EP. 163 — The Writers’ Strike with Megan Amram

 

[00:00:00] Jameela Megan Amram, welcome to I Weigh. How are you?

[00:00:03] Megan I am so glad to be here. Big Jameela Jamil fan. So.

[00:00:08] Jameela I’m a bigger Megan Amram fan now. I. I know you from The Good Place originally. That’s where we met. You were one of the head writers on that show, and I fell madly in love with you. And then I was lucky enough to get to work with you again on Bumper in Berlin, which we shot last year in Germany together. And the reason I asked you here today, other than the fact that I am perpetually obsessed with you, is because we are currently in the middle of a writer’s strike. And it’s a very complicated situation that it feels as though there’s a deliberate haze of misunderstanding around.

[00:00:43] Megan Mm hmm.

[00:00:44] Jameela I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not, but it just feels as though

[00:00:46] Megan I think it is

[00:00:47] Jameela we’re not particularly clear as to what it is that people want, why people are striking, why this is important, why this impacts the whole of our industries and kind of reflects the needs of other industries. And so I just thought maybe I could sit down with you. Seeing as you are currently on the front lines, picketing with all the writers because you are a member of that union. I wondered if you could just break down exactly what’s going on, what the implications are, and what the needs are to be met. So so first of all, the WGA is the Writers Guild. Can you tell me how we’ve gotten to the point where everyone’s on strike?

[00:01:24] Megan Yes, absolutely. And just thank you very much for having me on to talk about this, because I do agree with what you just said, which is there has been both non deliberate but also deliberate sort of misinformation about everything. And so I am a dork and I am pretty well informed. I also my caveat is just I’m one person, so I’m not an expert. No one is because this is all happening as we go.

[00:01:56] Jameela And it’s precedented.

[00:01:58] Megan It is in that there’s there’s been writers strikes. The last writers strike was in 2007, I guess is how a human would say it would be 2007. I myself am an AI. I should have said that up top.

[00:02:13] Jameela Can you imagine if I’d gotten chat GPT to have this podcast episode with me.

[00:02:19] Megan I don’t want chat GPT to do my job, but I do want it to just be my like, social. I want it to tell me what to say in social situations. I think it would probably be cool. But to answer your question, so the WGA, the Writers Guild, represents almost every single screenwriter, television writer. And then, you know, some late night shows, some video games. There’s about 11,000 members. And periodically throughout the years there have been strikes. I’ve never been a part of one. And they often concerned things like when streamers first started we struck I don’t in the past tense of strike is strike

[00:03:06] Jameela Struck stroked.

[00:03:06] Megan Struck stricken we stroked. Yeah but we struck for you know to to establish the basics of like streaming, pay. We have health insurance through our guild. But this year, the headlines of what we were asking from the studios who are all represented by a group called AMPTP, which includes things like your ABC, NBC, some of those more traditional places.

[00:03:39] Jameela Netflix.

[00:03:39] Megan And then yeah, and then you have the streamers like Netflix and Apple. Um, we were specifically looking out for this incredibly intense, changing view of what even a writer’s career looks like. And so it’s this huge question of what is the job of writer anymore? And the very basic picture that the studios wanted to paint to us for what a writer is, is they want it to turn it basically all freelance, where it would be the kind of thing that you do for very short periods of time, that there’s not as many people who are writing on shows and you’re not compensated in a way that, you know, for a lot of people in a city like Los Angeles is even a livable wage. There’s a lot of writers who are currently not making a livable wage, and these in L.A. and New York. I’ll just speak to that.

[00:04:40] Jameela And they’re expected to live in Los Angeles or near Los Angeles or near these studios and near their headquarters, and they’re expected to drive in every day in spite of huge gas prices and how expensive it is to own a car in Los Angeles. And now they don’t even want to pay for these people’s health insurance, because that’s what happens when you become an employee of a company. If it’s just a gig economy, if you’re just a freelancer, then nobody has any responsibility to you whatsoever.

[00:05:05] Megan Yeah. And it I mean, it explains why I have been hiding in your garage. I had to downsize. I couldn’t pay my rent anymore, and I apologize. You know, I should get that out of the way. But it is. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot. I started in. I’ve been in the Guild since 2011. I was very lucky that my first staff job, which was a Disney Channel Live action children’s show, was part of the Writers Guild, which children’s shows are not always. Um, but. It is a career that when I started there was this sort of roadmap laid out, which was you start at a certain level in a writer’s room if you’re lucky enough to get your foot in the door and you’re hopefully mentored by people who are much more experienced than you are. Which I will probably shout this person out many times in this conversation. But I was lucky enough to sort of fall into Mike Schur’s camp, who created The Good Place where we

[00:06:13] Jameela And Parks and Rec.

