As the Hollywood writers strike rages on—and with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) having joined the WGA in the fray in July—the stakes for the future of the entertainment industry have never been higher. Writers and actors want fair pay and assurances that artificial intelligence won’t be taking their jobs, among other things; some industry insiders reportedly believe that the studio executives are “going to let it bleed out.” How we got here is anything but straightforward, thanks to AI, the rise of streaming platforms, and a new wave of tech execs who are now running Hollywood.
Cord Jefferson is a journalist-turned-TV writer who’s intimately familiar with the changes roiling his industry. Since leaving a job at Gawker in 2014 to embark on a career in television, Jefferson has worked on some of the biggest shows out like Succession, The Good Place, and Master of None, before winning an Emmy for his stellar “This Extraordinary Being” episode of HBO’s Watchmen series in 2020.
Last month, GQ reached out to Jefferson for his view of the writers’ strike, what he sees him and his colleagues as having lost in the last several years, and his own journey through the Hollywood development system. “I stand in total solidarity with the actors, who are making it clear that we’re all in this together,” he added in a follow up after the SAG walked off. “The specifics of our strikes are different, but the similarity is that we’re both fighting for the existence of our careers as we know them.”
Cord Jefferson: Strikes are hard, nobody wants to strike. I have an overall deal at Warner Brothers that’s been suspended, so I’m no longer being paid from that. And I’m on the picket lines and just doing what everybody else is doing: showing up to picket.
I know that the photos from the picket lines and stuff may make it seem like it’s a social event, like a happy hour and people are having a good time. And yeah, there is something nice about being out there and feeling that solidarity with the Guild. But at the end of the day, the reality is that underneath all of that is pain. People aren’t getting paid anymore, and people are worried about paying their rent or for their kids’ school—and people are worried about whether or not they will be able to exist as a writer in this industry after this is all over.
People know at every level in the Guild—from showrunner level on down to just baby staff writers and pre-WGA people—that this is an existential threat for all of us. It’s not just that one section of the Guild is in more trouble than the others, it’s a real fight for everybody.
Yeah, I was not around [for] the last strike, but from what I’ve heard from people who were, this one does feel different. There were some sort of divisions, I think, back then amongst people in the Guild. And there were, I think, some divisions where people in other guilds were annoyed that the writers were going on strike. Because a strike has repercussions for everybody in this industry, whether or not you’re on strike. But this time around it feels like there’s just real solidarity in all aspects of the industry. It feels like a real group effort and I think that that’s because people realize that this isn’t just a problem for writers.
They are trying to exploit people’s labor for as cheaply as possible in every facet of American life these days. I don’t blame it on any one thing, but I think that the tech ethos of efficiency and growth at all costs is bleeding into every aspect of culture and life. People are realizing that, to these technocrats, human beings are inefficient. They’re working to get rid of human beings and to utilize our labor and skill for as cheaply as possible, in an effort to boost their stock price another half percent.
Yeah, man. I was a journalist when I was working at Gawker and in 2014 I left Gawker to go work on a TV show. And my very first job, I was getting paid less money than I had been paid at Gawker, blogging. Not only was I being paid less as far as my weekly rate, but once you get into this industry, then you have to pay 10 percent to your manager, and then you pay 10 percent to your agent, then you pay five percent to your lawyer.
So if you have those three entities looking out for you, then 25 percent of your check goes away immediately. That’s before taxes, before anything. And so when you’re first starting out and trying to scrape together a career in this industry, there’s people that are struggling and it is not glamorous. It is a grind, and you’re working really hard for very long hours trying to make something good.
I was working on a show called Survivor’s Remorse. Mike O’Malley was the showrunner, and he knew that I was having a rough go of it and he invited me over to his home and he wrote me a personal check for $5,000.
Because he was like, “You worked hard, you deserve this.” And I wasn’t getting a script fee because I was such a brand new writer and I wasn’t in the Guild yet. It was one of the kindest things anybody’s ever done for me, and I remember it to this day. But I had left Gawker for TV and all these people thought, as you said, that it was some glamorous gig. But meanwhile, I got to go to my boss’s house for handouts because I’m not getting paid that much. That’s the reality for so many writers.
