Filmmaker and Dread Podcaster Joe Russo Discusses the WGA Strike [Interview]
Dread Central regulars will likely recognize his voice. Joe Russo (no, not that Joe Russo) is the producer of Post Mortem With Mick Garris, the popular DREAD Podcast Network title.
But Joe is so much more than a podcast producer. He’s also a writer, producer, and director who has had a hand in creating a fleet of exciting feature films. After spending time in Hollywood and crafting numerous movies, Russo found himself a member of the Writer’s Guild, where he is now a Strike Captain.
I had the opportunity to sit down with the creative to unpack his connection to the WGA, why the writers are striking, and what the future holds for professionals in the film industry.
Dread Central: People may be familiar with you and your voice. I’m just wondering, what inspired you to get into filmmaking and being a writer?
Joe Russo: I always loved movies growing up. My family… We weren’t sports people, we were arts people, and they instilled in me a love of movies from a very young age. But I grew up in Connecticut, which is pretty far away from Hollywood, and I never thought that I would be out in Los Angeles working in the movie business, so it wasn’t really a childhood dream. I wasn’t that kid who was holding a camera in his hand at eight years old. It was something that came when I was in college and I moved out to Arizona State, and I was much closer to Los Angeles, that the dream started to feel like something that could actually be a reality.
DC: What’s your connection to the WGA?
JR: In 2018, I became an associate member of the Writers Guild, and in 2021 I became a full-fledged member. And most recently, I was asked to be a WGA strike captain. In the event that there was a strike, I would help mobilize some of our ranks, and here we are.
DC: At the time when you were asked to take on that role, did you foresee a strike happening in the future?
JR: Yeah, lots of people would say I was being a Negative Nancy, and I was being pessimistic. But if you looked at where the trend lines had been going in screenwriting and television writing over the last few years, and how the streaming services have allowed the studios to erode some of the norms that writers have had for decades, and some of the protections that they’ve had for decades, there was a battle brewing. And I would say to my friends who worked on the business affairs sides of the studios, we’d talk about this and they’d say, “Joe, are the writers going to strike?” And I’d say, “I don’t know. Are you going to give us a fair deal?” And their response would be, “We’ve already given you all our money.” And I said, “Well, then we’re probably going to strike.”
Long, long answer, when I was asked, I had an inkling that it was probably going to get to this point. And I felt very honored that I was asked.
DC: It’s a big question, but why are the writers on strike?
JR: That’s a big question. There are a lot of issues, and probably too many to cover in one answer or two. We could do a whole article on just that. But the big issues are because of streaming over the last 13 years; they’ve eroded our pay scale, they’ve eroded the residual system, and they have been pushing more and more free work onto us. They have been pushing writers’ rooms, they’ve been crunching them down into these things called mini rooms, which are basically loopholes to get around having to pay a full staff of writers, and these mini rooms are forcing less writers to do more work in a shorter period of time.
And so we’re getting to an existential crisis when it comes to screenwriting. They’re trying to turn it from something that if you have the talent and the ability to do it and make it out here, that could be at least a good middle-class paying job, they’re trying to turn it into a gig economy job. And we don’t want to let that happen. We want to keep screenwriting, for those who can do it, as a viable career and not something that we have to have two extra jobs just to be able to pay the bills, to do.
DC: What are the studios using as an excuse not to give you what you’re asking for?
JR: They always cry poverty in every negotiation. And while they are… It always seems to be every three years, right around the time they have to renegotiate with all the various guilds, they start laying people off, surprise, surprise, it’s almost like clockwork, so that they can cry poverty, but they’re crying wolf. And we’ve come to recognize that, and we’ve come to recognize this pattern. They’re saying, “Oh, we have no money to pay you. And we’re laying people off.”
And then, on the flip side, they’re doing these investor presentations where they’re promising you ten years of DC superhero movies or ten years of a Harry Potter TV show, which doesn’t even have a showrunner attached to it yet. So they’re saying they have no money, but they’re also projecting out in these big, big ways that they’re going to make all this money and all this revenue that they don’t want to share in and cut into.
DC: We’ve been hearing a lot about AI and how that’s playing a role. Can you speak to that a little bit?