[00:06:13] Megan And Parks and Rec. I wrote on Parks and Rec and then The Good Place and learned and an immense invaluable amount from Mike. And you sort of work your way up the ladder until you’re experienced enough and comfortable enough being on set to be able to run your own show, which I very fortunately get to do on our show Bumper in Berlin, and what the studios are basically saying with what they’ve brought to the table with this strike is that they do not want to create those abilities for writers to be able to learn and grow and rise through the ranks. They want I’m going to now explain something and Jameela, stop me if I’m getting too, like, wonky about this because it’s all I think or talk about. So one of the things that the writers are striking against is something called a mini room, which traditional writers rooms are, you know, can be like ten people, it could be as big. I’ve been in rooms as big as like 15 people for a sitcom, and it lasts for a few months and not a few months. Like multiple months, almost a year, depending on how many episodes you have. And you then are promoted the next season if your show gets picked up. These are the traditional ways that, you know, writers rooms have functioned. A mini room is something that has become incredibly popular, which is, you know, a handful of writers usually who are already upper level, meaning they’ve already risen through the ranks who are only brought on for a few weeks at a time, are expected to break the stories of the entire season of a show. Breaking story is just the sort of technical term for figuring out what happens in a season of television. And that is usually done in a TV room like as a group. So it would be a small group of people for, you know, three or four weeks who figure out every single thing that happens in the season of TV. And then the showrunner would go off and be expected to possibly write the whole show by his or her or themselves. And it is both neglecting to give good, solid jobs to the people who are in that mini room. And then the showrunner is expected to do like an ungodly amount of work, which I can tell you from being on the picket line. I have spoken with a lot of showrunners who have been on that side of things where they’re like, We need to be able to spread the work out among people.

[00:09:03] Jameela And just to give context, because this is slightly unique to the United States, right? Because there are so many more episodes of television here than there are in other countries. For example, I come from Britain, which is notorious for having six episode series that only run for two years or three years maybe. And so often for those shows, one or two people do write those entire shows because it’s six half hour episodes or one hour episodes of television. In the United States, the norm has been 26 or 27 episodes per season. That is smaller on the streamers. I think there’s a bigger culture for for a shorter season, and a short series. But traditionally, how many writers would you say are in a room? Because I think when people think of The Good Place or Parks and Rec, they hear the name Mike Schur. And even though at the end of every episode on TV, it’ll say which writers wrote that episode, generally we just think of Mike Schur as writing The Good Place. How many people were in that writer’s room?

[00:10:01] Megan That is a great point, and I do think it is this like TV writing is still sort of an inscrutable thing that like when I moved to L.A. and wanted to be a TV writer, I had no idea how that worked. I didn’t know what a showrunner was. I just like showed up at a studio one day and had an assistant job and then lied for six years about knowing what a showrunner was. And then I finally figured it out. So I would say on a show like The Good Place, we had something like 10 to 12 writers per season. And you bring up another good point, which is that it it’s sort of left to the discretion of a showrunner of like exactly how to spread the work around. Mike always was incredibly collaborative as a showrunner, which I took on, You know, when I became a showrunner myself, it was very important to me to be very collaborative. So when you see the names of someone who wrote an episode of TV, in my experience, usually what that means is as a room entirely all together, you’ve broken the story, which again means figured out what happened. That writer, whose name is credited usually goes off and writes a first draft and is sort of the point person for that episode. The showrunner, of course, will sort of oversee everything, make sure it’s in her voice, and generally that there’s continuity. But every single writer in that room, no matter their level, is given the opportunity to put their stamp on it, but also to learn from each other. And this kind of like brings me to another point that we’re striking against. Which is. Writers are no longer given the opportunity to go to set, which I wanted to bring up, partially because it’s how we became such good friends, is I was interacting with you mostly on set when I’d cover my episode cover, meaning I’d go down to set and sort of be the point person along with the director to make sure that the show was in the correct voice. I’d pitched jokes on set. That’s always been an amazing way to, you know, have relationships with the actors, with the directors to get to know how TV is made. TV is like an incredibly dynamic thing, which is changing until the second you put it on TV, basically, but while you’re shooting it, there needs to be people there. And another thing that the studios are sort of trying to cut away at is the opportunity for writers to go to set at all except for a showrunner.

[00:13:00] Jameela Why? Why are they making this hard?

[00:13:01] Megan It’s all about money. I’m so sorry to tell you this America’s really obsessed with mon- no, it it really is, though. It’s about shortening writers contracts, because if someone goes to set, you have to pay them. Which, you know, again, from where I’m sitting, these companies, especially some of these tech behemoths, have so much money that we are making for them. And that is all public. You know, how much revenue that these shows that we are making are earning. Places like Netflix. You’d think you could pay a person to go do the thing that they are both good at, but also it then gives them those skills to be able to go make you more shows. So I work with on our show Bumper In Berlin. I have writers who are amazing writers who are producers but have never been to set before, and that is a major skill set for if you become a producer that you just need to have.

