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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. First, this morning for those of you who are listening on AM 820 just now, you just heard the last minutes of The Takeaway, which does end its 15-year run on the station today. Just want also to say goodbye to that show from our show, that show, which did a lot of great stuff and acknowledged the many really great producers, as well as Melissa Harris-Perry, and other OnAir people who've been contributing to it. I hope you all find success going forward. A big thank you from me and this show's team to our colleagues for all you've contributed to the station and to the nation. Thank you.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the media, we acknowledge that today marks one month since the start of the writers' strike against TV and movie producers. Everything I'm reading says the two sides are far from agreement and the strike could go on for months. TV and film actors are in the middle of a strike authorization vote over many of the same issues regarding how to get paid in the new economy of the streaming platforms rather than old-style network or cable TV or in theaters, that is theater-only movies. AI is an issue, short seasons on streaming shows are an issue, and more.

At this one-month mark, we'll talk in a minute with Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, Vice President of film, television, and streaming for the Writers Guild of America East. According to her IMDB page among many other things, Lisa has developed pilots for Netflix, ABC, NBC, CBS, ANE, and Warner Brothers. She has served as co-executive producer on NBC's The End Game, and a consulting producer on NBC's Law & Order SVU. Here is the star of the show, Mariska Hargitay from Law & Order SVU making an appearance recently in support of this strike.

Mariska Hargitay: Hi, I'm Mariska Hargitay here supporting the WGA and the writer's strike. Let's pay them fair wages. I've been on SVU for 25 years and I wouldn't be here without them. Deeply grateful for their creativity and they deserve to be compensated fairly. Thank you so much. Let's get this done.

Brian Lehrer: Mariska Hargitay there, and with us now, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, vice president of film, television, and streaming for the Writers Guild of America East. Lisa, thanks for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Thanks for having me. Mariska said it better than I could have.

Brian Lehrer: Well, from what I've read in the press, you're still very far apart on key issues. Would you put it that way?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: I think that that's the case. Just to back up for your listeners, we're on strike against our studio employers for fair wages and decent working conditions. We're 11,500 TV and screenwriters. We create the over 4,000 TV episodes and movies you enjoy every year. Our studio employers make billions in revenue and profits off of our creativity and labor, and all we ask is that we're fairly compensated for that work and they do not see things the same way.

Brian Lehrer: An article on forbes.com this week identifies three key obstacles to a deal, and I thought we might talk about some of those, and you can add others, of course, if this isn't a complete list. One is that the union wants the streaming services to open their books on viewership and the actual value of a piece of content on their services. Seems like a basic fact and a contract negotiation, some basic transparency about what the profits are that you're all trying to split up fairly, but they won't even give you a counter proposal on this. They want that viewership data to remain secret, or what they call proprietary. That's from Forbes. Would you describe the issue that way?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: I think that that is certainly an issue. I don't know that it is a key issue. Certainly, we are interested in the data behind streaming, and the companies have kept those extremely close to the vest, although we do think that that might have to change soon as the streaming companies move to ad-supported options. Advertisers need to know how many eyeballs are watching your shows. They will demand to know those numbers before they hand over their money. Of course, writers and other people who work on those shows have been asking for that information for a long time, but perhaps the advertisers and their ad-supported tier are going to force that issue.

Brian Lehrer: Accurate or inaccurate to say the viewership data matter because writers get paid residuals based in part on how many people watch those streaming shows.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Well, that's the classic model if you're talking about broadcast and cable. However, streaming has always claimed that they cannot share that information. Whether you write on a Bridgeton, which has billions of views worldwide, or perhaps a show, and I won't shame anybody by naming any, but a show that has a few, a handful of viewers including your grandma, on the same streaming network, you get paid the same in residuals. In any case, across the board, it's [unintelligible 00:05:26].

We have writers receiving checks for pennies, actual pennies, and this isn't just writers too. I just talked to an actress on Orange Is the New Black, who was a key player and was on that show for its entire run and just received a residual from Netflix for 27 cents; cents, not dollars. This is a problem across the board, and we do think that streamers are going to have to tell us in some way what their data is so that we can fix that.

