PRESS

PRESS

“We are living in the wildest imaginations of a few billionaires.”

“The question coming out of this strike is, how do we turn this moment into a movement? This is a new generation. There is a new wave in Hollywood. If you truly believe in a better world, that better world can come. It’s not inevitable; it takes labor. We have the ability to build the world that we’ve always wanted to live in.”

For newer writers, there’s a sense of having shown up at the party too late. Alex O’Keefe, who is twenty-eight, grew up poor in Florida and worked as a speechwriter for the senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and as Green New Deal campaign director before getting staffed on FX’s “The Bear.” “It should be this beautiful rags-to-riches story, right?” he told me. “Unfortunately, I realized not all that glitters is gold.”

During his nine weeks working in the writers’ room for “The Bear,” over Zoom, he was living in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with no heat; sometimes his space heater would blow the power out, and he’d bring his laptop to a public library. (He was never flown to set.) He thought that he was making a lot of money, but, after reps’ fees and taxes, it didn’t add up to much. “It’s a very regular-degular, working-class existence,” he said. “And the only future I’m seeking financially is to enter that middle class, which has always been rarified for someone who comes from poverty.”

Last month, “The Bear” won the W.G.A. Award for Comedy Series. O’Keefe went to the ceremony with a negative bank account and a bow tie that he’d bought on credit. He’s now applying for jobs at movie theatres to prepare for the potential strike. “A lot of people assume that, when you’re in a TV writers’ room, you sit around a table, and you just dream together,” he said. “With ‘The Bear,’ I learned from these masters that, if you are given a shit sandwich, you can dress that up and make it a Michelin-star-level dish. And they were consistently given shit sandwich after shit sandwich.” He recalled one of the executive producers apologizing to him. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry this is your first writers’-room experience, because it’s not usually like this. It shouldn’t be like this.’ I don’t even know the alternative. I thought we would be treated more like collaborators on a product. It’s like an assembly line now.”

A lot of people in Hollywood saw this work as a white-collar, high-status career. But we’re seeing that the CEOs and their shareholders don’t see a writer from The Bear any differently than they see Chris Smalls from the Amazon Labor Union. We are their enemy. When they said that they’re going to keep this strike going until we start to lose our homes, we realized, oh, we’re just as precarious as anyone else out here in America.

No one really knows what it means for the future of Hollywood, if we’re going to keep this kind of solidarity in our culture, but it’s made an imprint on the minds of all the culture workers of America. Everyone who has written everything from a Marvel movie to a kids’ show has had this experience of, “Wow, my power is in the collective, it’s in my union.” I think that will ultimately change the culture, even if there’s a lot of resistance from the studios...

Late last night, the Writers Guild of America announced they have reached a tentative agreement with the Hollywood studios. The union’s negotiating committee is calling the deal “exceptional,” but it’s now up to rank-and-file writers to vote on it.

“Thank god for democratic unions willing to fight and strike to save American industries from extinction,” says Alex O’Keefe, a writer for The Bear. “This strike has to be used again and again as the shiny Hollywood example of how to beat these global mega-corporations. We had a Hot Labor Summer; we need a season two next year. We need the workers of America to unionize and strike. And Hollywood needs to show up for them when they do.”