Courtney Kemp: Why I am running for the WGA board
I want a strong, united Writers Guild for the fight ahead.
When I joined this Guild in 2004, I was the luckiest staff writer in the world. The Bernie Mac Show hired me off a spec episode and a pitch meeting, and I was overwhelmed — with both the paycheck and the other benefits my union provided: health insurance, a pension, RIGHTS. It was in the MBA that I could not be paid less than other writers because of my race or gender. The minimums working on a broadcast show were more money than I had ever dreamed of making, and that check — and the green envelopes that followed — changed my life, as did the health insurance that helped me bring my daughter into the world, even when I had a seizure as I went into labor and had to be hospitalized for a week. I was protected.
Writers have never received the respect we deserve in this industry. We’re not on the covers of magazines, we’re not wearing designers on the red carpet (usually), and we’re often shoved aside or lowballed in the process of making a deal. This is true in both television and in film, but our screenwriter membership suffers more often from requests for free rewrites, late or missing pay, and credit-theft of the highest order. Our Guild is for writers of all media, and that’s important to consider as we move forward together in strength. In television, we are in a grand age, where writers are gaining more power than ever. We should be walking into the next AMPTP negotiation in the strongest position in history.
But we’re not.
Instead, over the last year, our Guild leadership has pursued a renegotiation of the AMBA with the ATA, a campaign that has been fruitless, costly, and threatens to be endless. The lack of transparency and accountability has been appalling. I was asked as many of you were, to vote YES so the Leadership would have leverage in negotiation. I did. Then they did not negotiate. I was told a lawsuit was a last resort. The decision to file was swift. I aired my concerns again and again, and again and again I was patted on the head and dismissed. It felt far too familiar. A new version of governance has swept the land, and this Leadership has conformed, using obfuscation and diversion to compel obedience from the membership. I believe that the campaign was, from the beginning, about jurisdiction over writers. But had that been stated openly and clearly, I think that would have been a worthwhile discussion. Instead, agents and agencies were vilified, used as a scapegoat for a bigger problem — our Guild has little to no role in the employment of writers. We should examine that and if elected, I commit to doing so.
From the beginning, I was outspoken about the dangers of this campaign to women, people of color, and LGBTQIA writers, those that often need agents to advocate on their behalf just to get into the room. My pleas fell on deaf ears. I begged this leadership to reconsider, to present us with a plan that did not include firing our agents before staffing season. The leadership, many of whom were on overall deals (as I am), moved forward with the plan anyway. If the firings were necessary, we could have done it in June, right before development season, when the agencies would have lost out on potential new packages. Instead the membership — especially the younger membership, just breaking into the business — lost out on jobs. Showrunners asked me how to find writers of color or women because they “didn’t know anyone.” When these showrunners became frustrated, they hired their friends, maintaining the status quo. I have spoken to younger writers of color who are lost, not knowing where to send their scripts or how to make connections. They were told to hire managers. That’s not an answer. They were told this was being done for their futures. Potentially, if a great deal had been negotiated, that could have been so. But there has been little negotiation and there is currently no deal. Instead, time marches on, and the gains that our younger membership may have made under a deal remain potential. The next AMPTP deal is real, though. It is real, actual and direct to their pockets — and we cannot fail.
The end of the green envelope. The end of back end.
I’m sure you’ve noticed, as broadcast networks play repeat episodes less and less, that you’ve been getting less residuals. I’m sure, if you’ve negotiated with some of the big streaming outlets, that they’ve offered you an upfront buyout instead of a piece of your back end. That’s where the business is headed overall. The Companies are looking actively to “buy us out” up front, so they don’t have to share profits with us and they don’t have to pay us for re-use. And they will never have to tell us the truth about the value of our content. They will own your intellectual property outright and forever. As my eight-year-old daughter would say — no backsies. And that’s an issue worth striking over. We must protect our ownership of our material at all costs. We must be prepared to strike if it comes to it. I’ve been told, and it may not be true, that the current leadership thinks that if we don’t agree with their action, we don’t support writers and we don’t support a strike. Far from it, in my case, and the case of my fellow concerned candidates. I climbed up the side of a tractor-trailer in 2007 during the strike as the teamsters crossed our picket lines. I’m older now and my right hip is tricky, but I’ll do it again to protect us and fight for our rights.