Brian Lehrer: Now listeners, striking writers, call up and make your case. We invite your voices, 212-433-W-N-Y-C, 212-433-9692. Make your case. Tell us how you're surviving the strike without your income, or at least your usual income, or anything else you want to say, 212-433-W-N-Y-C. Anyone else in the TV or film or streaming industry, you too, or anyone with a question about the writer strike now at one-month-old, 212-433-W-N-Y-C, 212-433-9692 for Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, Vice President of the Union for Film, TV, and streaming for the Writers Guild East. You can also text your comment or question to that same number.

Lisa, just to give people a little lay of the land of the people situation here, you are the Vice President for Film, TV, and streaming for Writers Guild East. Does that mean you represent people in New York but not explicitly in Hollywood jobs per se?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: That's correct. The Writers Guild of America has two entities, the West and the East. We are sister guilds, but we are not one in the same. The division is the Mississippi River. If you live east of the Mississippi and work in film and television, you belong to Writers Guild East, and west of that belongs to Writers Guild West.

West as you might imagine because LA is a company town is far bigger than the East. However, we are small but mighty. We are going hard at our strikes and pickets. I have many friends in the West who say that their pickets are tame and lovely affairs compared to here in New York City where we go hard on the streets of New York.

Brian Lehrer: That's what Yankees fans say about the people who show up at Dodger Stadium. Yes, they show up, but they don't really make all that noise or care all that much. How many strikers do we have here in the New York area, roughly, if you know the number?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Well, I'll tell you that our membership is over 6,000, but the Writers Guild of America East also includes journalists, and we have grown in that area with online media journalists as well as broadcast news journalists we have had since our inception.

The number of film and television members are numbers in the thousands. There are about 2000 who are covered by this contract. However, our numbers are enormously swollen by our sister unions in the entertainment guild, in the entertainment industry, not just in the entertainment industry, but really all union members are showing up on our picket lines.

We have SAG-AFTRA actors, we have Actors' Equity, we have Teamsters, we have IATSE workers. Those are the members of the crew who work on television and film production. We have plumbers. We have electrical workers. We have the DGA. We have really every union of every stripe is turning up in support of us and it's really been overwhelming and gratifying to see.

Brian Lehrer: I guess the streaming services could say the economics of making TV shows has changed. They compete most effectively by making these short seasons, not October to May like the old TV network shows, and that's just the new nature of the business, so you can't expect to get paid for episodes that aren't being produced just as their revenue is limited to the number of shows in a season. This whole issue of short seasons or what you call mini rooms, maybe that would be their argument a little bit from their perspective. What's yours?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Sure. Mini rooms are a studio construct. They decided early on that if they were, for instance, producing a 10-episode season, that they don't need writers on staff for, say, 40-plus weeks as we are on a show like Law and Order which has 22 to 24 episodes per season. That sounds reasonable.

However, the amount of time that they have compressed the writer's room into is unconscionable. Writers, especially the showrunners who create the shows, are just breaking themselves in order to produce the quality that viewers want and demand. As a viewer, you might watch a streaming show and think, "Well, that's fantastic. This is better than anything I could watch on NBC or ABC," without understanding that a tiny amount of people have killed themselves to create this product.

It's not just writers, of course, it's crew as well, and actors and everybody who is working way, way too hard under really unconscionable conditions in order to create this product, and it just can't go on.

Brian Lehrer: I guess the devil's advocate question would be if you're hiring an hourly contractor of any kind in your life, a company to renovate your home, or a printing service for your office, whatever, and you have a four-week job, but they say, no, we'll only do it if we get eight weeks of pay, is that the same thing and would you bark at that as an employer?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: I don't think it's the same thing. I think that you pay for quality and isn't it true that if you hire a good contractor and they take longer-- Listen, who in New York or New Jersey has ever hired a contractor for a four-week job and had it be a four-week job? It's always longer, right? If you want a good product, then you should pay your people appropriately.

By the way, I think every worker in America deserves this kind of consideration when they're being hired for work. We all deserve fair pay and decent working conditions so, no, I don't think that it's too big of an ask that we be paid fairly for creating the only product that these companies sell.

