How the Writers Guild of America played a crucial role in negotiations with the studios amid the strike in Hollywood

The writers were on a strike in Hollywood ever since May owning to lack of fair pay, compensation, threats from Artificial Intelligence, and many other crippling issues. The actors joined the strike too, forcing major productions to come to a halt with scarce chances of negotiations. The Writers Guild of America intervenes The WGA reached to a settlement with the studios on September 24 and ensured everything the strike happened for in the first place- Fair pay and compensations, and protection from any threat imposed by AI. A glimmer of hope now awaits Hollywood as writers and actors are likely to get back to work. What next in Hollywood? With the  Hollywood writers strike over, actors will now get a shot at cutting their own deal with studios and streaming services. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists announced Wednesday night that strike negotiations with studios would resume Monday. The guild said  several studio executives will attend, much as they did during marathon sessions last week that helped bring the nearly five-month writers strike to an end. Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” which had been using guest hosts when the strike hit, announced Wednesday that it would return Oct. 16 “with an all-star roster of guest hosts for the remainder of 2023.” The plans for “Saturday Night Live” were not immediately clear. The strikes have had a “catastrophic” impact on late-night television viewing, according to the research firm Samba TV. Without Colbert, Fallon and Kimmel proving fresh, topical material, the broadcast networks have seen late-night viewership declines of between 40% and 50%, Ashwin Navin, Samba TV co-founder. “It remains to be seen how late night will rebound to its previous relevance,” he said. Board members from the writers union approved that  contract agreement with studios on Tuesday night, bringing the industry at least partly back from a historic halt in production that stretched nearly five months. What were the negotiations? The union had sought minimum increases in pay and future residual earnings from shows and will get a raise of between 3.5% and 5% in those areas — more than the studios had initially offered. The guild also negotiated new residual payments based on the popularity of streaming shows, where writers will get bonuses for being a part of the most popular shows on Netflix, Max and other services, a proposal studios initially rejected. Many writers on picket lines had complained that they weren’t properly paid for helping create heavily watched properties. On artificial intelligence, the writers  got the regulation and control of the emerging technology they had sought. Under the contract, raw, AI-generated storylines will not be regarded as “literary material” — a term in their contracts for scripts and other story forms a screenwriter produces. This means they won’t be competing with computers for screen credits. Nor will AI-generated stories be considered “source” material, their contractual language for the novels, video games or other works that writers may adapt into scripts. Some issues still persist Scripted shows will take longer to return due to the actors strike, which showed its first signs of a solution with the renewed plans to talk. There had previously been no official contact between SAG-AFTRA and the alliance of studios that negotiates contracts since their strike began July 14. The first resumption of talks in the writers strike last month went poorly, and it was another month before the two sides tried again. But when the talks resumed last week it was just five days before a deal was reached. With inputs from agencies