Hollywood’s Picket Line Confronts Its Color Line

More than three months in, the mood on the picket lines outside of The Walt Disney Co.’s Burbank studios remains a blend of festive and defiant. Members of the two Hollywood unions on strike — the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA — have continued to assemble here and in front of other major studios in record numbers. But the marchers at this picket had more at stake than most, with many of them belonging to the group Filipinx In Entertainment and WGA’s “pre-union” supporters caucus, consisting of aspiring writers who have not yet amassed the professional credits necessary to become full-fledged members.

The striking unions say the items on the table in their fight against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group representing Hollywood’s major studios and production companies — shrinking residual payments in this era of streaming media, the slashing of jobs due to shorter seasons and reduced writers’ room commitments, and the looming threat of artificial intelligence — are existential ones for Hollywood workers. But these issues don’t affect all actors and writers equally. Hollywood has always been hardest for those paying their dues by toiling endless hours for unlivable wages in the hopes of someday breaking through to the big time. And those at the lower-levels are often people of color. WGA West data shows that the majority of low-to-mid-level television writers are black, indigenous, and other people of color, while 64% of executive producers are white men.

Recent movements such as #OscarsSoWhite and Black Lives Matter pushed the industry to reckon with its lack of diversity by hiring more people of color. Meanwhile, even as streamers such as Netflix have contributed to Hollywood’s inclusivity boom — their appetite for content and ability to target niche audiences creating a wave of opportunities for fresh stories and emerging artists — new access has come with changes that have significantly reduced pay for those at the junior level of the industry. A decade ago, 86% of staff writers, the lowest title recognized by the WGA, were working for the contractual minimum; as of last year, that number had risen to 98%. 

A group shot of marchers at the Filipinos in Entertainment and Pre-WGA themed picket line on August 15 at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. Photo by Jeff Yang.

“It’s funny how pay in Hollywood started going down when diversity numbers started going up,” said Parvesh Cheena, a veteran working actor on strike. “It’s a very worrying correlation.” (The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers did not respond to a request for comment.)

Capital & Main analyzed raw data from the 2021 edition of an annual survey of 523 entry-level support staffers conducted by Pay Up Hollywood, an advocacy group for assistants and support staff. Among the analysis’ findings are the following:

• Respondents of color were 90% more likely to have student loans, and their average student debt of $29,000 was two-thirds higher than the $17,000 average held by white respondents. 
• The greater student debt load was because POC respondents tended to be more educated: They were 70% more likely to have graduate school degrees than their white peers.
• Respondents of color were 25% less likely than their white counterparts to have had personal contacts in the industry before working in it.
• Respondents of color had worked in the industry for a shorter span: 3.6 years on average versus 4.2 years for white survey respondents. 
• While working as assistants and support staff, respondents of color were 25% more likely than white respondents to say they were asked by their bosses to perform tasks outside of their job descriptions, ranging from personal services and domestic work to child care.

The Aug. 15 Burbank picket line was organized in part to support “pre-WGA” writers still looking for their first staffing opportunity. James Arcega Tinsley, a writer for the Paramount+ series “Mayor of Kingstown,” was marching in solidarity with his pre-WGA peers, a group he belonged to just a few years ago. He said he considers himself lucky to have gotten staffed after years as an assistant because the changes streamers have imposed make getting started in writing much harder. “Now we’re seeing episode counts per season going down from 22 in network TV to as little as eight now on streaming,” he said. “That’s all taking away opportunities from younger people looking to break in.” The strike “isn’t just about money — it’s about protecting writing as a profession.”

The changes have also made it harder to stay in the industry and survive. Historically, actors and writers could expect a relatively secure stream of income between gigs from residuals, the compensation from the re-airing of a show on different platforms. But streamers pay far less in residuals, preferring to compensate talent with upfront lump sums. 

Stars and top tier creators have the power to negotiate big paydays upfront, but only a handful of luminaries have such leverage. According to the WGA, the median pay for writers has fallen by nearly a quarter from a decade ago when adjusted for inflation, and the percentage of writers working for minimum pay has gone up by a third. Meanwhile, the experience of streaming-era actors such as Kimiko Glenn, who broke out on Netflix’s hit prison drama Orange Is the New Black, shows how cuts to residuals have restricted what they can earn. Glenn and others have shared pictures of streaming residual checks on social media — all of them denominated in cents, not dollars.

Los Angeles is a city with top-dollar rents and expenses. Pay Up Hollywood’s survey found that 54% of entry level film and television workers earned less than $40,000 — the average annual cost of living in Los Angeles. WGA West board member Liz Hsiao Lan Alper, a writer on the upcoming Amazon Prime Video series Ballard and co-founder of Pay Up Hollywood, said the low pay lands a harder blow on those who do not have relatives to help them financially. “A lot of assistants quite frankly are the children of rich white parents,” she said. “But if you’re a person of color, and you don’t have those resources, when you can’t pay rent, you give up your dream.” The result, Alper said, is that “the people who stick are folks who don’t need the money.” Alper, a disabled mixed-race Asian American, said she herself has no cushion when there’s no work. “I have no shame in saying I just put in my application to work at Ralphs,” she said.

SAG-AFTRA members Danny Pudi and Parvesh Cheena take a selfie on the picket line. Photo courtesy Parvesh Cheena.

And getting to the point of even being staffed on a show took Alper six years. That’s typical, said Y. Shireen Razack, a writer for the Netflix series Vampire Academy and co-founder of the Think Tank for Inclusion & Equity, or TTIE, a nonprofit that advocates for underrepresented Hollywood writers. “It’s not that uncommon to be an assistant for five years, but you’ll see that a lot of BIPOC writers end up getting stuck in that beginning part of their careers,” she said. A TTIE survey of 1,200 TV writers showed that underrepresented writers — women, people of color, disabled people, LGBTQ+ writers or those 50 and older at junior tiers of staffing — were 50% more likely to be forced to repeat at the same level from year to year.

“Then, when you see room sizes shrinking, the studios want to keep the experienced writers, so those marginalized staffers end up falling out,” Razack said. 

Inclusion programs and mentorship help — many of the creatives and performers Capital & Main spoke to got their start through targeted hiring and outreach programs — but without staffing guarantees and livable wages at the entry level, entertainment could end up as a “hobby profession,” Cheena said. 

“Where we are as an industry is a familiar place for people of color,” he said. “We’re used to facing a scarcity complex, where we’re being constantly told that we should be grateful for what we’ve got. Except it’s not just us now — it’s not just the brown folk who are being told this! It’s the whole industry. It’s all of us.”

Copyright 2023 Capital & Main