‘A lot of catching up to do’: Hollywood writers head back to work

“It came down to the wire,” recalls David Scarpa, who was racing to complete a draft of his screenplay for Gladiator 2, a sequel to the Oscar-winning film starring Russell Crowe. “I had gotten the email which said you must stop writing at 12 midnight and so I was writing up until 12 and literally hit send at 11.59 to the producers with the draft and then it was, ‘OK, so you see when it’s over.’”

Related: Hollywood writers agree to end five-month strike after new studio deal

Scarpa and fellow members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) were then in creative limbo for 148 days. They took to picket lines outside major studios to demand improved minimum pay, increased streaming residuals and guardrails against the use of artificial intelligence. The strike came to an end this week. The writers declared victory and got back to work.

With striking actors also expected to reach a deal relatively soon, the wheels of Hollywood are about to start spinning again just in time to save the winter half of the TV season. But despite the pent-up energy, no one expects the hard-won compromise to fix everything. Questions linger over the post-pandemic box office, a pullback from content saturation and what effect AI – or the next disruptive technology – will have in the coming years.

Still, on Thursday the mood was upbeat at the Office, a communal workspace for writers in Santa Monica, west of Los Angeles, that has given birth to the screenplays of movies such as Eternals, Finding Dory, The Maze Runner and Serenity. In a room of blacks, browns and greens flooded with natural daylight, people sat typing on laptops as if making up for lost time. Communication was allowed only via a whisper.

Sitting outside in a car park, Gillian Weeks, a film and TV screenwriter, admitted that the strike had been a “scary” time of personal sacrifices but likened a meeting of guild members at the Hollywood Palladium on Wednesday to “a rock concert”. She said: “It was standing room only, packed to the rafters, rowdy and very joyful.”

Daytime and late night talkshows are roaring back and Weeks predicts an explosion of activity. “There’s no grace period, like everyone’s rubbing the sleep out of their eyes,” she said. “I have friends who are delivering for studios in a matter of days. If you had work going into the strike that you had to put on pause, you’re just back at it immediately. But as to whether people will be commissioning new work, I don’t know what that’s going to look like this fall. There is a lot of catching up to do.”

She added: “I imagine buying new things is part of that but it’s also about just getting production back on the rails and addressing all the changes to schedules and cast and talent availability. It’s a big mess that people are trying to figure out as soon as they can and then, of course, the actors are still on strike and that has to be addressed. But we’re all hoping that, because of the work that the Writers Guild did, their deal will come together a little faster than ours.”

The Screen Actors’ Guild (Sag) – with a membership of 160,000 film and TV actors, stunt performers and other media professionals – is also seeking better compensations from streaming and protections against AI. Scarpa, who has worked with the director Ridley Scott on films such as All the Money in the World and the upcoming Napoleon, expects the walkout to end sooner rather than later.

He said: “Once the studios decide that they want the strike to end, they can wrap it up pretty quickly. This deal could have been made six months ago. It was just a matter of, in a sense, testing whether or not we had the fortitude to sustain a strike for six months or how ever long. Once it came to the point where it was recognised that we were prepared to hang in for a long time, it just ceased to make sense for them to hold out that much longer.”

Week after week, the studios – including Netflix, Walt Disney and Warner Bros Discovery – probed the 11,500-member WGA’s defences for signs of weakness and hints of division between the leaders and rank and file. An anonymous studio executive was quoted by the trade publication Deadline as saying: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” Despite such efforts to spook them, the writers stood firm.

Scarpa noted: “It’s this periodic thing where it’s as if the credible threat of a strike needs to be tested on the part of the studios every time, which is: can they get it together? There’s always the fantasy that this is the time the writers are going to crumble and they can sort of end this. It almost comes with the territory that you wind up with with these strikes every 15 years.”

Details in the three-year contract show that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers – which negotiates on behalf of the studios and did not respond to a request for comment – gave in to several demands including increased health and pension benefits. This contract also guarantees the existence of writers’ rooms and establishes a minimum staff size.

