David and Goliath

“The Agents Certainly Did Not Like Being Called Crooks”: How Hollywood Writers Won a War 

After a furious, two-year struggle, the almighty talent agencies blink. Inside a twist ending. 
Writers Guild of America won its battle with the agencies
From Capitol Films/Everett Collection.

In April 2019, thousands of Hollywood writers fired their agents en masse. The move convulsed the entertainment industry. It looked like an impossible David and Goliath scenario: The Writers Guild of America had declared war on the immensely powerful talent agencies, several of which had mutated into full-blown media conglomerates over the years, backed by private-equity money. The WGA argued that these agencies—in producing their own projects and creating package deals that combined writers, actors, and directors—no longer had the best interests of their clients as their first priority. The packages, they believed, were riddled with conflicts of interest and weren’t necessarily the best deal for writers.

“This has the potential to be a really, really big bang,” one veteran TV writer told me in March that year.

Nearly two years later, the bitter struggle concluded with a plot twist: The writers have triumphed. One by one, the agencies signed on to WGA’s terms, agreeing to phase out packaging fees. William Morris Endeavor (WME), the last agency holdout, finally came to an agreement earlier this month.

“The agencies are very good at making you feel like, ‘You need me and you’ll be nothing without us,’” said Meredith Stiehm, cochair of the WGA negotiating committee and the creator of TV dramas like Cold Case and The Bridge. That can be an effective form of intimidation for insecurity-prone writers. But when Stiehm discovered that Creative Artists Agency (CAA) packaged Cold Case without her knowing it—and by this lucrative process effectively made a 94% commission rather than an agent’s standard 10%—she was furious. (CAA said in June 2019 that Stiehm’s allegations against the agency had “no merit whatsoever.”)

Frustration about agency practices began surfacing in 2014, according to WGA West executive director David Young, who was one of two actual Davids in this David and Goliath tale, along with current WGA West president David Goodman. While the union was negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and periodically wielding the threat of a strike, its members were realizing that they needed to take on their own agents.

While Goodman is a TV writer for shows like Family Guy and The Orville, Young is a Hollywood outsider. He became executive director in 2006, bringing his skills as a longtime labor organizer for garment workers and Teamsters unions. Although a small segment of high-profile Hollywood writers luxuriate in splendor, many “live a life of almost complete uncertainty,” Young noted. That’s increasingly true in this streaming-TV era, where mini-rooms and short-term gigs proliferate. “Yet the product they’re creating is a huge global success. So, whether it’s a garment worker or a construction worker or a trucker or anyone else that I’ve worked for in my career, the question is: How is the pie being divided?”

Young organized the 2007-2008 writers’ strike, which brought most TV and movie production to an expensive halt; he led WGA to the brink of another strike in 2017. But the agency battle required a different mindset. “Some of the normal things that I would think about in a union struggle were almost turned on their heads here,” he explained. “If you get four months into a strike and you can’t see the road to victory and you don’t see any movement from the other side, you’re only going to get weaker at that point because your own army is starving.”

Four months into the agency action, though, Young realized that they weren’t growing weaker. Although some 7,000 writers had fired their agents, the writers were still getting jobs. In fact, Young claimed, “we had the highest levels of employment we’ve ever had in July of 2019,” with writers finding work via their own networking skills or through the WGA’s newly launched online staffing platform. “Even though there was this tremendous psychological pressure that we were feeling, writers were working and making money. And that changes your ability to hang in there.”

Young’s straightforward style seemed to ruffle feathers. In one early negotiation session with top agency executives, Young warned them to brush up on their knowledge of RICO, a law designed to combat organized crime. It wasn’t just an idle threat: WGA soon launched a lawsuit against WME, CAA, United Talent Agency (UTA), and ICM Partners, the four agencies that dominate Hollywood, alleging that packaging deals are unlawful. David Simon, creator of series including The Wire and The Deuce, was one of eight WGA members who signed on to the suit (which was eventually dropped). Simon wrote in 2019 that packaging “is theft. It is fraud. In the hands of the right U.S. attorney, it might even be prima facie evidence of decades of racketeering.”

“The agents certainly did not like being called crooks,” Goodman recalled of that meeting. According to him, one agent complained, “My kids read that in the trades and I have to explain to them!”

UTA copresident Jay Sures told The Hollywood Reporter in June 2019, “David [Young]’s history is to go straight to the fight and to embrace scorched earth and chaos as effective means to an end.”

For his part, Young deflected such critiques as anti-union propaganda. “If you can get people to believe that I’m unreasonable or get me to believe that I’m being unreasonable, it’s a bargaining strategy, right? ‘You’re being too harsh and you’re trying for too much, and you should scale this all back.’ If the earth was scorched in this case, it’s because the agencies forced us. They would not listen. They were not reasonable…. What was at stake meant so much to them that they were going to have to be dragged and bludgeoned to a fair solution.”

No one knew exactly how the standoff would play out, least of all those who initiated it. “It took longer and was more difficult, honestly, than I predicted,” Young conceded. “I’ve been in labor wars for 35 years now, but I’d never done anything like this.”

How the dispute would affect writers’ careers was also unclear—and even in the aftermath, that remains cloudy. Many writers had close, long-standing relationships with their agents and felt bereft at the thought of losing someone who championed and steered them. Others felt newly liberated.