Companies like Netflix and companies like the linear broadcast channels, entertainment is all they do. We create the one product that they sell, and all we're asking is for a fair share of that enormous pie, which, by the way, they are making money handover fist on our product that we sell, but our pay is going down. That doesn't make sense.

Brian Lehrer: I read that while the producers won't pay the writers for the extra weeks, the writers are still obligated to work exclusively for the studio you're contracted with. Is it that in these downtime periods between shows, you're not allowed to take gigs from other producers because they're considered competitors even though you're not getting paid by your primary one?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: That's something called span. We have controlled that to some extent but, yes, if you, for instance, are contracted to work on a show and there's a long lag period in between the writer's rooms seasons, then sometimes yes, you are not able to take other work during that time. That's become increasingly difficult for our writers because again, these mini rooms are so short and they might be working for, say, 10 weeks at a time. Sometimes it's even less. I once worked in a three-week mini room and they have to patch together these jobs in order to make their year. Whereas previously they could be employed for, like I said, 40-plus weeks on a show like Law and Order.

That's a full year's pay. That's enough to cover your income for a year. If you're patching together from job to job to job, it becomes increasingly difficult for the writer to survive.

Brian Lehrer: On this transparency question since they won't share their real viewer data, Forbes also says the producers are struggling to show Wall Street a measurable formula to show success on a streaming platform, that they tend to show the number of subscribers, but that isn't specific enough. Forbes describes investors as skittish about the streaming services from a Wall Street level. Do you, the workers, and the Wall Street investors maybe ironically share this issue? Are they helping pressure the producers out of their self-interest to be more transparent?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Well, I think so. Isn't it interesting? I think just yesterday Netflix shareholders voted against the gigantic executive pay package that Netflix proposed. I do think that shareholders are becoming more aware that the streamers are perhaps playing with funny numbers. Now, these are companies that are used to playing a shell game with their profits.

Look, we have a history of big hit movies and television shows that somehow show no profit at the end so that they don't have to pay out the backend points to the creators and other people involved. Somehow The Titanic never turned a profit. That seems funny, doesn't it?

The streamers yes, have been hiding these numbers for a long time and perhaps that is one reason that they don't want to share the data is that they aren't showing the growth of the profit that they are claiming. I don't know but I do feel that shareholder pressure is helping.

We have the New York State Comptroller who of course controls one of the largest pension funds in the country, Thomas Napoli, who has written to the studios demanding that they give workers a fair pay and end the strike. Hopefully, that kind of pressure will continue to help.

Brian Lehrer: Does government have any more of a role to play than that? I noticed that Senator Gillibrand, for example, was out at a WGA picket line.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Senator Gillibrand has been a great ally to us. I had coffee with her before that speech that she made that really riled up hundreds of our members who were in Times Square demanding a fair wage. She is a great supporter of working people and she had some great, very specific advice for us. She was like, you shouldn't demand any less than $10,000 a week, which I don't know that we can follow that.

She, I think, has great support and empathy for working people like many of our New York and New Jersey and Connecticut and California-based politicians do. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez has sent food and water to our picket lines. We're getting a great deal of support from our friends in DC.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking about the Writers Guild Strike at one month with Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, vice president of film, television, and streaming for the Writers Guild of America, East. 212-433-W-N-Y-C. Elijah in Brooklyn, a WGA East member, you're on WNYC. Hi, Elijah.

Elijah: Hi, there. I am a WGA East member, though because I am a documentary film producer, I am not part of the striking sector. I just wanted to say that as documentary filmmakers, nonfiction filmmakers, it's really important that we are in solidarity with WGA writers because it's really a race to the bottom by the networks. We can't be in competition with each other. It's really important that we be in solidarity with each other.

It's been really exciting to see other documentary filmmakers and producers on the picket line and making statements in solidarity, whether that's from the Documentary Producers Alliance and others. It's really important for our livelihoods and our sustainability of our careers across the media industry. Just thank you for all the work that WGA is doing.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to say anything to that?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for your solidarity. We greatly appreciate it. As you know Elijah, non-fiction members are very small but we hope growing sector of our guild, it's extremely difficult to organize in non-fiction, but our guild has been trying to do that for over a decade now. We have had recent successes including organizing Alex Gibney's company and others. We hope that shop by shop, we will begin to organize on your sector too, and hopefully give you the protections that film and television writers on the scripted side enjoy. Thank you so much for your solidarity,

Brian Lehrer: Elijah, thank you for your call. Here's a question that came in via text. Listener writes, "I may be naive, but I'm stuck on the question, why wasn't there a fair residual agreement when the streaming platform started? Is it that their success was unpredictable?"