[00:14:04] Jameela Yeah, and I can speak from an actor’s point of view, which is that it made it infinitely easier for me to understand what you were going for as a writer when I was able to communicate with you directly because you were on set. And then also you got a chance to get to know us better, which meant that if it was easier for you to write in our comedic voice and to our comedic strengths, and then when you would pitch stuff like so much of what’s in The Good Place is of course written, you know, on the script. But a lot of what you saw was also funny shit that we came up with on the fly with whichever writer was on set that day where we would pitch ideas back and forth and improvise together. And that made for some amazingly magical moments. And you don’t feel confident, as confident when you don’t have your your showrunner or your writer on set as an actor because you’re like, Fuck, are they going to like this take? Are they going to like this option in the edit? And so you don’t have a chance to really advocate for your own opinion. And these are the moments that that lead to really great and timeless art when there is a synergy between the performer and the creators.

[00:15:06] Megan I also was just like laughing in my head, thinking about because I am I don’t know that it’s coming across so much in this conversation, but I’m like a crazy person and every other joke I write, I feel like oftentimes you’d be like, So what? What is that? What does this mean? And I’d be like, Yes, that’s good. We need to have these conversations also to just gas you up. Jameela when we were living in Berlin last year shooting this show Bumper in Berlin, there was a specific joke that had to do with a prop mic that I remember you just like we together, like, built this little moment and you had a very funny pitch. And then I was able to collaborate with you on that. And I was like, That made the show better. Like, that’s the thing is the collaboration in real time and the comfort with that, you know, really does make the stuff we’re making better. And that always comes back to for the studios. I’m like, Then the better shows make your money, so give us some. I mean, really, the bottom line is we’re just like, we are human beings. We are not asking for anything untoward. We just want to be fairly compensated and to have some amount of security, which is what a guild and a union is there for.

[00:16:32] Jameela You’re also asking to be paid something called residuals. Right?

[00:16:34] Megan Exactly. Yeah.

[00:16:36] Jameela Which is after every time a show re-airs again and again and again on on network television, normally then the actors and the writers and the producers are paid again, not the full amount, but like residuals like so that if the TV network is profiting off people watching something numerous times and so are you, and we don’t have that anymore as streamers. And why that was important is that a) that’s fucking fair. If people are consuming and consuming and consuming something that you made, you should be compensated for it. But also work is not guaranteed in this industry. We’re all technically freelance and sometimes you can go a year or two years or three years without a good job. And so those residuals used to be what kept young actors like young struggling actors or young writers in particular, like people who hadn’t fully, fully made it, made it would keep them being able to eat and keep a roof over their heads. And now those are disappearing as we are moving off network television onto the streamers because they’re like, Well, we don’t show adverts, although some of them fucking do.

[00:17:40] Megan Right.

[00:17:40] Jameela We don’t show adverts, so therefore we don’t have to pay you again.

[00:18:07] Megan It also is this is always how the strikes end up happening, that the paradigm and the model of television changes for you know with things like streamers. And then we have to, you know, have some amount of leverage to get. It’s always like the studio is trying to get one step ahead of paying us money for our craft.

[00:18:31] Jameela Even who create the things that.

[00:18:33] Megan Yes, and I do We can talk about this too, in a moment. But I’m like I do think that this is representative of like any artistic profession right now is like, how do you get the people actually making the art to be paid for it? I know in like music, it’s a big deal. But so for, you know, specifically what we’re looking at in this strike is that streaming has become such a huge way of watching television, even if you like. For example, The Good Place aired on NBC, but a lot of people really discovered it on Netflix.

[00:19:12] Jameela Also sorry. Just to interject, whenever people come up to me and tell me, oh, I’m on my fifth rewatch of The Good Place, I know that that’s not on NBC. Because they’re not showing it again and again and again. During the pandemic, people watched it multiple times. They all watched it on the streamers. But there’s no compensation for the people that made it. When they do that, when they repeat, watch again and again and again.

[00:19:33] Megan No, When someone comes up to you and says that you have to be like, give me $20 at least. Like just that cash we’re striking so they don’t have to give you that cash. But for now, you’re going to want it. No.

[00:19:47] Jameela It’s so stupid.

[00:19:49] Megan I’m. I am so stupid. I can’t believe you let me on your beautiful podcast. I’m being so dumb.

[00:19:55] Jameela No, not at all.

[00:19:56] Megan I’m trying so hard chat GPT is telling me everything to say.

[00:20:00] Jameela But I do just want to quickly, just quickly, just add that also, because we’ve been having this conversation about money publicly for the writers and some people are saying, you know, we make less than 33,000 a year if we’re lucky, sometimes if we are hired. That’s the kind of fees that writers are now looking at under this current model of payment. And then other people watching that have been like, Well, that’s how much teachers make a year, so why the fuck are you all complaining? And that is valid to, to feel like this feels trivial and frivolous. But if these giant studios, these people sitting in boardrooms who have no creative input whatsoever, are profiting in the millions and billions, however we feel about the specific number, I think we can all agree that someone deserves a proper piece of the pie that they have baked themselves.

[00:20:55] Megan Yes.

[00:20:55] Jameela That’s all that we’re fighting for. It’s not about the number. It’s about the percentage of what’s fair.