And that was almost a decade ago—things have gotten even worse. There was a young Black writer who talked about writing for The Bear, which was nominated for Best New Show at the Writers Guild Awards. And the night that he attended the awards ceremony, he went there with a negative bank balance and then he won. In what world is that a reasonable situation? And that is an incredibly common story. There are a lot of people who have bartending gigs, they leave their writers room and then they go work as a waiter, or a bartender, or some other gig job.There are people driving Ubers because they can’t scrape together enough money from a TV writing job.
And meanwhile, you have the executives in this industry paying themselves 50, 60, 250 million dollars a year. It’s not like Netflix sells cars and food. They sell one thing, and all of it has a writer involved in some way.
My second job ever was The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and that was the first show that I ever started getting residuals for, because they replayed episodes once or twice a day. Obviously my weekly rate was great, but on top of the weekly rate we had residuals. And that is something that I haven’t really had since. That used to be a huge pot of money for television writers: if you wrote for Seinfeld or The Simpsons or whatever, when that was replayed, you’re getting residuals for that work.
You can have written an episode of television that goes on Netflix or some other streamer, and you have literally hundreds of millions of people watching it, and you are not getting any residuals whatsoever. Or rather, the residuals that you are getting are a fraction of a fraction of what you used to get. I have a friend who said one episode of television they wrote 20 years ago, which they’re still getting residuals for, accounted for more money than anything that they’ve written for streamers since. That money allowed people to have a steady income and to have a comfortable lifestyle. And nowadays, that just doesn’t exist anymore.
Absolutely. It’s like, VC people came in from Silicon Valley and started saying, “Okay, we need to get into news, and we need to get into media, and online content.” So they started pumping money into BuzzFeed and all these other websites, and it’s this perpetual growth mindset. They expect to make more money every single quarter for the rest of history, or for as long as this entity exists. And they weren’t concerned about quality, they weren’t concerned about their employees, they weren’t concerned about the people who were doing the work for them, it was just purely about growth at all costs.
It’s this idea that we need to be everywhere. And that’s not how you make news. That’s not how you make art. That’s not how you invest in actual creativity.
Yeah, exactly. It’s always been risky to be an artist, for most people. Obviously there’s a lot of rich kids in art, and so there’s less risk for them. But if you’re an average person, there’s no guarantee in the work. And that’s always been the case. Nobody is saying that we think that artists deserve guaranteed income, although that would be a nice idea, but that’s not what the Guild is saying. What the Guild is saying is that in success, we should be compensated for the work that we’ve done.
I think that ultimately what we were asking for was [less than] two percent of their profits. If they were to concede to every single thing we were asking for, every single thing, it would cost them two percent of their profits. And they’re unwilling to part with two percent to end this strike. They could end the strike tomorrow and it would barely put a dent in their revenue streams and they just are unwilling to do that.
No, it’s not crazy to think that. We started writing Watchmen in September 2017. Then I left to work on a new season of The Good Place, and then I went and worked on Succession. Then after that I came back to Watchmen to work for another five or six months. All together, we were probably in that writers room for about a year, if not a little bit more.
Nine episodes of television. And it’s because we got time to work on it and it’s because we got time to really think about it. And that, to me, was necessary for that show. I don’t think all shows need a year, but when you give people more time, you give people the resources to make something good, they’re going to do it. I promise you, if you tried to compress the creation of Watchmen into 10 weeks and on the backs of four or five writers who are exhausted all the time because they’re not getting any sleep because they’re constantly trying to figure out how they’re going to write this show in 10 weeks, you’re not going to get the show that we made. You just aren’t.
I can’t imagine that that’s fun for those people who have those jobs, and it’s especially not fun for the writers. It’s just that people are exhausted, people are running out of money, people are feeling creatively unfulfilled. People are feeling undervalued, people are feeling disrespected.
Remember when they were making Quibi? I remember one of the heads over there, Vulture asked her what her favorite television show was, and she couldn’t name one. She had to think really hard. And then she eventually came up with a show called Grant that was on the History Channel about Ulysses S. Grant. And that’s fine—TV’s not for everybody, film isn’t for everybody. That’s fine if your interests lie elsewhere. But why are you in this business then? Why are you in this business if you don’t actually value and appreciate what this business is about?
