Late night comedy shows CLOSED as Hollywood writers vote to strike

The union representing 11,500 Hollywood writers announced a strike at midnight on Monday.

Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers will all be off the air immediately. Fallon was at the Met Gala in New York City on Monday night.

The strike, announced by the Writers Guild of America, marks the first time in 15 years that production teams have shut down work.

The last strike lasted 100 days and cost Hollywood $2.1 billion.

During the 2007 strike, late night hosts eventually returned to the air and makeshift equipment. Jay Leno wrote his own monologues – a move that angered the union leadership.

Meyers, a union member, has been particularly vocal in his support of the writers.

‘I like writing. I like writing for TV. I love writing this show,” he said on Monday afternoon.

“I love that we come in with an idea for what we want to do each day and we work on it all afternoon and then I have the pleasure of coming here. No one is entitled to a job in show business.

‘But anyone who has a job is entitled to fair compensation. They are entitled to income.

“I think it’s a very reasonable demand made by the guild. And I support those demands.’

Other directly affected shows include Real Time with Bill Maher, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Saturday Night Live – which Pete Davidson was scheduled to host on Saturday, the final night of the season.

An SNL star told it deadline: ‘We also have to think about our crew.

“I absolutely support the writers and I want the writers to get what they deserve and need, but I don’t want our crew to be out of work. We can’t make this art without each other.’

The decision is the culmination of a months-long battle with studios over wages in the streaming era.

“The Board of Directors of the @WGAWest and the Board of the @WGAEast, acting upon the authority bestowed on them by their memberships, voted unanimously to declare a strike, effective Tuesday, May 2 at 00:01 am,” the union announced on Twitter.

They said the decision was made after six weeks of talks with Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount and Sony.

While our negotiating committee entered this process with the intention of reaching a fair deal, the studios’ responses have been wholly inadequate given the existential crisis writers face.

‘Tomorrow afternoon the picketing starts. #WGAStrong #WGAStrike’

In a statement, they said writers are facing an “existential crisis.”

“The companies’ behavior has created a gig economy within a unionized workforce, and their uncompromising stance in these negotiations betrays a commitment to further devalue the writing profession,” the WGA said in a statement.

“From their refusal to guarantee a certain level of weekly employment in episodic television, to creating a ‘daily rate’ in comedy variety, to their impediment of free work for screenwriters and of AI for all writers, they have closed the door for their workforce and opened the door to writing as a wholly freelance profession.

“Such a deal could never be considered by this membership.”

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the trade association that negotiates on behalf of studios and production companies, said Monday that negotiations did not reach an agreement until the current contract expired.

The AMPTP said it had made an offer that included “generous increases in writers’ compensation and improvements in streaming residuals.”

In a statement, the AMPTP said it was willing to improve its offering “but was unwilling to do so due to the magnitude of other proposals still on the table that the guild continues to press.”

The labor dispute can have a cascading effect on TV and film productions depending on how long the strike lasts.

But a shutdown has been widely predicted for months due to the scale of the discord.

The writers last month overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strikewith 98 percent of the membership in support.

It’s about how writers are compensated in an industry where streaming has changed the rules of the Hollywood economy.

Writers say they don’t get paid enough, TV writers’ rooms have shrunk too much and the old calculation for the payment of residues has to be re-established.

“The survival of our profession is at stake,” the guild said.

Streaming has exploded the number of series and films made each year, meaning more jobs for writers.

But WGA members say they earn much less and work under more tense conditions.

Showrunners on streaming series receive only 46 percent of the wages showrunners on broadcast series receive, the WGA claims.

The guild is looking for more compensation on the front end of deals.

Many of the back-end payments that writers have historically benefited from — such as syndication and international licensing — have largely been phased out by the onset of streaming.

More writers — about half — are getting minimum rates, a 16 percent increase over the past decade. The use of so-called mini-writers’ rooms has boomed.

The AMPTP said Monday that the main sticking points in a deal revolved around those mini-rooms — the guild aims for a minimum number of writers per writer’s room — and length-of-employment restrictions.

The guild has said more flexibility is needed for writers when contracted for series that tend to be more limited and short-lived than the once standard 20-plus episode broadcast season.

At the same time, studios are under increasing pressure from Wall Street to make a profit from their streaming services.

Many studios and production companies are cutting expenses.

The Walt Disney Co. is cutting 7,000 jobs.

Warner Bros. Discovery cuts costs to reduce its debt.

Netflix has been pumping the breaks on spending growth.

When Hollywood writers went on strike, it often lasted a long time.

In 1988, a WGA strike lasted 153 days. The last WGA strike lasted 100 days, starting in 2007 and ending in 2008.

It takes longer for scripted series and movies to be affected.

But if a strike continues throughout the summer, fall schedules could be upended.

And in the meantime, having writers unavailable for rewrites can have a dramatic effect on quality.

The James Bond film ‘Quantum of Solace’ was one of many films rushed into production during the 2007-2008 strike with what Daniel Craig called ‘the bare bones of a script’.

“Then there was a writers’ strike and we couldn’t do anything,” Craig later recalled.

“We couldn’t hire a writer to finish it. I say to myself, ‘Never again’, but who knows? I tried to rewrite scenes – and I’m not a writer.’

With a long-anticipated strike, writers have been scrambling to get scripts in and studios have been trying to prepare their pipelines to keep producing content for at least the short term.

“We’re assuming the worst from a business perspective,” said David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, last month.

‘We are ready. We’ve produced a lot of content.’

Foreign series could also fill part of the void.

“If there is one, we have a large base of upcoming shows and movies from around the world,” Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos said during the company’s April earnings call.

Still, the WGA strike may be just the beginning.

Contracts for both the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, expire in June.

Some of the same issues surrounding the streaming business model will factor into those negotiation sessions.

The DGA will begin negotiations with AMPTP on May 10.