[00:20:59] Megan Absolutely. And just to say, because this is a really important thing that has come up a lot, there’s a few different points. You know, I’d like to make about the actual pay. The Writers Guild is an interesting union because there are people at such different walks of life, at different basically, you know, class strata at this point, based on their job. There’s a lot of different types of writers who are paid different amounts. Um so I do think, as you said, it’s incredibly valid to acknowledge the fact that there’s people who are striking right now who are incredibly well compensated and, you know, are experiencing the strike even differently than people who have just started their careers or haven’t worked in a while or, you know, any number of things. But as you say, the job of writer is a very strange one in that it is not just like yearly salary that you are getting. So you might see numbers for something like selling a movie script that you just wrote in your house, you wrote a script in your house and you sold it and you made, you know, many thousands of dollars, which of course both is a lot of money and looks like a lot of money. But what we’re trying to also sort of educate people on is that that has a lot of contingencies to it. There is the fact that you give most writers have a representative like an agent or a manager or both who are people who help you sell those scripts, manage your careers. They usually get 10% of every job that you get, so.

[00:22:48] Jameela 10% each.

[00:22:49] Megan 10% each. So you give maybe 20% of your money to those people. You also might have a lawyer who helps, you know, draw up contracts and such. And that person would also get a commission, maybe 5%. Then you also it takes a really long time sometimes to write a movie or TV show. So maybe that was two years of work for you.

[00:23:14] Jameela There’s also an unbelievable amount of notes on any given project that you expected to fix within that fee. So even if it took you two years to write that script.

[00:23:26] Megan I’ve never gotten a note because I’m perfect. But for most people I’d say for like every other person, no. It’s like every thing takes so long and it also is unpaid labor. And some of that is something that we’re not even that is not even like built into the strike because it’s just a side effect of being a, you know,

[00:23:49] Jameela Creative.

[00:23:49] Megan Creative for your job is like. It’s a lot of what you are doing is free labor under the assumption you will get paid at some point. And really what our ask is that after that free labor, what you get paid is enough to fully compensate and again give you sort of just like a ability to live in Los Angeles.

[00:24:16] Jameela Yeah. And I mean, just to finish on the money thing, someone wrote a tweet saying that basically, even if you make $100,000 on a script with all the after tax, it becomes an after agent and managers, it becomes 40,000. And then it can sometimes take three years to get the full payment because you only get it in tiny little chunks. So four grand is for the first draft and then it kind of changes from there on and you just get little drips and drabs and that can happen over the course of two or three years, which amounts to about 13,000 and something per year. And so if they take make taking away the main rooms and we’re making mini rooms and we’re hiring less and less writers and we’re finding more opportunities to hire less and less writers, it means that then there are very few jobs to make in between the script that you’ve already worked so hard on. So then so that 13 and a half thousand dollars to live in Los Angeles, it’s beyond unlivable. Unlivable. It’s living in your car money.

[00:25:13] Megan Or Jameela’s house, yeah.

[00:25:14] Jameela To try and make those dreams come true. Yeah, exactly. I take you all in. But but also just just to add something that I know that you feel very passionately about is that then we end up with people who already live in a kind of on the social economic backfoot being denied entry once again into an industry that was just starting to make progress and that’s

[00:25:34] Megan Yes.

[00:25:35] Jameela People of color people, you know, from different genders and within the LGBTQIA community and women all now not being able to subsidize being paid so far below the minimum wage.

[00:25:47] Megan Absolutely. And it is we’ve talked about this a lot. It is like incredibly important to me in, you know, on our show, but also just in general, that every type of voice is given the opportunity to make entertainment for us. Because I think that everyone who listens to you can agree that makes better things, it makes better TV shows, it makes better movies. It is a more interesting, beautiful way to experience the world. Now as it pertains to this strike, the people who are most being affected by the gatekeeping that, you know, this financial structure is basically putting in place are exactly, like you said, people of color, disabled writers, older writers, LGBTQIA plus writers like. People who don’t come from really wealthy backgrounds, which I actually think is a really major issue in the writing industry, is like, how do we make this a career that you don’t have to be independently wealthy to succeed in? And again, these are things that are affecting, you know, I’m not an expert, but as far as I can tell, every artistic endeavor, probably every industry is like as the people at the top are amassing more and more of the money, it leaves less and less wiggle room for anybody to get in who does not have a cushion already in place.