When I find myself rewatching old shows, I’m like everybody else: I rewatch The Office, I rewatch The Sopranos, I rewatch Mad Men. I’m not re-watching stuff that was made in the past two or three years.
Exactly! Well, not only is it being overwhelmed, but then if you do pick something new, it’s likely that it’s going to get canceled a year after you get into it because they don’t want to pay the actors, writers, and directors more money for success. So they’ll have a show that’s on for two or three seasons and it’s like, “Well, this is going to get too expensive, so it’s done. It’s over.”
When I started working in TV, a boss of mine told me, “The thing that distinguishes television from film is that people literally invite you into their homes. They’re on their couch, they’re in their sweatpants, they’re vulnerable, they’re not out. And they return to these cast of characters week after week, they literally invite you into their home week after week, year after year.” And there’s a reason that people love The Office, it’s because they started to feel like those characters were their friends, and they wanted to check in with them from week after week.
And I think that the investment that people make in those things is no longer rewarded because even if you do invest in something and it’s successful, they might just say, “We’re done with this.”
I was in a meeting a couple years ago and I remember an executive saying to me, “We’re really looking for our Bridgerton.” And it’s like, how are you not embarrassed to talk like this?
I think we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel with the IP boom, too. I remember reading that New York Times Magazine piece a few years ago when The Emoji Movie was coming out and they were doing this piece about people just trying to find IP from anywhere that they could try to turn into a movie or TV show. And I remember reading about these guys who were trying to break Fruit Ninja, which, that’s just a disembodied hand chopping fruit, and they were trying to figure out how to make a Fruit Ninja movie.
There’s such an aversion to new ideas. That’s another one of the reasons why there’s been an erosion of quality. They’re no longer making an ecosystem that allows the David Chases and the David Simons of the world to grow. They’re no longer creating an environment in which you could have the next Shonda Rhimes or Mike Schur.
The way that those people became good is they worked up the ranks. They started low on the totem pole and they learned from the people before them. We’re not given the time nor the money to grow under [young] people and actually learn how to be a good showrunner, and how to make television, and how to make films.
Exactly. And on The Office under Greg Daniels you have Mike Schur, Mindy Kaling, and B.J. Novak. And you have all these people who are writers there. You have Gene Stupnitsky, and I’m forgetting his writing partner’s name, but those guys are showrunners now and making movies. From Parks and Rec, you have Jen Statsky who does Hacks. Now you have Megan Amram who now does the Pitch Perfect show on Peacock. It is a place where you really learn how to do the job and you go off and make things of your own, and you flourish in that way. And now those opportunities are becoming rarer and rarer.
I was confident that it wasn’t going to happen until the very last minute. I have therapy every Tuesday morning, and we knew the strike was going to happen on Monday night. And so I woke up on Tuesday morning and went to therapy, my therapist asked how I was feeling. And then I said that it almost felt like when Donald Trump was elected—I was sure that Donald Trump wasn’t going to win. I was so confident he was going to lose by a landslide because in my mind, I know that there are people in this country who believe differently than I do, I know there are people who have much different values than I have. And despite all that, I thought that they would look at Donald Trump and just say, “Look, I’m a conservative, but that’s not the guy. I can’t bring myself to vote for that man.”
And the thing that made me feel confident that the strike wasn’t going to happen was that I thought that people were going to say, “Okay, you know what? We make billions of dollars. Our CEOs are living ridiculously extravagant lives. And it is absurd that being the case, that we are flourishing in abundance and the people who help us make our only product cannot afford to live, cannot afford to house themselves, cannot afford to feed themselves, cannot afford to put their children through school.” I thought that somebody would say, “That’s wrong. It’s wrong that that’s the case, and we can part with two percent of our revenue in order to make this a viable career for human beings.”
I really thought that that would win the day, I really did. So I told that to my therapist and he was like, “Denial is a very strong emotion.” And he was like, “You have been living in denial about these things and you’re in denial about the fact that people don’t care.”
And I don’t want to lose my optimism, I think that I still feel optimistic. I really believe in the Guild’s cause and I think we’re going to win, but that was a painful wake-up call at the start of all this.