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: We were able to gain jurisdiction in what we just called the internet. We weren't calling it streaming back then, due to our previous strike in 2007 and 2008. That turned out to be an absolutely prescient and necessary get on our end. We did not know what streaming would become, that's true, and the residual formula is not nearly adequate. I think that yes, part of it is the massive boom in that sector. We are adjusting to that.

We were not able to address it adequately in the previous negotiations when we could have because it was 2020 and at the very start of the pandemic. We, the guilds and the studios, decided that we would focus on other things, assuring up our health and pension plans. We did not delve into the issue of streaming residuals at that time.

Now it is long past due, and so we are trying to make up ground. That's partly what's so important about this strike is that we're not asking for more. We're asking for what we've lost. We have lost ground over the past 10 years by not having these residuals in place and other fair pay measures in place. All we're asking for is some portion of what we have lost.

Brian Lehrer: On the business model, streaming services don't generally have commercials. The episodes are uninterrupted by ads. Viewers pay directly. Unlike old-style tv, cable has both commercials and subscriber fees. Is free TV with commercials better economically for the writers and others who work on the shows, or is that irrelevant?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: It's better, without a doubt. The broadcast model paid television writers a living wage. We were able to make money through a few different factors. One is the length of the season because many of the shows that we worked for would have year-long seasons where they produced 22 to 24 episodes or even more, and so we would be paid and employed for all of that.

We also received residuals that were calculated in an extremely fair formula for us. TV writers in the years past were able to sustain middle-class lifestyles. Absolutely, that has been the better model.

What's interesting though is that streamers are moving to that model. They're introducing the ad-supported tiers where you can watch Hulu with some ads and pay a little less. We're going back to the old TV model. I do think that it was a mistake on the studio side to jump onto this streaming bandwagon and hope that it would work out in the end.

Importantly, they approved these massive mergers for which they're now deep in debt, and they're having to make some major cost-cutting moves because of a decision that they made earlier on regarding mergers. We do think that the old model worked, and we don't know why they broke what wasn't broken.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, Vice President of film, television, and streaming for the Writers Guild of America East as the writers' strike turns one month old today.

Lisa, you know what's happening? I'm looking at our caller board. Members of other related unions are calling in to talk about the effects of the new business models and maybe the strike itself on other aspects of the industry. Gary in Accord from the Directors Guild, we see you. Dylan in Little Ferry from the Stagehands Union, we see you. We'll take your calls when we come back, and hear from Mark Ruffalo. Stay with us.

Mark Ruffalo: Hey, everybody. Mark Ruffalo here at the WGA strike showing solidarity with our brothers and sisters from the Writers Guild asking the Directors Guild to join us, and soon the SAG Guild to be with us. We have to get our votes in before June 5th to authorize the strike from the actors. The board has already authorized the strike. Now we get the actors to vote yes for a strike. The stakes are so high. It's AI, it's streaming, it's the future. We need to fight this now or lose forever. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Mark Ruffalo out there supporting the writers. More in a minute.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, Vice President of film television and streaming for the Writers Guild of America East as the strike enters its second month today. Gary in Accord, New York, you're on WNYC. Hi Gary.

Gary Accord: Hi, Brian. Hi, Lisa. Very happy to be here. Brian, love your show. Been listening for years. You're a national treasurer. I'm a member of the DVA and I made a lot of movies, and most people don't realize that streaming is just at the beginning, at the infancy of its reach around the globe. Most of the revenues coming from North America, a little bit of Europe, some South America, Asia hasn't really been over-- it's not really implanted as much, and the world is a much bigger market.

