Joy Blake heard a deal was absolutely, positively nigh in early August, when the Writers Guild of America and the group that represents the major studios and streamers, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, seemed ready to resume negotiations. “I was hearing it from different groups of friends, and there was just this sudden sense of optimism,” says the showrunner. “I wanted to believe it as much as anybody, and I thought, We’re gonna get this all wrapped up! People were still planning pickets for the following week, and I was like, We’re never gonna make it to that—it’s gonna be done!” When a deal never materialized, Blake’s euphoria vaporized. “How many times am I going to be Charlie Brown with the football over here?”
Rumors have been whipping through Hollywood for months, filling entertainment industry workers with false hope, along with gossip to stoke their loathing of the corporate overlords with whom their guilds are locked in combat. Streamer Boss X says it’ll be over by August 15! … My friend’s exec at Studio Y heard they’ll have a deal by Labor Day! … Power Agent Z told his team it’ll be resolved by mid-September! This is real! After four divisive, debilitating months on strike for the writers and nearly two months for the actors, it’s hard for Hollywood creatives not to listen to anyone claiming to have intel, whether it’s delivered on a group text chain or in person on the picket line. The painful truth, though, is that Hollywood’s gossip mill has been slightly less reliable than a broken clock.
One comedy writer pinpoints August 11, the date of a short-lived negotiation session, as a high-water mark for strike gossip. “It was the most insane face-in-my-phone day of my life,” she says. The screen time monitor on her iPhone hit an 87% increase that day. “I was with another WGA friend and we were sitting around like it was election night: ‘Okay, it’s ending in an hour…. Oh, no, it took a turn, it’s really bad!’” She shares what she hears on three separate text chains with writer friends, each of whom has other chains too. Keeping up with the buzz has become an obsessive part-time job—which is nice, she quips, “because we’re all out of work.”
The gossip does prove true—or at least truth-adjacent—at times. “I heard at one point that [LA mayor] Karen Bass was going to step in and save it all…but isn’t she busy working on homelessness?” says the comedy writer. (It turns out Bass did have conversations with both AMPTP president Carol Lombardini and WGA chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman back in mid-August, and, as Bass told an industry newsletter, “I have been very clear that I’m more than willing to have people come into my office or residency to get things resolved.”) Other times, striking guild members trade gossip about which companies apparently care the least about resolving the conflict and are said to be holding up negotiations. But most of those I interviewed admitted that the original sources of these fiercely circulated tidbits were unknown to them, appearing amid a vacuum of authoritative information. WGA’s negotiating committee has kept a tight ship, issuing missives to members only when it has specific details to report—or when it has had occasion to rebut the AMPTP’s own public pronouncements. On August 22, the AMPTP released details of its counteroffer, seemingly intending to put pressure on the WGA’s leadership. The WGA in turn assured its members that this was an attempt “not to bargain, but to jam us. It is their only strategy—to bet that we will turn on each other.”
“When I hear rumors, they’re usually coming directly from friends who have just spoken with an agent or just spoken with an executive,” says WGA member Lila Byock. Like many striking writers, she parses them with some skepticism, since, she says, “There is no way at this point for the membership of the guild to take anything that’s coming from the studio side in good faith.”
Members of the SAG-AFTRA union walk a picket line with screenwriters outside of Paramount Studios in July.David McNew/Getty Images.
A writer-director who lives outside the hubs of New York and Los Angeles says the constant barrage of gossip can be disorienting, and that it unnecessarily heightens the already stratospheric tensions. “I have friends who are up on every rumor,” he says. “You don’t want to be constantly like, We might hear today! We might not! This is it! This isn’t it! If you are someone who is desperate to make your rent or mortgage or next car payment, rumors or no rumors, the stress level is going to be so freaking high. The constant search for information is itself a stressful thing.” He follows the official news updates from the WGA closely and believes the guild is doing a good job. “Strike captains are posting every day.”
A senior agency representative, who has been in the thick of things since the writers went on strike, concurs. “It hasn’t been good for morale,” he says. “The only thing worse than this [deal] taking so long is the dashed dreams.”
Even self-appointed fact-checkers can arguably have the counterproductive effect of reinforcing the falsehoods they’re trying to knock down. “You amplify what it was, even if you’re saying it’s not true,” the writer-director says. “It’s always like, ‘See! I told everyone to not believe such and such!’ And then I have to go back and see what the such and such was in the first place.”
It’s not just people on strike keeping the rumor mill turning. Agents, producers, and studio insiders are just as hungry for information. Some are getting intel from those directly in the know—and, by the way, there are very few people actually in the room where it’s happening, as the saying sort of goes—but plenty of others are playing a game of telephone with diminishing returns. “We are dealing with an industry where knowledge is power, and uncertainty is the devil,” says one writer. “Agents, for example, are absolutely losing their minds, because not only do they have nothing to do, they don’t have any currency to trade. The place where the most certainty is coming from—with the least credible reasons to have it—are agents who are telling me things like, ‘Not this week, but after Labor Day.’”