[00:27:27] Jameela Yeah, And by the way, I also just want to make one quick point, which is that what the writers are striking for are the same things, not the same exact things, but they are things that are going to set a precedent for other unions within the industry to be able to follow through on when it comes to fair pay and being hired and being protected and being given insurance like this is going to impact all the rest of us in the industry, which is why we’re all standing in solidarity with the writers, but also as a consumer of someone who grew up never thinking I would be an actor, but someone who just loved movies and television and music. It has been sad for me to be old enough to remember the golden era. What I felt was the golden era of film and television and music. And not to say some amazing work doesn’t still come out. I’m lucky to have been, you know, to have participated in some of those projects that have been that are incredible. But there was a time where people used to treat creators with more respect in this industry, and they used to create a cushioned environment for them to do their best work. And they knew that to invest in the writers and to invest in the artists was to invest in the work and the output. And that’s what was going to win you awards, and that was going to bring people to the movie theaters. And over time, now all that money just goes to who has the biggest following on social media? Who’s in your project, who you hired often based on their social media followers, rather than really like investing into the foundation of the project, we say see the same thing in music. We find out that you can have a number one album on Spotify and the artist doesn’t see any money from that. So unless they’re very good at touring and very good at social media and marketing themselves, they are fucked financially. We see all these people. We presume they must be millionaires. I meet these people, they have no fucking money because they aren’t getting paid properly by streamers. Streamers are amazing because they democratize the art that we’re able to see and we wouldn’t have seen maybe so many women and marginalized people break through the kind of bro code of writing. Had we not had streamers because it created more opportunities for art to be put out. However, we then have to move with the times. Otherwise art is going to continue to die and we’re going to keep having musicians making songs that have 7 seconds worth of goodness that will go viral on TikTok.

[00:29:45] Megan Right.

[00:29:46] Jameela And we won’t have great albums like we don’t have great albums very often anymore, and we’re going to have bullshit TV shows and we’re going to keep watching shows from ten or 15 or 20 years ago wishing that we still had content like that and then remakes of that amazing content, rather than just investing in people who can tell the new fucking stories. Sorry to rant.

[00:30:09] Megan Oh my God, no.

[00:30:10] Jameela But as a consumer I’m just like, we all lose. If this continues to go in this direction. If this becomes a banking like a money laundering thing.

[00:30:21] Megan There’s been so many times that I’m like, Am I part of some weird money laundering scheme that’s way bigger than I can possibly understand? I do think there is a this is like maybe a little abstract, but again, all we have to do right now is just think and talk about this while, you know, picketing all day. I do think that you’re like the current structure of television at least, which is what I’ve primarily worked in, almost like incentivizes you to for mediocrity. It like incentivizes you to make things as quick as possible with as few people as possible. And to just I mean that when they started calling it content, which like sure, I’ll call it content, it is very descriptive of what of a change in how they saw television shows that it is not

[00:31:18] Jameela Very reductive.

[00:31:18] Megan Art. It’s content to like fill your days and your, you know, brains and whatever. And also I’m not, as we’ve said on this podcast, I’m stupid. I don’t I’m not like a snob about things. And there’s plenty of things that I love that I wouldn’t call like high art, but they are, you can tell that someone had a point of view and someone wanted to make it. And you know, you brought up a good point. Which was that there was this huge boom of TV shows in number like a few years ago when things like Netflix and Apple and everything started making a ton more shows. That was good in some ways, in that a lot more writers got their first job and a lot of those writers were from, you know, different groups of people than had been previously represented in TV writers rooms, of which it was almost entirely like cis had white men for a long time. So that was great. But we need to create a type of structure where those writers can get their second and third job and, you know, and learn and become showrunners because the back and this is maybe like a little off topic, but it’s very interesting to me as someone very, you know, active in the Guild. It’s like if you look at diversity in every writer’s room, it’s of course, going up than it was a decade ago, two decades ago. But there still is a bottleneck at the top. So most people who are running shows are still white men to generalize and the number of people who are able to get to that level of writer who are from different groups are is still like trailing behind. So that’s why it’s very important. Aside from, you know, just the the pay, which of course is incredibly concrete and tangible, it’s important to us to restructure our entire industry so that people are not just like cast aside after their first job.

[00:34:00] Jameela So now let’s talk about the part of this conversation that has taken over the right to strike the

[00:34:07] Megan right

[00:34:07] Jameela narrative, which is AI.

[00:34:11] Megan How funny my picket signs are. Oh, no AI. Okay, great.

[00:34:15] Jameela Yeah. And poor old Jenna Ortega, who everyone seems to be sending for on the front line of the pickets.

[00:34:21] Megan People just really latch on to. It’s like there’s one main character of the picket line a day. Um, no AI is, like, the flashiest thing. And this, I think, also sort of like bridges into a discussion of like, how this strike to me is representative of so many things that affect literally everyone in this country. But so the AI thing is the flashiest part of what we’re striking for. But in some ways, it’s not even the most kind of like

[00:34:54] Jameela Potent.

[00:34:54] Megan Potent for right now. Right now, I would say that writers in the short term are really prioritizing those minimum room sizes because, again, just because we need humans to have jobs and residuals from streaming so that we get paid for, As you said, when people watch things over and over again on Netflix, of which we don’t get a cent. But the AI stuff, which I am like, you know, generally just really interested in it and have been observing it like a nerd since I guess I heard about Chat GPT in like December. The the language models have exploded in how I’m trying to think of a better word than intelligent, but like in how intelligent they have started to seem to be. So. Have have you played with Chat GPT?

[00:35:54] Jameela Oh, yeah. My manager was asking me to ask it a question. She was showing me how it worked, and I. I asked why is Jameela Jamil so annoying? I just had to know.

[00:36:06] Megan Oh, my God. What did it say?

