My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calcottin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily os. It's somehow Monday, the second of October.
I'm Zara, I'm sam. We begin with breaking news now at six with major developments from Hollywood overnight.
The Writer's strike reaching its final act. The Writer's Guild of America says it has indeed reached a deal.
After one hundred and forty eight days of strike action. The Writer's Guild of America has reached a deal with Hollywood Studios and that means their strike is officially over. So what have they agreed to and does this mean film and TV production is back on track or will the actor strike still slow things down? TDA factchecker and resident Film of Fishinado, Lucy Tassel, will join me to discuss it in today's deep dive, but first the headlines.
US President Joe Biden has signed a short term funding bill, avoiding a full shutdown of the US government. The bill was passed by Congress only hours before the deadline. The government now has enough funding to last until the seventeenth of November and does not allow the government to implement the planned increased funding for Ukraine's war against Russia.
The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability has handed down its final report that was made available to the public on Friday, so we now know its contents. Among thirteen volumes of four and a half years of findings, the Commission reported people with disability are subject to higher rate to violence, neglect and
abuse than Australians without disability. The Commission also made two hundred and twenty two recommendations, including reform across areas like education, employment and housing.
A massive weekend of sports last night, the Penrith Panthers won the NRL Men's Grand Final, beating the Brisbane Broncos in a thrilling game at Sydney's Acre Stadium. It was the greatest comeback in NRL Grand Final history after the Panthers overcame a sixteen point deficit to win twenty six twenty four. It was their third premiership in a row. Earlier in the day, the Newcastle Knights beat the Gold Coast Titans in the NRLW Grand Final.
And I'm being told this is good news. A new electric blue spider has been discovered in Thailand. It's considered especially significant as the color blue is one of the rarest colors found in nature. The team who found the spider will now auction off the right to name the species to raise money for charity. Well there you.
Go, Lucy, welcome back to the podcast.
It's so good to be here.
So you've kind of become tda's Hollywood correspondent, not so much of the actual going to Hollywood bit, but the inn house Hollywood correspondent over the last few months. And you've kept us up to date on developments with the Writers and Actors' strike. What news you bringing us today.
Well, huge news. The Writers Guild has ended its strike, so the WGA, the Writers' Union, has reached an agreement with the big Hollywood studios. So all of those eleven thousand writers who are covered by the union went back to work, or at least could go back to work starting from last Wednesday.
And I guess the way that materializes for us is more stuff on our televisions and our movie screens. We'll get there in a sec. But first, how did we get to this point?
Well, let's recap. There's two bodies you need to understand. So we've got the WGA, which is the union that represents writers for TV and movies. So that's everything from Barbie to the Drew Barrymore Show, so that include talk shows, that include scripted television like dramas like Outer Banks. So the WGA represents all of those people. Then there's the AMPTP, which is the group representing the studios that actually fund and produce these shows and movies, so the Alliance of
Motion Picture and Television Producers. So they represent groups like Amazon, like Apple, NBC, Disney, Netflix, Paramount, all the big players exactly the names on TV channels. That's who the AMPTP represents, and that's who the WGA negotiates their multi year contracts with. Basically, if there's a contract, then writers from that union can
write shows that the AMPTP puts on air. Got it so earlier this year May the second, the WGA actually voted to strike because their contract that was up earlier this year had lapsed and they weren't able to come to a new agreement. And there were a couple of different reasons for that. I mean, it's not an overstatement to say that the landscape of film and TV has changed so incredibly dramatically, has been completely upended by streaming.
It looks completely different to how it did twenty years ago, with the rise of things like streaming services, with AI, with the pandemic, a lot of things have changed very dramatically.
And you and I did a podcast episode where we kind of went a bit deeper into those issues. I'll put a link to the episode we did on the actors' strike in the show notes. But today we're talking about the end of the writer's strike. So you say they've now reached an agreement. What have they agreed to.
Well, one of the main things that the writers were asking for was better pay. So one of the ways that writers make money is through residual payments, which are ongoing payments given to the cast and crew of particularly TV shows, whenever they're rerun or released on d That was all changed by streaming. So one of the things
that has changed is that pay overall is better. So writers are going to get annual minimum pay increases of five percent, four percent, and three and a half percent over the course of their new contract with the studios. So the expiration of the previous contract obviously started the strike. The next one expires in twenty twenty six. Until then they're getting yearly pay rises. Another huge change which based on what I saw online, this was one of the
biggest developments for writers. This was the sort of thing that people were saying. They said it couldn't be done. And that is a minimum number of writers employed in writers' rooms who are guaranteed a set term of employment. So for people like you and me, we go to work every week knowing that our job continues, even though we work at a startup. There's still an element of job
security that a Hollywood writer does not have. If your show gets canceled, that might mean that ten weeks of work that you were banking on for the next year are no longer there.
