Voices from the picket lines: Three writers on why they’re striking

Across Hollywood, the picket line for writers looks quite similar. Wearing blue Writers Guild of America T-shirts and carrying signs affixed to stakes, the strikers walk a circuit past the gates of each studio. Then they loop back in the opposite direction. At Fox Studios, one writer carries a sign that says, “I’m getting my 10,000 steps in.” 

To get to this point in their careers, these writers have also had to put in their 10,000 hours. It’s a profession that often entails late nights and forgoing weekends. The scribes say that studios and streaming services (dubbed “streamers”) often nickel and dime them to cut costs. On the picket line, as in their jobs, they are accustomed to perseverance.

The Monitor interviewed three of the people on strike – a newcomer, a mid-career writer, and a veteran – about their tribulations and triumphs in the industry.

The newcomer

Screenwriting is career 2.0 for Mitali Jahagirdar. The young millennial, a first-generation American, graduated from New York University with majors in economics and broadcast journalism. Her first job was as a paralegal. 

“It took me a while but, like, I knew that my heart was in Hollywood,” says Ms. Jahagirdar, who is marching outside Sony Studios while carrying a sign that reads, “We’re gonna need a bigger offer!”

She enrolled in an MFA screenwriting program at University of California, Los Angeles. After a stint in the script and continuity department on the reboot of “Dynasty,” she was hired for the Disney sci-fi show “Just Beyond,” for which she was nominated for a WGA Award. Then she was hired as the story editor in a “mini room” – which consists of a showrunner plus two or three writers – to develop an adaptation of Alka Joshi’s novel “The Henna Artist.” But Netflix decided against putting the series into production. 

“When you work for 16 weeks, I mean out of a year, that’s not a lot of work,” says Ms. Jahagirdar, raising her voice to be heard over the honks of cars showing support for the writers on strike. When “you’re constantly hustling for that next job ... your mental energy is spent on like, ‘How am I going to pay the rent?’” 

When her savings began to dwindle, she started a part-time job on the screenwriting faculty of Western Colorado University. 

“I didn’t know anybody in this business when I started. And I want to give back,” she says. “But I genuinely don’t know if I can tell my students, ‘Hey, this is a great business to get into. If you can make it, if you can break in, it’ll be great.’ I can’t see that anymore.” 

Ms. Jahagirdar also worked to adapt Colleen Houck’s YA series “Tiger’s Curse” for Netflix, where she has a script development deal under the streaming service’s “Created by Initiative” for underrepresented writers. That project is also in limbo. Yet these setbacks haven’t extinguished her spark.

“There are these stories that we want to tell,” says the writer. “These are lived experiences. We want to see them on the screen. We have observations we’ve made about the world and we share them, whether it’s in a gritty drama or sci-fi fantasy. That’s in our heart.” 

The mid-career writer

When Kristin Newman became a Hollywood screenwriter, she never imagined that she’d end up writing a song for Sting. 

Picketing outside Fox Studios as her floppy hat wilts under the late-afternoon sun, Ms. Newman reflects on her storied career. After earning a Radio, TV, and Film degree at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, she returned to her hometown of Los Angeles.

“I got a writer’s assistant job because I was a fast typist, and then made friends from there, and wrote scripts and showed them to them,” she recalls. 

Ms. Newman’s comedic sensibilities have been employed on series such as “That ’70s Show” and “How I Met Your Mother.” While working on Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” she wrote a song for Sting, who played himself on the series. “I felt comfortable doing it,” she explains, because the lyrics were intentionally bad for comedic effect. 

“I’m a TV writer because I don’t want to write alone in a dark room,” says Ms. Newman, who penned a memoir in 2014 titled, “What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding.” “I love the camaraderie and the process that happens when you have lots of people coming together and one plus one equals three.” 

Ms. Newman is striking alongside fellow members of the Writers Guild of America because she objects to the trend of writers’ rooms getting smaller. As a cost-cutting move, some streaming services also lay off the writing staff once filming begins. 

“I had to really fight to keep one writer with me throughout production for my last show after seeing what had happened to showrunners on streamers who lost their writers’ rooms,” says Ms. Newman. “Then they had to shoot it by themselves and finish breaking stories by themselves and write the scripts by themselves.”  

Two days prior to the strike, Ms. Newman was in Argentina filming a TV adaptation of her travel adventure memoir. The showrunner worries what will happen to that dream project, which she’s unable to edit now that she’s on strike. But during the strike outside Fox, she’s reconnected with her friend and fellow writer Dave Caplan.

“We were just talking about how we worked on ‘The Muppets!’ together for ABC,” says Ms. Newman. “I got to have Willie Nelson come and sing ‘On the Road Again’ with the Muppets and introduce my dad to his idol before he died. That was amazing.”

The veteran

Wallace Wolodarsky has co-written so many movies that when he’s asked to name some, he’s at a loss. 

“What’s the dog movie where it’s reincarnated?” asks Mr. Wolodarsky, who is marching outside Amazon’s studio in Culver City. “I can’t remember the name of it. ‘A Dog’s Journey,’ maybe.” 

He guessed correctly. The veteran co-writes mostly family-oriented movies with his wife, Maya Forbes. Their credits include “Monsters vs. Aliens,” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days.” More recently, the couple adapted and co-directed Ann Leary’s novel “The Good House,” which starred Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline.

This is Mr. Wolodarsky’s third strike during his 35-year membership in the Writers Guild of America. The sign he’s hoisting features a photo of Jerry Lewis from an even earlier strike in 1973. Tensions between studios and writers are long-standing, he says, but the situation is worse than ever for scribes.

“When I came into the business in 1987, I earned a really good living,” says the writer, who got his start on “The Tracey Ullman Show” and “The Simpsons.” “I went from having no bank account to being able to buy a used car and rent an apartment with my girlfriend.”

Glancing at the strikers walking two-by-two along the narrow sidewalk, Mr. Wolodarsky says very few of them are high earners. The strike isn’t a case of rich people fighting rich people, he adds.

“Amazon has got a lot of money and Amazon could pay the writers a fair living, decent wage,” says the writer. 

Asked about the financial pressure that studios and streaming services are under – last month Amazon Studios and Amazon Prime Video laid off 100 of its 7,000 employees – Mr. Wolodarsky responds, “For the most part, middle-class workers have to pay for bad business decisions of huge corporations.”

The writer says that he and his wife, who have a 14-year-old son, still try to create movies that captivate audiences amid a fragmented media environment where no one pays attention for more than 30 seconds. 

“To me, a great movie is magic in the way that a great novel or a great painting is,” says Mr. Wolodarsky. “I still believe in it. And I’m going to keep doing it till I get kicked out.”