[00:36:10] Jameela It said I haven’t looked into her much. Rude. And so why do you have a problem with her? Which I thought was a really interesting like.

[00:36:19] Megan I love that.

[00:36:19] Jameela emotionally intelligent response of I don’t know, it’s felt like a socially responsible. But also I was frustrated because I, I know exactly why I’m annoying and I thought there’d be some quite clear answers Chap GPT. But yeah, it’s.

[00:36:34] Megan That’s hilarious.

[00:36:36] Jameela Basically, chat GPT said I don’t know her. Which I thought was fucking hilarious.

[00:36:42] Megan I think that was pretty chat GPT is is just doing that really tactful Hollywood thing because it’s going to want you to hire it someday, so. So. Okay, so here’s where we are right now. It is May 15th, 2023, in like a week. I have no idea what chat GPT is going to be like because it’s like this exponential learning curve. But it is a language model slash anything like it reads everything ever written online basically, and can mimic how human beings write because of that.

[00:37:17] Jameela It is also being constantly updated by Kenyan workers who are working way below the minimum wage, who are being totally extorted in order to be able to continue to like finesse the software.

[00:37:29] Megan I didn’t know about that but that is also.

[00:37:31] Jameela That is crazy.

[00:37:31] Megan Is insane. I will go educate myself, but like basically the Writers Guild has tried to get ahead of the fact that right now chat GPT cannot write a good episode of TV. It just cannot. People have tried and played with it like my boyfriend and I tried to get it to like write an episode of Frasier and, you know, Frasier’s hilarious, so it did not capture Frasier’s voice. It is something, though, that is becoming smart so quickly that we are just trying to put into place now this idea that chat GPT has to be used as a tool and not as an entity, which is a really wild thing to wrap your head around. But it would be as if. So. So we want to say like, realistically. Writers are going to be using Chat GPT. They already do in certain industries, like journalists use it for leads and you know, like.

[00:38:34] Jameela Well, they’re not going to be able to get anything on me.

[00:38:37] Megan Yeah. I don’t know her. Yeah.

[00:38:41] Jameela I’d love if even Chat GPT started giving out information about Priyanka Chopra.

[00:38:45] Megan I think it would be funny if you asked. If you ask Chat GPT anything. And it just started talking about Priyanka Chopra.

[00:38:52] Jameela 100%.

[00:38:52] Megan Yeah. Just like what? Why are you obsessed? Yeah. I can’t wait until Chat GPT is so human equivalent that it develops strange obsessions and won’t stop talking about them. That would feel very cool. But anyway, the technology is not at the place yet that there could be zero writers. But something that was deeply disturbing is that and I will say as a side note, the WGA is very transparent with its members and with the public. When the negotiation, before the negotiations our strike Committee had all these meetings with like any member who wanted to voice their concerns or support or whatever, to like hear what writers really wanted. And after the strike negotiations obviously broke down and we struck, they released a list of everything they asked for and what the studios came back to them with and what we asked for for AI. And I would highly recommend looking at it. I can send you the link, Jameela, but like we asked that there be basically minimum human requirements of writers rooms and that chat GPT be not defined as like a entity that could be hired. And what the studios came back with was we will not agree to that. We will consider having yearly meetings where we can talk about the technology, but that is so I would say, patronizing to be like, Oh, what what do you think that’s going to do? We have to put into place right now before chat GPT is better than it is that there need to be real humans making this art.

[00:40:47] Jameela So ideally what they want is for, you know, when you talk about breaking a story, they want Chat GPT or whatever other AI tool to be able to do that.

[00:40:57] Megan Yes.

[00:40:58] Jameela And and then have one or maybe two writers who are very experienced, who are already with their foot in the door, experienced to punch up that script and make it good enough for human consumption.

[00:41:10] Megan Right. Which, you know, brings up almost ethical or philosophical ideas of like, what is art that I, as a stupid person, don’t feel that I can even always wrap my head around.

[00:41:29] Jameela No, but we do know that this already completely gate capped industry that is only just going to break minorities.

[00:41:35] Megan Exactly.

[00:41:36] Jameela Is then they’re all just going to be replaced by people who are already seasoned, who are predominantly privileged white people who don’t have disabilities and who ask you know.

[00:41:45] Megan Yeah, no. I was like, if if that happens. And again, you know, I have had an amazing career which I attribute to luck. And so the people who mentored me, I don’t I have been incredibly fortunate. But when I think of a structure like that where it’s like Chat GPT and a writer, I’m like. I probably get to do that. I mean, mark my words, I’ll be watch me never write again if if Chat GPT is in charge. But then it would be people who look like me and then it would turn into also like the most homogenous, mediocre storytelling. My bread and butter. But also I have to believe somewhere that, you know, even from a economic, financial standpoint, that human beings still want to respond to art that is made by humans. And we’re in uncharted territory there. But. I think it’s one of the reasons that the writers strike and this is good news for people like me. The amount of like support and solidarity and just excitement that I’ve seen from everyone in L.A., from everyone across the country, is completely overwhelming. And part of it is because I do think that this strike feels like it is bigger than just the writers that it is a like. It’s almost like everything we’ve been seeing across tech, across the oligarch ization of America of late capitalism, all the stuff that that it is coming to a head in the writers strike. And I have personally been incredibly overwhelmed by like how kind of emotional and inspiring it has been to be like, we all want a different economic structure and not we all. But a lot of people in the vast majority want a different economic structure in this country.