Well, the number of shows that have a pilot episode and then are stopped after that.
Mascically, yeah, so you have you know, three weeks writing for the pilot and then after that, good luck. Maybe you won't here for six months. So to have ten weeks guaranteed employment is huge. That's going to be a massive, a massive lifestyle change for a lot of people, I think, probably for the better.
Do you think that will mean that studios are taking less risks if they have to lock in ten weeks employment, That's entirely possible.
That is always the flip side of the coin is that with these gains for writers, you might get different business decisions being made.
Interesting.
I think the argument that writers would have for taking these potential risks, certainly in negotiating with studios, is that studios have already made financial risks by going all in on streaming. So things have already changed.
And part of what has really changed is the AI space. And you and I spoke about that a lot a couple of weeks ago. What sort of agreements around AI have been reached?
This is another huge agreement. So back in May, writers were asking for One of their original demands for their new contract was regulating the use of AI on projects covered by their contract. So they specifically said AI can't write or rewrite material, can't be used as source material, and our material can't be used to train AI. So that was the writer's pitch, and the amptp's response was that they wanted to have annual meetings to discuss advancements
in technology. So that's where negotiation kind of broke down. What has changed is that the AMPTP has agreed artificial intelligence can't be used to produce or edit written material. Writers can choose to use AI, but studios can't force them to do so, got it. Okay, a huge step. That's one of the things that's come out of these many months of strikes and negotiations.
So another big factor in these negotiations was residuals. I feel like we've explained this a couple of times, but in case we've forgotten, that's the money writers would make from series like Friends or Seinfeld when they get rerun on networks, and they kind of can make that in perpetuity forever, exactly right, what's the update here?
So streaming residuals were a very different beast. That's one of the reasons that writers wanted to negotiate for a new contract, so to compensate for the fact that residuals don't act in the same way on streaming. This new agreement introduces viewership based residuals to award bonuses to the writers behind content that performs well with US subscribers. So writers involved in projects that reach a certain viewership threshold in their first three months of release, we'll get extra money.
If you remember, when we first talked about residuals on the pod, we heard about cast and crew of Oranges the New Black getting tiny checks in the mail despite that show having been huge on Netflix. So any writers associated with whatever the next massive Netflix phenomenon is that will not happen to them. Actors, however, are still negotiating that kind of thing. Residual payments for content viewed by overseas subscribers, so people like you and me will increase massively,
So huge, huge gains for residuals. As for transparency, so obviously you and I don't know how many people have viewed a Netflix show. We only hear what Netflix has told us. So the AMPTP agreed to share international and domestics so Hollywood streaming numbers with the Writers Guild. That's subject to confidentiality, but it means that writers will actually know how many people have watched their shows, which they weren't allowed to find out before.
Okay, So both parties have signed this agreement. What happens from here and how quickly can we expect to see our favorite shows back on television or on.
Streaming, Well, that depends. So the agreement has been accepted by the union's leadership, which means that writers were able to go back to work. It does need to be voted on by those writers. That's going to be happening over the course of this week and next, but it's expected that they will agree to the agreement.
So it's not an one hundred percent done deal, but it's pretty likely that this is going to be the state of play.
It would be very, very surprising if the membership of the WGA said, we don't accept this agreement and we want a better one.
Okay. So from there, that's when everyone goes back to set and writers' rooms and starts producing stuff.
Right, Well, they go back to the writers' rooms. They don't go back to set because SAG after the Actors' Union is still on strike. Okay, they went on strike in July. That's when we first talked about this on the podcast. So actors performers, all those one hundred and sixty thousand people covered by SAG after they're all still
on strike. However, as you're listening to this pot cast right now, the leadership of SAG AFTRA has actually gone back to the negotiating table with AMPTP and that's inspired by the success of the WGA agreement. So we could be seeing people back to set soon. We're not sure. It's going to depend on how things turn out over the next couple of days.
So big step forward for writers, but we'll have to watch and see what happens with actors exactly. Lucy, thank you so much for joining us on the Daily OZ today.
Thanks Sam, thanks for listening to today's pod. If you learned something from today's episode, don't forget to share it with a friend. We'll be back again tomorrow morning, but until then, Happy Monday.