JR: AI is a pretty scary thing. You can tell what the studios are thinking by what they don’t want to engage on in the negotiations, and they completely stonewalled the Writers Guild on the subject of AI, which means, and they even said it, it’s something they’re considering using down the road. And that’s a big problem because, as I’m sure you know, artificial intelligence can generate lots and lots of copy, but that copy is usually sourced from other places, which makes it something that you can’t copyright. And if you can’t copyright it, how can you actually release a motion picture based upon it?
So the Writers Guild took what I thought was a pretty smart stance, which is, “Look, we know that AI is a thing. We know it’s something you’re going to want to use, but because it’s something that you can’t copyright and you can’t…” It’s generated from existing texts and not something original. You can use it as research, as a tool. You could use it like a Wikipedia page. You’re not making the movie out of the Wikipedia page, but you might get some information from the Wikipedia page.
Ultimately, the Writers Guild’s agreement with the studios, the MBA, the Minimum Basic Agreement, states that a writer is a person, and what they want to do is tie the use of AI to a screenwriter. So if the studios are using it to generate a synopsis that they hand to a writer to turn it into a screenplay, they can do that. But they have to have a writer. It can’t just be based on a computer.
So I think that for me, the idea that the studios want to do that is scary. But having played with ChatGPT myself a little bit, I’m not sure that it’s going to replace screenwriters in the immediate future, which is why I think the studio said, “Well, let’s just table this for a year and we’ll talk about it every year until…” But if we do that, it’ll be too late. We have to put language in now. It’s very clear and delineates exactly what it can and can’t be used for.
I was working on a horror script recently, and I asked it to help me with a scene where I was describing two characters who were locked in a closet, and they discovered that they were in there with a monster. And ChatGPT spit me back out a scene, and it basically said they get out of the closet, the monster chases them through the house, out the door, they find a police car, they get the cop and the cop arrests the monster.
DC: The end.
JR: It took one scene, and they gave me a whole story that you would never use. And I think the reality is the studios want it to work, but the amount of time and effort it’s going to take, to put in prompts that will turn out a decent story is going to be almost zilch. It might be able to help them write a synopsis, but I do not think it’s going to be able to write them a screenplay. I don’t think it’s going to be able to write them a good screenplay, and I don’t think it’s going to be able to write them a screenplay that even they’re going to want to read.
DC: Although it may be able to write a news article, and that scares me.
JR: As it should. My bigger concern is that it can take aggregate information from different websites and spit out some sort of legible copy. It’ll never take editorials away from you, though.
DC: Your tweet was quoted in Deadline recently?
JR: Last night, as of this recording, we had a WGA members meeting, at the end of day two of our strike against the studios, and they had 1800 people packed into the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and there was great enthusiasm. I was expecting it to just be essentially a pep rally, “Here’s what the studios didn’t give us, here’s why we’re fighting back, let’s go get them.” But our leadership at the WGA offered us a surprise. And that surprise was leaders from every single labor union relating to Hollywood were there, and they gave speeches, and they planned to stand in solidarity with the Writers Guild during the struggle, locked arms, because this is something that impacts all of us.
We’ve all had our livelihoods eroded over the last several years because of streaming, because of these new kinds of practices, because they’re constantly trying to chase filmmaking down to the bottom. How deep can they cut into it before they hit bone? And hearing that they’re going to stand united, and knowing that the Screen Actors Guild, and the Directors Guild of America, have negotiations coming up with the AMPTP, the organization we are on strike against, in the next few weeks. There is a world where if those negotiations don’t go well, and we all stand in solidarity like they promised, Hollywood will shut down after June 30th. There will be no actors, no directors, and no writers. And that could end this conflict immediately. And that was what I was tweeting about when I said, “The studios are so fucked.”
DC: Yeah. Good. So how do you see this shaking out? Are you feeling hopeful?
JR: I left the meeting last night much more hopeful than I went in. And it was specifically because in 2007 the AMPTP was able to basically divide and conquer the guilds. The Writers Guild went on strike, they were able to make a deal with the directors, undercut us a bit, and then we had to come to the table and make a deal. It’s the difference between collective bargaining and pattern bargaining. We’re trying to push collective bargaining right now. They want to pattern to the easiest deal they can make.
I think that if SAG and DGA can stay locked arms with us and all the below-the-line guilds, and we can shut down Hollywood come June 30th, I have hope that this can be resolved quickly. Going in, I thought it could drag on the rest of the year. I really did have a gut feeling that that could be the case. But for the first time, in a long time, I have hope that this could end as soon as early July.
Check out Post Mortem with Mick Garris on the DREAD Podcast Network:
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