[00:43:56] Jameela And it bleeds out, as I said, across other parts of our industry. It is. And I so agree with you that it’s like this is the late stage capitalism reckoning that was always on its way. And I’m glad it’s here, although I feel extremely afraid for my friends who are writers right now, and actually just anyone who works in this industry because their health insurance is being paused in order to take this stand like they are running out of money. They don’t know how long this is going to last. This is not going to be a short thing because the other that the people who have to give out that money are digging their heels in as much as possible. And so we feel like we’re looking down the barrel of another three, four, five month strike. And I remember, you know, when I got here, people used to talk about the strike of 2007 with such like kind of doom and horror, because not only did that destroy the lives of so many young writers in particular who had to then move home or to go and find other work, or who lost the health insurance and got really, really sick. But also the art that came out of that strike was dog shit. Like television was ruined for for years, but people always talked about it and this one feels like it’s going to be even bigger, longer and more significant. But what is being fought for is going to change this industry for everyone and therefore change what the consumers get to consume. If you want shit, that you’re going to want to watch again and again and again. It can’t be written by a motherfucking robot who, by the way, when it comes to minorities or people with disabilities or people from different genders or sexuality backgrounds, what has been written up until so recently for the last few decades has been so reductive as to our experience.

[00:45:38] Megan Yeah.

[00:45:39] Jameela It has been so that the way women have been written, I’ve often talked about the fact that when that men can write for like extraterrestrials, sometimes easier than they find in writing for women like Alien and Predator have better arcs and ET than women’s roles, where we’re always written in the same sort of three ways. And so the only way for our experiences as minorities to be represented authentically and for us not to be treated as a monolith and reduced to the most like imbecilic like or the most reductive stereotype means that we need those voices in those writers room. And if technology is just being updated with what we have up until now, then there’s barely anything to go off that.

[00:46:29] Megan Oh, yeah.

[00:46:30] Jameela Reflects the majority of us.

[00:46:32] Megan You do not want Chat GPT learning from the most.

[00:46:36] Jameela The parties or that Peter Sellers, you know, where like Indian people only talk like this and howdy partner like we are. There are people who speak like that. That’s great. Let’s keep them in films. But let’s also have other people, you know, like me. Or like any of the Riz Ahmed. Like, let’s, let’s allow that. Let’s allow us to have an actual diaspora that is reflected in art. It’s just bonkers.

[00:47:00] Megan It also is, yeah. It’s like if Chat GPT is learning from only the most reductive at best and offensive at worst things. It’s like, well, then, then we’ve stopped. Then evolution has stopped. And I do think, you know, you’re you make a very good point, which is like this affects every member of the industry, which this is, you know, kind of in the weeds a little bit. But the directors, the DGA, the Directors Guild of America and then SAG, the Screen Actors Guild are both, currently the directors are negotiating with the same group that we’re striking against and SAG is going to too later. And my hope and this is kind of a complicated issue, not the least of which is because it hasn’t happened yet. I think that there is a lot of feeling of solidarity across every single guild right now. Actors, we also there’s a guild called IATSE, which represents a lot of different types of people, including the Teamsters, who, like, you know.

[00:48:09] Jameela Hair and makeup, ADs.

[00:48:10] Megan Like hair and makeup, editors. Their animation shows, lots of different members of the entertainment industry who are showing an unbelievable amount of solidarity with us, like Teamsters who drive the trucks on set, among other things, don’t cross our picket lines, which is partially what’s shut down some productions. And let me tell you, it feels so cool. Not that we don’t want those people to get paid or be compensated. And it obviously we want TV to just be made fairly. We love it. That’s why we do this. But to be able to have that solidarity translate into literal change right in front of you and, you know, costing the studios money is pretty amazing. And that I do want to say this too, because I think one of the counter narratives against the writers is like, we are all rich and not caring about hair and makeup artists or, you know, crew members or whatever who are losing their jobs when we shut when we quote unquote, shut down productions. And I just want to say, speaking for both myself, but also all of us, we don’t want to be doing this like we don’t want to be on strike. We all do the jobs we do because we love it and we are so passionate about it. But. We also. So when it’s said, like the writers shut down this thing, we’re like, no, the studios shut it down because they would not fairly pay us. And give us protection and all the things we’ve been talking about. The studios are the ones who shut down the conversation, and we’re not doing this for fun. So I do think that that’s an important distinction. And if you read about the strike in some of the Hollywood trades, there is seemingly a bit of a bent of like writers shut down this thing, writer shut down that thing. And it was like, no, this is because.

[00:50:16] Jameela Greed.