We need our union to protect the rights of ALL writers.
I am passionate about underrepresented writers: women, writers of color, and LGBTQIA writers. When I started in 2004, issues of diversity and inclusion were barely discussed. I was hired by innovators in the field, people who actually wanted diverse voices in their rooms. Even so, I was “blackapedia” and “blacktionary” on several shows in the beginning of my career — the only person of color and/or the only woman in the writers’ room. When I have come to Guild meetings — especially showrunner meetings — I am saddened by how little things have changed. We have so far to go in this Guild to achieve real inclusion, to have writing staffs and those hired for features truly represent the population.
A brief story: when I got pregnant with my daughter, I was working at The Good Wife. Robert and Michelle King gave me twelve weeks off for maternity leave. And my job was waiting for me when I returned. CBS didn’t do that. Robert and Michelle did. It was their choice. But the Guild should mandate those protections. It doesn’t.
The Guild does not provide protections for working parents, guidelines for inclusionary hiring, or even a space for interpersonal conflict resolution. If a young writer feels he is being discriminated against by his showrunner because he’s gay, where does he go? How can his showrunner learn to change his/her/their behavior? Where is the course for current showrunners on how to handle discrimination within the writers’ room? Or simply, how to run a functional, creative writers’ room without creating an unsafe working environment? Where is the conversation with feature writers about how to handle tokenism and discrimination with hiring, rewrites and credit?
Currently, we leave all of that up to the companies and their human resource departments. Maybe it’s time to tend our own gardens and not let the establishment — which has no real interest in our welfare — pretend to protect us. I would like to advocate for a new focus in Guild programs, to add support where we need more and to foster more of a sense of community across special interest groups.
A wider road to the future.
The Guild must support and protect its least powerful members — especially in the upcoming negotiation, where so much is at stake. This Leadership has not demonstrated the openness or willingness to communicate that is required at the time of the strike. In 2007, I was a young writer, but I remember we had almost constant communication from our Guild about our progress, our needs, and what the AMPTP was willing and unwilling to do. When that NegComm walked out of negotiations, I understood why. It’s been twelve years and I’ve been running a show for six, and I don’t have any idea why our current Leadership abandoned the negotiating table. Do you? Well, if we go into the AMPTP negotiation with no change, you certainly won’t. Only now, your mortgage, your kids’ school tuition, and your career will be at stake. Companies are buying foreign formats at record speed. Our position of privilege among the world’s writers is going away. The business is global and we are becoming replaceable. We have no time to waste.
We have no choice. The time is now. The fight is real.
This leadership has squandered an opportunity — with a united Guild, we could have stood tall and demanded more from the Companies. The DGA is already in communication with the Companies, beginning to hammer out a deal favorable to their needs. But we are mired in a struggle with the ATA that has no foreseeable end and no immediate benefit to the mid- and lower-level members of the Guild, and underrepresented writers. The push for inclusion and diversity over the last few years has been a revolution for me, and as a showrunner, I have seen agents on the front lines of this struggle, fighting with me side by side to get more money for female writers, more seats in the room for people of color, more advocacy across the board. There are issues with packaging, no doubt. I believe that the affiliate production arms of the Big Four agencies present a huge conflict of interest and should be sold off or dissolved. I believe that our agents should only make money when we make money, period. But I also believe that we must walk into the AMPTP negotiation next year with the ATA at our side. Agents have been part of the resolution of every negotiation — but this time, they are unmotivated to help. And this 2020 negotiation is the most important in our history to date.
I have been in this Guild for fifteen years and, as anyone can tell you, I’m a fighter. Let me fight for you and for your future. I’d love to resolve the next negotiation without a work stoppage — and maybe we can get there — together. But if we need to strike, we need to strike and win. This leadership is yet to demonstrate the ability to win. Let’s turn the page, get everyone on board, and walk together to victory.
— Courtney Kemp
