David A. Goodman and Michele Mulroney marched with about 200 strikers at Paramount Studios in Hollywood on Tuesday in support of the WGA, which, among other things, the AMTPT is fighting for better wages, on the first official day of the strike.
The duo was joined by actors Rob Lowe and Ike Barinholtz; Authors Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz, Craig Mazin, Jenni Konner and Nancy De Los Santos.
“The biggest sticking point was that the companies held us back on the very important issues we raised in these negotiations,” said Goodman, co-chairman of the WGA negotiating committee. “They refused to even start a conversation to negotiate. We were able to negotiate some other issues and we made some compromises and we took some things off the table. But there were important issues in those negotiations that the companies didn’t even talk about, and they forced us to strike.”
He later elaborated on some of these key themes, including “writers who can sustain a career; screenwriters who cannot afford to remain screenwriters; Comedy variety writers wanted a daily prize; TV writers who can’t afford to live in the city where their shows are produced – all these compensation issues are a problem and they’ve turned them all down.
Mulroney, a screenwriter who worked on Power Rangers (2017) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and an ex-officio member of the WGA negotiating committee, is ready to strike “for as long as it lasts”.
“It will take as long as companies want. If they are ready to take our agenda seriously, we are ready to negotiate,” she said. “I am a screenwriter in this union and our feature agenda has once again been completely denied by these companies for many cycles, and they flatly refuse to address any of the very fundamental and central issues we have raised, including a fundamental denial of the existence of the freelance nightmare that plagues our members in television, feature films and the comedy variety, they really blocked us in a way that was frustrating, surprising and totally inappropriate given the time we’ve been in this industry.
Source: Deadline
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