My optimism about all things, if examined closely, is pathological.
Thank God.
This broken part of my brain comes from too scary a place to think much about— having to do with Daddys, drugs, and hamming it up to make sure everyone’s happy—but, like many unexpected turns of fate since my own family and I relocated to California, it’s turned out that the most broken parts of me are the most valuable to Hollywood’s marketplace.
Everything’s going to be okay.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” I would say, standing on a beach as a 400 foot tsunami approached.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” I will say, while dying.
Oh, to be born in California. That’s a strange saying that comes from deep down inside my wife’s Italian immigrant ancestry. It took me a really long time to understand that it meant, to them, that California was the best place to live, but you weren’t allowed to live there unless you were from there, because you weren’t allowed to ever leave where you started because it meant you were ungrateful.
My experience as a showrunner from 2017-2022 was an exercise in incredibly novel ways of self-gaslighting; of convincing myself that I was the crazy one, and that in fact, though every instinct inside of me kept screaming that something very weird and unusual was happening above me in the power-system, during my day-to-day communications with my employers, I was the likely the problem.
Whether it was because I was too strident, at times, or too obsequious at others, it was probably my wavering sense of “good” and “not good” that kept creating instability; it was my unsteady hand at the wheel that made chaos happen on my sets, or endangered the quality of life of my crews. It was my entitlement that was wildly demanding too much, like a baby might, like extending a writer now and then; it was my wackadoo Supervising Producer Who Was Elevated Too Fast And Didn’t Get It, experience-wise, that meant millions upon millions of dollars might potentially be lost.
Fuck. That.
You learn a lot from all the mistakes you make as a showrunner; if you’re paying attention, you learn quickly that you’re making mistakes you can’t see, and it’s your fault you can’t see them, and you best repair your vision ASAP unless you want your show gutted, or taken over, or replaced by someone else. And while I could write 100,000 words about the ways I have made mistakes along the way—real mistakes— or all the blindspots I wasn’t aware of that led to problems I could have nipped in the bud, the last couple weeks of this strike’s “negotiations” have been quite clarifying:
Our employers actually do really fucking hate us.
This is irrational. This is systems. Anytime you personify the lurching, golem-like conversations between institutions, you’re making a mistake. It’s not personal at all, right? We’re talking about numbers, and we’re talking about percentages of profits.
This couldn’t possibly, under any circumstance, be personal.
Everybody’s made too much money for this to be personal.
What’s becoming clear is that it weirdly, weirdly is.
I actually think the ongoing and unyielding solidarity of the WGA, which is rife with different bands and strata of people with dissenting perspectives, is a good indication that for the writers, it fundamentally isn’t personal. It’s business. We’re extremely valuable, just like IATSE and the DGA and SAG, and we’d like the math to reflect that.
What’s become so apparent is how irrational and emotionalized the larger business entities we’re negotiating against have become.
The timeline of the AMPTP’s communication, reactions, and bizarre feints and stabs toward the current conversation remind me more of… well, sorry, but the dynamics of an abusive family system.
This is not news to anyone—at any level— who’s worked in our business for the last five years.
A small amount of people got really rich and really powerful in a really short amount of time, and they lost perspective.
And hey! This, actually, is what all the young writers who were empowered as creators and showrunners over the last five years were accused of, and dismissed for, as they were desperately trying to hold the reins of their bucking bronco shows.
Here we are in 2023, and the artists, for the most part, are the calm and sane ones.
The artists are the adults in the room.
If I were a shareholder in any of these corporations, I would be asking how this could have possibly fucking happened.