Currently, the Writer’s Guild of America is on strike for a number of reasons, all of them perfectly valid: better pay in general, better streaming residuals specifically, better pensions and health benefits, and strictly regulating the use of AI for writing scripts. And they’re battling the mini-room — when a show tries to save money by hiring just a few writers and works them hard for an abbreviated period of pre-greenlight time rather than hiring a reasonable number of writers and keeping them hired for, y’know, as long as it takes to make the show. The WGA is arguing for minimum staffing of the writer’s room based on the size and duration and such of the production.
Obviously, there has been pushback from the AMPTP (the producers’ union, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) — they’re unwilling to negotiate at all on this point. And during the accompanying general debate, a (n on the surface, at least) reasonable question has been raised: Why does someone get to dictate to the show how many writers have to be on staff at a given time, if they think they can operate just fine with fewer? Where’s the creative freedom in all this? And why do the writers feel entitled to longer-term employment?
The problem is that it goes beyond the number of writers the showrunner thinks they need at a given time. It’s about knowingly understaffing for purposes of cheaping out, knowing precisely how much writing work is needed throughout the production process and also knowing how much of it they can load onto the writers in an artificially limited amount of time and how much of it they can pawn off onto some already-overworked assistant or script coordinator who doesn’t have the professional capital to complain about it, without paying them more for the extra work. (And, in the near future, how much of it can be pawned off onto AI.) Technically legal, yes, but dirty, and historically, a main function of unions is to clean up the technically-legal-but-dirty stuff on behalf of their members. (And, for the record, such a mandate isn’t without precedent — the Directors Guild of America has similar terms in their contracts.)
Just standing alone, the argument makes sense: Screw you, pay your damn writers. But it’s also backed up by logic: Productions need writers on set.
Now, I won’t pretend to have a huge ton of experience in this area — I’m not a full-time screenwriter, I’m an advertising copywriter whose job sometimes involves writing for screen. But I do happen to have just a tiny amount of screenwriting experience for digital series, to the extent that I know firsthand how crucial it is to have a writer on set during shooting. And it probably sounds funny coming from me, since I have been (and continue to be) such a vocal proponent of remote work. But there are some things that don’t really do well remote. (Not the things the return-to-office zealots are always blathering about — yes, you can collaborate creatively and mentor underlings and also celebrate people’s birthdays whilst remaining remote — but actual, substantive things.) And for a writers and producers, that writer being on set during shooting of their script is pretty important.
I want to make it clear that my personal experience in this area, though sufficient to give me a solid understanding of why this is so important, is vastly insignificant compared to that of the people actually currently on the picket line, fighting for their livelihoods. But luckily, you don’t have to take my word for it. This list wouldn’t be possible without the unknowing contributions of John Rogers (Leverage, Marry Me, et al), Albert Kim (Nikita, Sleepy Hollow, et al), Sera Gamble (You, The Magicians, et al), and every single member of every single production team I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. So here we go: five reasons — beyond “screw you, pay your damn writers” — it’s really important to have writers on set.
1. Shit happens.
The scene is set outside, but whoops! It’s raining, and it’s going to be raining for the next two weeks (spring in Birmingham, amiright?), and you can’t put off shooting this scene for two weeks, so inside it goes. Or you had a nice, battered, dystopian-looking location all arranged, but whoops! The building just got condemned. Or your scene had two characters talking quietly whilst slow dancing, but whoops! One of the actors got drunk the night before and dislocated their knee falling off a hijacked Bird scooter and is going to be delivering all lines from a seated position for the near future. You’re not in “minor script tweak” territory, you’re in “holy shit, rewrite” territory, and it has to happen fast, and with full knowledge of what you now have to work with. Accept no substitutes — particularly not a substitute who’s actually a script coordinator or showrunner’s assistant doing hasty script rewrites for no extra pay on top of all the other work they had on their plate already.
2. Actors are humans.
Some of them might tell you otherwise, but actors are human beings, made of human meat driven by human brains. Much of thee time — most of the time? — they’re happy to deliver the lines as written. (God, I could tell you some stories about some really awesome ones I’ve worked with…) From time to time, you’ll have an actor who doesn’t want to deliver a line as written. Or one who ad libs, and it’s so good you wish you’d written it that way to begin with and know in your heart it has to stay (or, alternately, they ad lib and it sucks but the director wants it to stay anyway). Or who reads the line, but with an inflection or emotion that completely changes the meaning of the line, even if the words stay the same. Having a writer on set to make all the cascading changes that can come from one minor line tweak is crucial.