There's always been a world market, but it's been segmented by the way distribution channels were working. Now, it's wide open. You're talking millions and millions. India has 800 million users. There's many people that now-- and people in Asia tend to watch a lot of things right on their cell phones. You put a good set of headphones on and you basically get a good feeling. You're close to the screen and you feel-- they watch it that way. There's everybody with a cell phone in their pocket is a movie theater, and so there's [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. You're going to make the point that there's tremendous profit or a potential profit.

Gary Accord: Absolutely, the revenue, and it's also a system that's just building itself out right now. Right now, I have a movie that's going to out through YouTube. It's not even the studios in that respect, but they're going to expand the YouTube reach to 62 more countries. It's in process now. It's building out. We've got to set these terms now because there's a lot of money involved, and they're cutting all the unions and all the people. My wife's an actor. I've seen these one-penny checks. It is there.

There's a lot of other things that Lisa's talking about inside things with the Writers Guild that most people wouldn't understand, and all the guilds. As a Director's Guild member, I'm on set 16 hours a day regardless of the Guild's wealth. I'm doing something all day long. It's hard work making movies. It may be technological business in its way, but it's still a handmade form. Takes people and their hands to get it done.

AI is posing interesting things for us as well. Again, AI is a duet sword. Sometimes it's got great things for productivity, but on the other side, it also can chop jobs up and make it difficult for people. It's important people understand this is a big change. It's a seminal moment in the history of business and in history of the movie and entertainment business.

As soon as it came in, we shifted and was Negroponte from my MIT Media Lab said back in the '80s, "We are shifting now in our technological advances from atoms building cars and boats and planes to bits." That's a major change and that's why the world is spinning as fast as it is right now because we're moving at the speed of light. I'm not shipping five cans of 35-millimeter film anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Labor relations have to keep up. Gary, thank you for putting all that on the table so clearly. Lisa, anything you want to say? I have a follow-up question to Gary's description of the environment. Anything you want to say directly in response to him?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Yes, sure. Thanks, Gary. We know that the Director's Guild is currently wrapping up their period of negotiations with the same group, the AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, that we did. We dearly hope that you folks are able to get a strong deal, but we stand with you.

I think that that is something that people who are watching this whole issue are fascinated by, is that the unions this time are standing shoulder to shoulder. That wasn't the case before. In our previous strike in 2007 and 2008. The WGA was not particularly aligned with the DGA. SAG AFTRA stood with us, but now this time, it's really I think, taken everyone by a little it of surprise how aligned our interests are now. We hope that that can only work in the favor of all of us.

We all have issues with streaming. We all have issues with working conditions. We all have issues with AI, and we hope that the studio's hear that we are all standing together on this.

Brian Lehrer: We played the Mark Ruffalo clip before the break. Obviously, he's an actor. I'm guessing that he's a member of SAG AFTRA, but I don't know. I see that my colleagues in the performers Union SAG AFTRA are holding a strike authorization vote of their own. I say my colleagues because full disclosure, I'm in a SAG AFTRA job as are many at WNYC but a different division, so the vote would not be to authorize a strike at radio and television station. Let me be clear about that.

Yes, at the same movie and TV show production companies that you are on strike against at the Writer's Guild, the SAG AFTRA contract expires June 30th, which is the earliest the strike would occur if they don't have an agreement. How consequential do you think the SAG AFTRA talks are to the success of your strike, and how related?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: We think it's massive, and it's extremely intertwined. SAG AFTRA has over 160,000 members. DGA has 19,000 members. We are smaller. We have 11,500 who are covered under this particular contract. Obviously, the more we have in numbers standing together, the stronger we are. SAG AFTRA as the actors' union plays a tremendous role. You can't shoot a movie or a TV show without your actors. You can try to do it without your writers if you have scripts, even though we don't recommend that. It's not a good pattern. It's not a good idea. We don't recommend doing it without directors, but you really can't do it without actors because who are you going to shoot?

We know that the studios are extremely nervous about this. We know that they did not expect SAG AFTRA to go in before their negotiations with a strike authorization vote. We're hearing from our actor friends and from our friends who run SAG AFTRA that the member vote is coming in very strong. As Mark Ruffalo said, they have until June 5th to make their vote. I hope that anybody listening on this, and I imagine they're a great deal of SAG AFTRA members who listen to your show because we have so many actors in New York who work in commercials, who work in television and movies, as well as in theater, we hope that they give their union the power to go in and fight hard for a strong contract.

