Dispatches From WGA Picket Lines Day 2: ‘SNL’s Bowen Yang, Krista Vernoff, Michael Schur, Cynthia Nixon Among Those Marching To Support Writers Strike
03.05.2023 - 20:27
/ deadline.com
The Writers Guild of America began its second day of strike action Wednesday, picketing several sites throughout Los Angeles beginning at 9 a.m. as well as at Netflix headquarters in New York City. In L.A., protests were beginning to wrap as scheduled by around 1 p.m.; they will resume Thursday morning.
Check back as we update from the field.
At Netflix headquarters in downtown Manhattan, Saturday Night Live cast star and staff writer Bowen Yang walked half-hidden behind a picket sign reading “Witty Sign TK,” tucked in among hundreds of demonstrators streaming past the East Coast corporate offices of both Netflix and Warner Bros Discovery on the second day of the WGA strike.
Yang, 32, is a member of both WGA and SAG-AFTRA, and was marching in the midst of a standoff with studios that he called “existential.”
“Not only for writers in the industry,” Yang added, “but everybody.”
“We have to redefine the way that compensation just works in general,” he said, “and that’s why you have other guilds negotiating with the Alliance and studios as well. Because it’s all been broken for a very long time.”
In preparing for an open-ended work stoppage — his first as a union member — Yang said he researched the last strike and found “echos of that time” carrying into the new dispute. “We’re trying not to get burned again in terms of an emerging technology compromising value or any kind of compensatory structure,” he said.
SNL was heading into the final three episodes of Season 48 when the strike started, shutting down production on the NBC late-night show. “We were in the homestretch and that’s what kind of makes it really demoralizing,” Yang said.
RELATED: Deadline’s Full Strike Coverage
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