Why do people keep hearing that some studio execs are saying the strikes will be over soon when there’s no actual evidence of a thaw? Actor Nick Westrate, a SAG member, thinks it has to do with a certain brand of Silicon Valley “magical thinking”: “It might let you sell a bunch of stock, but we’re coming to a point now where [running a streamer] costs more than you want it to cost. Just saying that you’re going to give everyone a catalog of the history of cinema for $15 a month doesn’t make it true.”
Westrate’s own group texts are a mix of striking actors and writers trying to help each other read the tea leaves. He’s been startled by the strength of cross-union solidarity, crediting it to technology and the pandemic. “We learned how to organize, how to protest, how to communicate with each other, and skip the middlemen in the pandemic.”
Though they can be full of misinformation, text chains and social media have proved to be essential organizing tools during the strikes—tools that barely existed during the last writers strike in 2007-2008, when both Facebook and Twitter were in their infancy. Early this summer, WGA members and their allies used them to help shut down ongoing television and film productions in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Guild members like David Slack, Liz Hsiao Lan Alper, and Steven DeKnight maintain a steady presence on X, routinely putting details into context. Beyond these practical uses, Westrate says, “It also just helps spread joy. You see pictures of your friends or friends of friends meeting each other for the first time on the picket line, and you get excited.”
Grace and Frankie star Ethan Embry says that social media has also given him insight into the needs of other unions. “It helped me understand things like, Why did the [Directors Guild of America] approve their contract, and what are the dangers in that contract?” he says. “I didn’t understand mini-rooms until I sat on Twitter, and read a lot of conversations between [WGA] members. You get people high up in the guild with educated opinions tossing together a thread on social media without an intermediary. It’s straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Still, the most hard-core venting goes on behind closed doors, in text threads, private Facebook groups, and invite-only chat forums—and it can get pretty dark. During the WGA’s bitter standoff with the talent agencies in 2019, a schism developed inside the guilds between those who wanted to fire their agents and a faction who thought writers should focus on other issues. Conversations got heated, both at meetings and on social media. “The agency action was so poisonous within the guild that everybody had to go underground with any kind of opposing opinion they had,” one showrunner says now. A current topic that’s triggered some dissent is the guild’s demand for minimum staffing levels for writers rooms, but a few writers I spoke to had decided it was better to keep quiet on the issue rather than risk slowing down a deal.
Another TV writer quotes political reporter Olivia Nuzzi: “Dance like no one is watching; email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition.” In other words, assume that anything you write in a WhatsApp group or text thread might be whispered around Hollywood. “I just cannot put my thoughts in a text box without assuming—and viscerally feeling—that somebody’s screenshotting it.” Instead, the TV writer says, “It’s fun to gossip on the picket line with a random person I have never met before and never will never talk to again.”
Andy Greenwald is a member of a showrunner WhatsApp forum, but prefers to listen rather than gossip or kvetch. “I pay someone handsomely to talk about my anxiety weekly, so that aspect of it hasn’t really been for me,” he says. “What’s been interesting, and potentially industry-transforming, is that in the dearth of real-world, actionable news, a lot of the conversation is about how to fix things going forward, separate and apart from the strike.”
That includes issues like transparency and providing lower-level writers with the skills they need to move up the ladder. Greenwald talks about people he’s known in recent years who were given the dream opportunity to run their own show—but without the necessary experience. “They are set up to fail and the result of that is their dream is poisoned. And from a studio perspective, they end up having to start over and waste millions of dollars in the process. All of that is avoidable.”
It makes sense that people accustomed to spending their days dreaming up stories in communal writers rooms would now be sifting through clues in hopes of crafting an ending to their strike. “We’re all trained to think: Is this the second act or is this the third act?” says Blake, the showrunner. “What’s the twist? What’s the complication?”
The comedy writer says she and her friends are constantly trying to decode where each rumor might have originated. “I say, ‘Where did they hear it from?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, they’re friends with this person on the negotiating committee,’ or ‘It’s from my friend’s agent,’” she says with a chuckle. “I understand why gossip can be bad in this kind of situation, but it feels like a good use of my brain. We’re all atrophying away here, and it makes me feel alive.”
Gideon Yago, who was a journalist before moving to television drama series like The Newsroom and The Mosquito Coast, suggests that the turbulence of writers’ lives have prepared them for the uncertainty of strike life. “Your show falls apart or gets canceled or you lose a job for bullsh*t reasons, which happens all the time in this business because it’s so volatile,” he says. “The guilds have an advantage over the AMPTP, because the experience of working in the streaming wars for years has been so sh*tty—never getting paid on time, having development stretch for years without any reason or fees. I don’t think they realize how tough they made their opponents.”
When Yago first moved to Los Angeles, someone gave him the William Goldman book Adventures in the Screen Trade, with its famous line, “Nobody knows anything.” Yago kept it under his pillow so that he could calm himself down when he woke up panicking in the wee hours because of dubious information flying at him from all corners: “You’ve got to remind yourself all the time that nobody knows anything in this business, so you’ve got to find fixed stars to guide you, and then just hold on to your sanity.”
Additional reporting by Anthony Breznican and Natalie Jarvey
