WGA Chiefs Ellen Stutzman & Meredith Stiehm Q&A: “Transformative” Deal For Hollywood, Solidarity With SAG-AFTRA & The AMPTP’s “Failed Process”
27.09.2023 - 04:49
/ deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: “This strike was way too long, because the companies took so long to get serious,” WGA West President Meredith Stiehm declared tonight of the nearly 150 days the Writers Guild was out on the picket lines before a tentative agreement was reached on September 24.
“I feel sad and pained that it took this long because when we got serious, we got it done in a reasonable amount of time. So much was wasted and lost by just not acting earlier,” the guild leader added, with WGA West chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman by her side.
Now, the end is nigh. The nearly five-month Writers Guild strike will meet its official end at 12:01 a.m. PT, with the WGA leadership approving the tentative deal struck on Sunday with the AMPTP.
“I would just say member power is what brought this deal in,” Stutzman said of the writers who held out as times got tougher — and the actors who joined them when 160,000-strong SAG-AFTRA went out on strike in mid-July for their first joint strike since 1960.
It’s been a wild half-year or so in Hollywood and the showbiz world, beginning with saber-rattling about a WGA strike and then the writers going on strike May 2. Studios and streamers on both coasts were picketed for more than two months before SAG-AFTRA moved to join writers on the lines. Since then, there had been a steady stream of rhetoric, picketing and finger-pointing as the studios and steamers wouldn’t even agree to meet with the WGA for nearly three months.
When they finally did sit down at the table on August 4, the rival sides couldn’t even agree to resume negotiations.
Then, after the studios and streamers mounted a failed campaign to go around guild leadership, came some welcome news.
On September 14, the WGA and AMPTP at last