Brian Lehrer: From another corner of the industry, Dylan in Little Ferry, you're on WNYC. Hi, Dylan.

Dylan: Hey, how's it going? I'm a member of IATSE 632. That's the North Jersey Stage Hands. It's like Bergen County [unintelligible 00:30:35]. We handle the Taylor Swift Show last weekend. A lot of our members are local 52 members. Local 52 is IATSE, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. What we do for 52 is that we take the tri-state area and we handle all of the theatrical film, TV, stuff like that.

A lot of our members, a lot of their money comes in during the summer, so some of the slowdown has been affecting their bottom line and their ability to exist as stagehands. We've been trying to absorb a lot of that business and a lot of the membership to come back with our stadium shows in the summer, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, all that stuff. Once the summer goes, it gets slow around here, and the longer the strike goes on, a lot of our members will be disgruntled.

Right now, we're not authorized for strike, but the common sentiment is that we're behind this and eventually we're going to get disgruntled enough to make our international eBoard move. That's where we're at. It's a lot of effort, but we're really trying to help people get work out here.

Brian Lehrer: Dylan, thank you very much. I don't know if the studio executives are listening. You're of course invited to call in too, and I know that it's an unrepresented sample of people that calls a talk show on anything. Lisa, it is interesting that people from so many other corners of the industry are calling in to support.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: It is, and Dylan, I want to thank you personally. I wish I could reach through this phone line and give you a hug, or at least a fist bump. We are so grateful to IATSE here in New York, IATSE 52 in particular. Without IATSE, our strike would not be nearly as effective as we believe that it is right now.

What Dylan is referring to is that, particularly in WGA East, we are targeting productions to try to shut them down or at least disrupt them.

That means that our picketers are going to locations including sound stages, but also any exterior shoots, interior shoots, and we are picketing so that the Teamsters do not cross the picket line. The Teamsters had said from the start that they would not cross a picket line if it exists.

I don't know if your listeners know this, but a picket line can consist of two people. Sometimes we have had two, three people on the picket line at 2:00 AM out in Green Point, Brooklyn out in Maplewood, out in Jersey City in the Bronx, and they have effectively shut down production on shows, including Billions and Evil and Severance and Daredevil.

The positive part of that is that we are making our financial impact on the studios. Obviously, if we shut down production, it hurts the studios because it costs them money. A rule of thumb is that typically a day of production costs $250,000. We want to be hitting the studios where it hurts in their pocketbooks so that they will come back to the table soon and help us end this strike.

However, there is a human toll, and we recognize that it is a cost to our IATSE friends because some of them, if they show up to work and we're there at the picket line, they won't cross and they miss out on a day of pay.

Sometimes they miss out on a week of pay, sometimes an entire job goes away. That is a massive sacrifice. We are trying to work with the leaders of Teamster and IATSE, as well as the crew members on the ground to work out things.

For instance, I was at a shoot in Maplewood, New Jersey, and we figured out, we worked with a shop steward so that IATSE members could go in, they could clock in for the day and get paid, but then the Teamsters who would come in later, would not cross our picket line, so then we are still effectively disrupting the production for that day. It was American Horror Story that was shooting there, and helping our crew member friends get paid nonetheless.

However, we do recognize that as the summer goes and as the pipeline starts to shut, these jobs are going to start to dwindle. That does affect our negotiations in that it hopefully will help the studios come back to the table sooner and end the strike. That is our goal. We want the strike to end. Nobody wants to be on strike. Everybody wants to be working. We want our friends to be working. We want to be working. We want to be back at the table, but it's up to the studios to do that.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to keep calling listeners for a few minutes more on this because we have so many interesting questions and stories coming in for Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, Vice President of film, television, and streaming for the Writers Guild of America East as the writer strike against the TV and film producers turns one month today. Here's Jim and Albuquerque, who might be the kind of person you were just talking about, Lisa, and this may be a little bit of pushback. Jim, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jim: Hello. Thank you Lisa, and thank you, Brian. I'm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'm from New York. I'm out here working, I was working on a show, big TV show out here. First, let me say I support the WGA strike 100%. We were on a TV show that we were told was strike-proof, meaning all the scripts were written already, so in theory anyway, there were no writers writing new scripts. Picketers were brought in from LA and picketed many days and shut the show down.

