Hollywood writers are optimistic that they will win

LOS ANGELES –

Fifty days after a strike with no end in sight, about 1,000 Hollywood writers and their supporters marched and gathered in Los Angeles for a new contract with studios that includes payment guarantees and job security.

Speakers at the Writers Guild of America’s WGA Strong March and Rally for a Fair Contract on Wednesday highlighted the broad support for their cause from other Hollywood unions — including actors in their own contract negotiations — and workers in general.

“We’re all in this together, we’re all fighting the same fight, for sustainable employment in the face of corporate greed,” Adam Conover, a writer and member of the guild’s board and its negotiating committee, told a crowd. the end of the march at the La Brea Tar Pits. “We’re going to win because they need us. Writers are the ones who stare at a blank page. We’re the ones who create the characters, tell the stories and write the jokes that their audiences love. They wouldn’t have anything without us.”

Talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group representing studios in negotiations, have not resumed since the hiatus hours before the writers’ contract expired on May 1. it continued.

A similar deadline now looms for actors, whose union, SAG-AFTRA, is negotiating with the AMPTP for a contract that expires June 30.

Streaming and its ripple effects are at the center of the dispute. The guild says that even as series budgets have increased, writers’ share of that money has consistently shrunk.

The AMPTP says writers’ demands require that they remain employed and paid when there is no work for them, and that contract offers have been generous.

“We’re here for the sake of the profession we love,” writer Liz Alper said at Wednesday’s rally. “The industry we work in, our audience, our fellow Hollywood sister unions, and all the workers across America who have been hurt and disenfranchised by Wall Street and big tech.”