[00:50:16] Megan The guy who runs Discovery Plus makes like half a billion dollars a year or whatever. So I would say that our hearts are with every other person in this industry who’s trying to just, like, make a honest living. And we also feel bad that there’s collateral. But, you know, you have to do stuff like this or else the industry gets away from everybody.

[00:50:45] Jameela 100%.

[00:50:46] Megan And it becomes an oligarchy.

[00:50:47] Jameela Well, it’s coming also towards actors where they’re now telling us, you know, there are certain studios who want our contracts to reflect that we can sell our faces and voices, they can buy our faces and voices and use them for AI created movies in which we aren’t there on set, in which we don’t need hair or makeup teams or wardrobes. We don’t need to be physically there. We can we can be making four projects all at the same time. It’s just us sitting at home while our face and voice is used for these animated projects.

[00:51:21] Megan Right.

[00:51:21] Jameela And and what they’re saying is that they want to own our faces and voices across the universe is the literal language in perpetuity, forever. That’s what in perpetuity means. So the idea that this is I mean, the the. I don’t even know what the word what the words are for, how terrorizing and insane that verbiage is.

[00:51:46] Megan I can’t give you the words because I’m on strike, but I’m sure I could think of it. I also was about to say for my birthday, can I have your face across the universe just?

[00:51:58] Jameela Yeah. But across the universe, like regardless of

[00:52:01] Megan It’s so creepy.

[00:52:01] Jameela And they’re trying to secure it for technologies that may be invented in the future, in the universe in perpetuity, like the eternal nature of like, the ownership of us means that we’re not going to put any human emotion into anything we do. Like this is we are at the beginning of a spiral here, and it’s going to be a fast tracked spiral. And so we all have to stand in solidarity with the writers because everything you’re fighting for is going to impact all of us with if we do not stop the the current model of the AI fast train, which is not again, like the main thing that writers are striving for, but it is one very important thing because if we don’t stop that train now, there will be no more writers, there will be no transportation people, there will be no more hair, makeup, wardrobe, production assistants, people building sets. Everything will be done on a computer by a very small group of already privileged people.

[00:52:53] Megan I have been, you know, picketing all day, every day, doing some other related things. And there’s been so many people from other not just guilds, but other industries who have joined us on the picket line. And I would say to anyone who’s listening to this in the New York or L.A. area, like, come hang out with us, it’s amazing. You’re all welcome. Whether or not you’re a current writer or you want to be one or you just want to, like, hang out with people. I’ve also met some of the most amazing writers on the picket line who I’m just like fans of, which is really exciting. But I do think it’s like. You know, school teachers are a group who have experienced this a lot. They have had to go on strike this year, I think, in Los Angeles. And um. I personally, as someone who just like in theory, has always been an incredibly big supporter of unions and workers taking control of their own production. I was like, I’ll go the next time I see a picket line. If it’s teachers or any other union, like I would love to go be a part of it. There’s a really amazing feeling of community. So that’s been very exciting.

[00:54:19] Jameela Do you feel hopeful about everything that everyone’s fighting for?

[00:54:24] Megan Absolutely. That is a great question because it’s something that, you know, kind of comes up. A lot of people are like, how long is the strike going to last? And the the answer is we do not know. The last time in 2007, it lasted 100 days. I think we’re all preparing for at least that length, which would take us through the summer. But. The thing is, is we are not the ones, as I said before, who want to be doing this. The ball is really in the studio’s courts to be like. What do you what is your end game with this? But to answer your question of whether or not I’m hopeful, I am like such a cynical bitch and I am like incredibly hopeful about this because the feeling of, again, not just the writers, but kind of all the guilds is so passionate and intense that we need to be doing this and that. You know, we had to the writers had to authorize a strike before it happened. We all had to vote on like. If negotiations break down, are you willing to step away and strike for as long as you need to? And we got a 98% supportive vote for the strike confirmation, which is like an unreal amount of solidarity for a union that big. It’s like thousands of people standing together. And I can tell you this from just like being there on the front lines. People are so fucking mad and are ready to do this as long as they need to. Now, of course, that is such a huge question mark because like we are people, we all have families to support and rent and, you know, any number of other things. And it’s like at some point we individual people run out of money when you do not have a job. So like, there’s a lot of uncertainty and scariness for everyone at all walks of their life. But it the resolve has not wavered at all. And I find that very inspiring.

[00:56:44] Jameela Well thank you for all of this information. I know that people have been messaging me for two weeks now asking for more clarity on the on the situation and why it’s important, what it pertains to. And I really appreciate you for being so clear and frank about all of this. And I will see you on the picket line. And just from me to you, I want to say thank you for all your great writing, because most of the best things I’ve ever said with my mouth have come from your brain. And I really appreciate it. I appreciate the work writers do, and I stand in solidarity with all of you forever.

[00:57:25] Megan Well, you know, if this strike just allowed me to have a wonderful conversation with you for an hour, it was all worth it. And I am honored to have spoken like an expert about something I barely understand.

[00:57:39] Jameela Megan Amram, thank you for coming.

[00:57:41] Megan Thank you.