I have to say, there was not a unified wall on the crew as far as whether or not to cross the picket line. There was a lot of hand ringing about this. There were some people that were willing to cross the picket line because what it meant was 300 people were thrown out of work, and a lot of those people are below the line people who live paycheck to paycheck, and it meant they were going to be out of work the rest of the summer.

I just want to know what you would say to those people. You just talked about people having to make a lot of sacrifice, and I just want to hear what you would say to those people who were put out of work in support of the WGA. I'd also like to hear if the WGA would ever go on strike in support of IATSE if IATSE ever went on strike.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Thank you, Jim, for that, and I feel that. I really do. We recognize that we are costing other union members work. We are costing them pay. We're costing them career opportunities. We live paycheck to paycheck too. I think there's a common misperception that writers, because we're above the line and that's industry jargon for your listeners. It's an actual line in the budget. Doesn't mean anyone's better or worse. It's just where the expenses fall. This is an existential crisis for us, and I know you understand that. I'm not saying that you don't.

By disrupting production, we strongly feel that we can end the strike sooner. Once we end the strike, we can get back to work and start filling the pipeline again. This is, of course it's personal to you because you lost this job on which you were counting for pay, but those jobs will go away without us. Without us, the pipeline will dry up. Whether it's now or three months from now, those jobs will go away because we're not working. We want to end the strike as soon as possible.

This is the strongest message that we can deliver to the studios, to tell them, "Get back to the table." Remember that it's not us doing this. This is the studios. They are the ones who are choosing not to negotiate with us at this time. They give excuses like, "Oh, we're with the directors right now and next week you have to negotiate with the actors." That is simply incorrect. They can negotiate with multiple unions at the same time if they wanted to.

Carol Lombardini, who is the head of the AMPTP, the head of the Studio Alliance, can call today and have us back into their offices in Sherman Oaks, and we can negotiate a fair deal, and then everybody can get back to work. I appreciate your sacrifice.

To address your question about whether the WGA stands with the IATSE, our leadership has already said that we have always stood with IATSE. You folks had a strike authorization vote, I believe a year ago. It did not come to a strike. I hope and pray that you folks get a great deal next time. I hope that we can set a pattern for you. If we are able to get a strong contract, we believe it'll benefit the entire entertainment industry.

Brian Lehrer: On this question of the studios not even sitting down with you at the bargaining table right now. Why would that be in their interest? What's your understanding of their tactic in that respect, if you don't take it as genuine that they say they don't have time because they're doing all these other contract negotiations? They're losing money hand over fist, presumably by not being in production. What's their tactic for delaying even talking about a final deal?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: I'm going to start with a snarky response. A producer told me that he heard that all the yacht rentals were taken up for the month of June because studio executives had long expected the writers to strike and we're planning on taking a holiday for the month of June. That's my snarky response.

The real response does come down to the bottom line. These companies are led by CEOs who respond to shareholders and their belief is that shareholders need to see profit growth. Not just profit, profit growth year after year. Because of these ill-advised mergers that they all participated in over the past few years, they are all in debt and desperate to show profit growth.

The way that they can do that if revenues aren't actually growing so fast is by cutting expenses. That is absolutely the main goal, the only goal for the executives that we were in negotiation with is to cut their bottom line. They believe that by not negotiating with us by stonewalling us while they go in with the directors and the actors and try to set a pattern with those other unions, that then they can portray the writers as unreasonable, our asks are unreasonable. Look at those crazy writers out there still striking when we've got to deal with the directors and we've got to deal with the actors.

Only this year, we think it won't work. We stand with the directors, we stand with the actors. We all have the same issues and we believe that we can all fight together for a better deal.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, where does AI, which a few people have mentioned but we haven't really talked about it, come into these negotiations? What do the studios want and what does the union want? One side could say, hey, we're a creator company and we're not allowed to use a tool of technology that's available to us to make the best thing we feel we can make or not make a product as efficiently as we can make it. What's your take on AI in these negotiations?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: The Writers Guild fight to take on AI is so important not just to writers, but really to the whole industry. The studios would and could soon use AI to replace writers, voice actors. They already have with voice actors and so many other jobs. We have three asks when it comes to AI. One is that AI cannot write scripts. Two is that AI can't create source material or what we call IP, the intellectual property off of which so many scripts are based. Three is that AI cannot train by using our material. AI, to be clear, is a plagiarism machine. It is gobbling up our work, our creativity, and spitting it out as something similar.