3. The writer knows what the script sounds like.
The person who wrote the script knows what they intended, what it sounded like in their head while they were writing it. They know what they were trying to say, even if that isn’t precisely reflected in the actual words of the text. And nobody who wasn’t in their head at the time knows it exactly. Obviously, the director and actors get their own creative freedom to interpret the script as they will — this is a team sport. But if a line doesn’t seem to make sense, or isn’t really reading right, it’s good to have the person who wrote it in the first place readily available to be able to say, “Try it with the emphasis on first instead of on thing,” and the actor tries it that way and it clicks and suddenly everything is better and the shoot is back on track, or the writer tweaks the line to make more sense and suddenly everything is better and the shoot is back on track.
4. Continuity is continuous.
With TV in particular, you’re looking at a long run of episodes written by, generally, one writers room, often directed by any number of individuals coming in sometimes just for an episode or two. That makes the writers the greatest source of continuity in the production — the ones who know everything that’s happened and everything that’s going to happen. And someone needs to. Because if Famous Director Doing a Favor for a Friend decides a character needs to throw their hat in the fire in a righteous frenzy, but that hat is going to be the clue to someone’s marital infidelity three episodes from now in a script that’s already being developed, you need to have someone on set who knows what’s going to happen three weeks from now and can clue the director in and help find a suitably dramatic alternative to the hat in the fireplace.
Or an actor throws in an ad lib or a line reading that throws us into screwing-us-over-three-weeks-from-now territory. Or the actor decides their character’s backstory involves growing up in poverty when a script they haven’t gotten a chance to read yet will reference all the polo they used to play with their dad. Or, for that matter, an actor delivers one of those so-good-it-has-to-stay line readings that could have an impact on the story moving forward. Someone has to know the future, and that someone is probably going to be the one who wrote it.
5. Writers who’ve been on set become better writers.
I don’t think it’s too terribly self-congratulatory to say that I’ve always had a pretty good ear for dialogue and have generally written pretty good scripts. But actually being on set for the first time during a video shoot, and then all the times I’ve been on set since, has made a huge difference. Watching an entire production team interacting with that script, watching the actors run lines, having to answer questions about something you wrote, making edits on the fly — it changes the way you write. It gives you a whole perspective and a whole new toolkit to work with. Hell, it teaches you exactly how long the lines you wrote actually take to deliver, and how long they take to shoot, and how the actors get really grumpy when you put too many consonants in a row. If you have screenwriters who are good and you feel you’d benefit from having screenwriters who are really good, make sure your good writers are on set while their scripts are being shot. And if you want your production to run efficiently, make sure your writers get to be on set to see how things run and how the way they write can contribute to that efficiency.
Bonus Reason 6. Shooting stuff is expensive.
Shooting stuff costs money, and that’s whether it’s a movie, a big TV series, a dinky little local sketch show, or a three-minute brand video. You know what costs even more money? Reshoots, because the actor threw the hat into the fireplace as instructed and there wasn’t a writer on set to stop them and now it’s three episodes later and there’s no hat. Scenes that take forever to shoot because an actor keeps stumbling over two lines in the script. Scenes that could have been shot in two setups but instead take four because the writer had never been on a set before and didn’t know exactly what it was going to take to shoot that scene as written. A production can’t not afford to avoid those ridiculously expensive screwups.
tl;dr: The money you’re saving in not having to worry about slowdowns, delays, and reshoots far outweighs the amount of money you’re paying a writer to actually be on set while shooting, instead cutting them loose the moment the show gets greenlit because you think you can go it alone..
Real tl;dr: Pay your damn writers.
So anyway, yeah, if you’re hearing about shooting delays on some of your favorite shows, or if they’re currently off the air entirely, that’s why.
In my post about not being afraid of AI copywriting, I did include one AI-related threat to my future employment: clients who don’t actually understand what I actually do for a living and think it’s not worth paying for me. This is adjacent to that, but even more egregious, because the people making these decisions are fully aware of what their screenwriters actually do for a living and are trying to save money off the writers’ backs regardless.
Writers need to be part of the full production process, writers need to be on set, and writers need to be paid for the work they do. And hopefully, the AMPTP will come around to that conclusion sooner or later. Hopefully-hopefully sooner, for the sake of everyone involved.