“I heard from people that this was the best thing that ever happened to their career because the gatekeepers were gone,” said Cathryn Humphris, a TV writer on shows such as NCIS: New Orleans and Dare Me, who served as a WGA captain during the agency action. “For other people, it was just the polar opposite: ‘My agents fought for me and now that I don’t have those people anymore, I’m not staffing.’”

A number of writers have decided not to rehire their agents, at least for the time being. The WGA doesn’t yet know how many members are choosing this path.  Humphris herself is among them and says that she enjoys being able to “just pick up the phone and call producers that I’ve known.” Others complain, Humphris pointed out, that agencies have used the WGA action as an excuse to clean house and rid themselves of lower-earning clients, including those who are in the later stage of a career. Those writers, Humphris said, “were just trying to make it through this action and hoping they could go back to their agents, and that didn’t work out for everybody.”

David Young said the WGA will be able to track writers’ income far better now than ever before. Thanks to the new agreement, “we’re now getting real-time information from the agencies on every deal they make for our members.… That’s a completely different ball game for us in terms of being able to say two years from now, ‘Okay, how much has it helped us? Were we right that this needed to be done?’”

Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin is among those worried about how this new world without packaging deals will impact lower-level TV writers’ income. “With the money that these studios used to be shipping to the agencies, are they going to be shipping it to the writers?” he asked recently on screenwriting podcast Scriptnotes. Mazin was initially part of a slate of candidates who ran for WGA office in the summer of 2019 during a deeply contentious internal election. It was a moment when talks with the agencies seemed to have stalled and frustrations simmered, with words like “scab” and “toady” being flung around.

Those who stood firmly behind David Goodman worried that disunity would undermine the negotiations with the agencies. In the end, Goodman was reelected with 77% of the vote, per Deadline, along with the rest of his slate. But some raw feelings remain on both sides, leaking out on Twitter in a recent comment by a board member (now deleted) cursing those who had run against the current board as “fucking quislings who tried to kill us.”

Ayelet Waldman, an author and television writer who ran as a challenger in that election, was stunned. “I think this is a great moment for the WGA,” Waldman said. “That great moment was soured for me when a member of that leadership chose that moment to tell those of us who ran in a free and fair election that we were quislings who tried to kill the WGA.” She was left feeling that the union “couldn’t tolerate dissent because dissent felt like a betrayal.”

Young shrugged off the acrimony, chalking it up to “writer-intellectuals with extremely strong convictions.… And when writers disagree, the pen is mightier than the sword.” Humphris compared the internal dynamic to the Democratic Party: “You have Joe Manchin and you have AOC and they’re all under the same tent and you can’t tell Joe or AOC to stop believing or saying what they believe, as long as they’re not hurting another person.”

For the last two years, the WGA focused much of its resources and members’ attention on the Herculean battle against the agencies. Now that it’s been won, the guild is going to have to figure out what it needs to grapple with next.

One looming struggle is how to address sexual harassment, which remains deeply embedded within Hollywood’s writers rooms. “Basically every woman writer that I know that’s worked in this business for more than five years has dealt with harassment,” Humphris said, adding: “We all know people where they spoke out about a situation and then they couldn’t get another job because the wagons were circled.”

Because the WGA represents every level of writer from showrunner on down, the membership includes perpetrators of harassment as well as victims. The recent stream of people speaking out about Joss Whedon’s alleged misbehavior on the sets of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel included a few writers who felt they were in a position to speak up. Does the guild have the will to hold powerful members accountable, and to address inequality?

Young acknowledged the challenge. He had just been on a call that morning with one of the major studios, “talking about how we are going to work together cooperatively to address issues of gender and racial fairness. I think there’s quite a bit of an appetite on the studio side and we have to take advantage of that and work with them.” Although it’s “politically dicier” than standard union organizing, Young said, “it’s our responsibility and we have to take it on.”

Over the last few years, the entertainment industry continued to consolidate, and streaming further entrenched itself. That almost certainly means more financial clashes lie ahead.

“It’s sort of amazing that even though this is still just about writing the story and having someone film it, this business just goes through these incredibly rapid changes,” Young mused. Writers are now “dealing with these huge corporate conglomerates. They’re extremely powerful and extremely well-organized. They bargain as one, and they’ve got a grip on global distribution. There are big challenges on the horizon around that, and I think we all know it.”

The writers who devoted themselves to battling the agencies for the last two years might like to take a breather—or even get back to writing full time. But Young is realistic about the situation.

“At the end of the day, a union is a fighting organization that really doesn’t want to have a fight,” he says. The trick is to make sure the corporate opponents know that if it comes down to it, “we’re capable of defending the ideals of the union. So we always have to be prepared to do that. My guess is that we’ll have to be prepared in the next few years to do that again.”

This article has been updated.

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair

— Evan Rachel Wood and Other Women Make Allegations of Abuse Against Marilyn Manson
The Bachelor Has a Bachelor Problem
Gina Carano Strikes Back After Star Wars Implosion
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Star Charisma Carpenter Speaks Out About Joss Whedon
— First Look at Jared Leto’s Eerie Joker in Zack Snyder’s Justice League
— Oscars 2021: The Best Bets for Best Picture
— For the latest awards-season news, sign up to receive text message updates from the Little Gold Men podcast hosts
— From the Archive: Mia Farrow’s Story

— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.