The studios' response was that they rejected all of our proposals, they refused to even negotiate on AI. Their actual words were, "We don't want to preemptively deny something that might be of use to us, a technology that might be of use to us in the future." They absolutely are looking at ways to cut costs using AI.

One of those ways might be, for instance, to have AI spit out a very bad script that then they hire a screenwriter, say, to come in and do a "rewrite" on at a much lower rate. A rewrite costs less than an original script. They would bring in an actual human to make that script decent and claim that the original source came from a machine and so therefore the writer is not entitled to any compensation on that.

We know that they're doing it because they've been talking to our members about that and trying to get them into meetings and trying to work on that. I also want to be clear that writers aren't Luddites. We accept new technology. We like new technology and we want to talk about ways where AI can be useful to all of us. What we do know very clearly in our bones is that AI cannot replace humans.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes in this question, "What will the strike mean for the post-COVID recovery of movie theaters?"

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Well, it's not good but again, don't blame the writers. Blame the studios. The studios are the ones who have not taken theaters into consideration by creating a situation that forced us into this strike. We will be affecting the pipeline both for television and for movies. At some point in a few months, maybe in a year, you will start to see the pipeline dry up. You will start to see less product or inferior product. That is, again, all due to the studios. This is the one product that they sell, the one product that they make billions and profits off of and they are cutting off their source. They're cutting off their own pipeline. It's cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Brian Lehrer: I'll add an overall business model question to that. Do you think that the pandemic and the fact that so many more people are watching movies, or at least they were, I think they still are but that's really what I'm asking that so many more people have been watching movies at home, the same movies that they would have watched in theaters before, has that changed the business significantly in a way that you think is going to be permanent?

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: I think that streaming was a disrupter model. It has changed a lot of Americans and really global viewers' viewing habits. That is true. However, the creation of the product hasn't changed. When a screenwriter sits down to write a screenplay, he or she or they are not thinking, gosh this is only for streaming, I'm going to do 50% of a good job and it won't matter so much because it's only going on Netflix or it's only going on Hulu. They are baking the same cake that a baker would make if they were baking it for a wedding to present to 250 people or if you're going to take that cake and eat it in your kitchen all by yourself.

They're still going to make the best product that they can make. On our end, the process hasn't changed. On the studio's end, perhaps it has but we need ways to be compensated for the same amount of work that we're putting in.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, also from a listener writing in. It says, please address yesterday's Supreme Court ruling. For listeners' background on that, we talked about this on yesterday's show, there was a Supreme Court ruling that said an employer can sue the Teamsters Union for damages under certain circumstances for revenue loss because of actions taken during its strike. I'm curious if you've talked about that now at the Writers Guild leadership. Are you afraid at all that that could be applied to the studios' loss of revenue from this strike? I know that was a very different and specific situation.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: All I can say is God help anyone who picks a fight with the Teamsters. They don't know the Teamsters. The Teamsters will fight tooth and nail. I cannot imagine that they will take this lying down. What employer is going to sue a writer for damaging the property? I think that was the ruling.

I don't envision that being an issue in this particular strike, but it does speak to the Supreme Court's political leanings, doesn't it, against the working person. In America, I believe about 11% of American workers are members of a union. My greatest hope is that soon those numbers will grow, that working people out there will see what we are doing, what we are accomplishing, what we are fighting for and say, "Hey, that's my fight too. The Teamster's fight is my fight too. The IATSE crew members' fight is my fight too." Soon they'll start to demand those same protections for their own workplace.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it with Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, vice president of film, television, and streaming for the Writers Guild of America East as the writers' strike turns one month old today. Thank you for spending so much time with us and taking so many calls and text questions. Good luck out there.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: Thanks, Brian.

 

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