Writers say they have suffered financially during the streaming TV boom. The union had sought minimum increases in pay and future residual earnings from shows and will get a raise of between 3.5% and 5% in those areas – more than the studios had offered. The guild also negotiated new residual payments based on the popularity of streaming shows.

Scarpa acknowledged, however, that the gold rush of a few years ago – which saw the “Netflix bloat” of too many shows for any viewer to keep up with – is unlikely to return.

He said: “This strike was happening against the background of other macro issues in the industry. You had all these studios expanding their programming to an enormous extent to the point where you had something like 500 or 600 shows on TV and that was unsustainable. In a sense, the strike came at a moment where it was part of the end of that process.

“You saw Netflix’s missed earnings and that signalled suddenly a belt tightening. That belt tightening will continue and the strike is kind of a means to that end more than anything and ultimately the business will revert to something that’s a little bit more bite sized and sustainable. But that’s going to be a difficult process and it’s probably going to continue after the strike is over.

“There are some things that have be rushed into production just to keep schedules going. But I don’t think we’re going back to the days of 2019 when they were just handing out overall deals, like money just flowing endlessly. It’s going to be a lot tighter.

The strike began just five months after OpenAI released ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that can write essays, hold conversations and craft stories from a handful of prompts. The new agreement does not ban all uses of AI. Both sides have acknowledged that it can be a useful tool in many aspects of filmmaking, including scriptwriting.

Under the contract, studios and production companies must disclose to writers if any material given to them has been generated by AI in full or partly. AI-generated storylines will not be regarded as “literary material”, meaning that writers will not have to compete with the emerging technology for screen credits. The companies are not barred from using AI to generate content but writers have the right to sue if their work is used to train AI.

Amy Berg, a screenwriter and showrunner, described the AI safeguards as probably the most important element of the deal. She wrote in an email on Friday: “These protections ensure that we keep authorship of everything. We can use AI as a tool, if we choose, but we cannot be forced to use it for any reason.

“AI, as we know, doesn’t create anything. It synthesizes and plagiarizes. And the phrasing of the language in this deal acknowledges that. What’s more, I have a feeling that any loopholes that the companies might seek to exploit will be quickly closed thanks to copyright law. So I’m ecstatic by what’s in here.”

Analysts shared the sense of cautious optimism. Joshua Glick, a visiting associate professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, said by phone: “There are some serious and substantial protections, in there with regards to how AI can be used, how it’s regulated and, importantly, that AI can’t write or rewrite something.

“That point about there always being a human author at the centre of credit is very important. AI can certainly serve as a tool or aid or part of the creative process but not as something that can replace or be used in such a way that marginalises or results in docked pay for a writer, which is important for a number of reasons.”

AI is still in its infancy, however, and inherently unpredictable. Under the draft contract “the parties acknowledge that the legal landscape around the use of (generative AI) is uncertain and rapidly developing”. The companies and the guild agreed to meet at least twice a year during the contract’s three-year term.

Back at the Office in Santa Monica, Patrick Burleigh, whose credits include Marvel’s Eternals and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, admitted that he already feels anxious about and competitive with AI. “It does feel like the rate at which this technology learns and advances and evolves is so fast that just inevitably we will see TV shows and films written by AI and potentially acted by it and, who knows, maybe even directed by it,” he said.

“So it feels a bit like postponing the inevitable. That’s what the pessimistic side of me feels. It’s a bit like a finger in the crack of the dam. But the safeguards that they were able to negotiate are really impressive. At least for the near future we’re OK.”

Periodic crises are a part of a film business that obeys the rules of capitalism but it has always proved resilient even as technology advances. David Gleason, whose most recent credits are Don’t Go and Tolkien, said: “The mantra in Hollywood is always: it’s a terrible time to be in business, you joined at the worst time, you should have been here 10 years ago.”

He added: “I wouldn’t say I’m sceptical. In fact it’s the opposite. I’m always optimistic. I think we’re always in a golden time. As long as you can catch a movie somewhere and as long as someone, somewhere is watching audiovisual content, that’s a good time.”