is demanded of them by their Wall Street string-pullers has nothing to do with artistic quality and everything to do with bottom lines, didn’t they execute their task exactly like they were supposed to?” Maybe! But take into account that Warner Bros. — home to 2023’s as-yet most profitable movie, ‘Barbie’ — is projecting losses of $300-500 million this year, and they’re definitely not the only ones.

Why has there not been a vote of no confidence from their vaunted boards? How can any rational person look at this coterie of brain-wormed clowns and think 1) YUP, those are leaders right there and 2) they deserve a bonus this year for all their fine leadership? To put it in movie terms again, which is the way most screenwriters understand the world and not coincidentally the impetus for our whole (stalled!) careers:

It’s behind a paywall, but The Ankler has been doing amazing work all strike, cutting through the spin cycles of Deadline and Variety³ to provide trenchant (and not for nothing, entertaining) reporting on picket lines, backroom negotiations, and everything in-between. Chief Columnist Richard Rushfield published a typically great piece this morning, asking just what these current studio heads have accomplished in their tenures:

Name a problem our poobahs have made go away, or even diminished in the past decade: the Streaming Wars, taking a wrecking ball to the cable bundle and the theatrical model, #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, our disappearance from the world's stage during the Covid-related calamities, the collapse of our awards shows, and now add this strike to that list.

We lurch from disaster to disaster with no vision to guide us in between. Here once again was an opportunity to spell out a new partnership between talent and the studios. But our poobahs never miss a chance to miss a chance.

At various points this summer I’ve suggested to friends that, post-strike, these CEOs should be 1) tried at the Hague, 2) hunted like Nazis fleeing to Venezuela after World War II, or 3) forced to watch ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’. I stand by all these assertions as works of therapeutic fiction, and not actual threats.

Get Busy Livin’, or Get Busy Dyin’

Pretend that I’m Ellen Degeneres talking about the challenges of early lockdown when I say that this strike has felt like a prison. Here you are, stuck in place, legally prohibited from exercising the freedoms you’d grown accustomed to — pitching TV and movie ideas, interviewing for writing jobs, doing those jobs if the interview went well. But let’s say you’d been struggling on the outside. Let’s say on some level the strike prison provided cover for what had maybe been a lack of freedom-exercising in your civilian life. For five months, you didn’t need an explanation for why you weren’t working — prison! — why you felt down — prison! — why, even though you basically had unlimited time to do it, you weren’t writing as much as you wanted to — prison! And ‘Tears of the Kingdom’! You could disappear into a fog of justification, and state-sponsored meals (Drew Carey’s tab at Bob’s Big Boy), talking broadly about the collective’s problems and relieved to be denying your own.

Then you get released! And suddenly it’s all up to you again.

Here’s the thing I don’t actually want to admit: I’m scared⁴ the strike is over. I wasn’t exactly holding a pencil before “pencils down” — two long unemployed years, actually, a break that makes me wonder sometimes if my brief tenure as a professional writer was actually granted by the Make-a-Wish foundation. An adult Make-a-Wish kid, not even asking for anything cool, like renting out a fleet of battle helicopters or bypassing the years-long waitlist at Noma. Nope, I just wanted to be a sitcom writer for two years, and eventually grow tired of the meatloaf at Joan’s on Third.

I’m mixing metaphors, I know. (I never claimed to be a good writer.) But whether I’m Brooks trying to make it outside the safety of Shawshank or an adult Make-a-Wish kid with NO WISHES LEFT, it’s fear undergirding both. I fear there are very real contractions coming, and that no matter what gains the WGA has made, forces will keep those gains in tight check. More dangerously, I fear I just can’t hack it. I fear Substack essays are the upper bound of my writing talent — no offense to Substack! — and when I leave Hollywood, I’ll never be able to watch another movie or TV show again.

@hopehealthsportsfitnessKids when they see the ice cream truck passing by 🍦 “I feel like, if I dont get to do this, i feel like, that’s it. I might, I might die” #CapCut #successionmeme #kendallroy #kendallroymeme #memetok #memetiktok #fy #fyp #foryoupage #foryou #icecreamtruck #icecream #funnyvideos #trending #viral #ifeellike #kids #kidsfunny #icecreamfunny

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(There is more Kendall Roy in me than I’d care to admit, not least of which the fact I AM the eldest boy.)

On the other hand… we might remember that fear is a product of one’s imagination, and not a tangible fact. And hey — properly channeled, imagination can be a wonderful thing! It is after all the BEDROCK OF HOLLYWOOD, its most irreducible element, without which none of the movies and TV shows Ted Sarandos desperately wants to buy and then never advertise would even exist. As writers step out into the post-strike dust — followed quickly, God willing, by SAG-AFTRA — we’ll need to exercise that imagination more than ever to re-cement this place as something worth preserving. Whether the studio heads give a shit or not, that’s immaterial. They caved. That happened. They know, however deep-down, that they provide nothing of value except their pocketbooks⁵. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they can seriously suck our collective dick.

I’d be lying to say I made a ton of new strike friends this summer, that I truly Found My Place in a writing ecosystem I’ve been desperate to join since marathoning ‘The Office’ season two and realizing, at the age of 20, that all those characters and jokes and moments I loved were written by a team of people. (A revelation!) But for all my whinging⁶, I did feel a sense of purpose, shared purpose, that makes me think tomorrow might look better than the day before, ideally not in this garish t-shirt.

If you take nothing else away from this overlong journal entry, let it be that I compared the 2023 Writers Strike to prison.

1. Feel free to make jokes about how WGA has the relative intelligence of Forrest Gump if you must

2. or brother! Or sibling! Whatever relationship you want

3. not that it matters, but Variety this morning called Hollywood “the content industry.” Just as Edison, Melies, and the Lumiere Brothers intended!

4. Maybe I should have continued the ‘Inside Out’ thing here and posted an image of Bill Hader’s “Fear” character. But why do the obvious thing

5. Why was my first inclination to say “pocketbooks” and not “wallets,” like a normal person? Something to look into

6. Possible new Substack title, “For All My Whinging”