Business
They’re on strike, but these writers are finding ways to write and create
In 1955, James Thurber, whose peerless wit made him one of the most important American writers of the 20th century, recounted the following exchange:
“I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.”
Thurber, whose prolific career included “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “The Battle of the Sexes” (both adapted into films), captured the occupational hazards inherent in the writer’s mind. Writing is not some industrialized, mechanized process; there is no time card.
The writers’ strike, now in its third month, has done for the thousands of members of the Writers Guild of America what Mrs. Thurber had demanded of her husband — forced them to stop writing.
Under WGA strike rules, union members are prohibited from providing writing services for any and all companies that are part of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and a host of related ancillary activities.
In other words: no writing, no pitching about writing and no talking or schmoozing about said writing.
While it’s one thing to stop writing, it’s another to turn off the creative spigot entirely. Writing is a profession in which a constant stream of thoughts courses through one’s mind, tumbling into ideas and words onto pages that become TV shows, feature films, books and plays. Stop writing? Might as well ask a hen not to lay eggs or the sun not to shine.
Or as Rachel Shukert, a writer on “Glow” and “Supergirl,” expressed in a tweet less than two weeks into the strike: “I pitched my entire vision of seasons 2,3,&4 of AND JUST LIKE THAT to our nanny this morning. She needs me to get back to work.”
Although cut off from the economics of putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard, scores of WGA members are using their downtime and when not picketing the studios to channel their creative élan. Hollywood scribes have sought to scratch their creative itch without running afoul of guild rules, doing everything from writing books to mentoring war-torn playwrights to making pottery and tending chickens.
Last year after Russia invaded Ukraine, screenwriter and playwright Jacquelyn Reingold began working as a writing mentor with Young Playwrights Ukraine. Reingold is one of 16 screenwriters and playwrights mentoring teenage Ukrainians, most of whom have been displaced by the war. The strike, she says, has given her more time to devote to the project.
They meet thrice weekly over Zoom, as the Ukrainians write 10-minute plays distilling their experiences with the war.
The program was created by playwright and screenwriter Laura Cahill. In July 2022, the works were performed over Zoom by professional actors and subsequently produced at the Orion Theater in Stockholm. Another performance is being planned for August, while a collection of the plays is scheduled to be published as well.
During the strike, the New York-based Reingold, who has worked on the Paramount+ series “The Good Fight” and the NBC series “Smash,” began writing a play of her own, but she said she has found a wellspring of inspiration and dedication in the young Ukrainians.
“My other creative muscle is working with other writers,” she said. “I’m not allowed to be in a writer’s room. And this is kind of like a writer’s room, except we are a group of adults and then a group of teenagers who are living through a traumatic experience that they’ll never forget in their lives. So we are both sharing ideas about writing and teaching.”
It is precisely the kind of activity that “happens naturally in a writer’s room,” she said, adding, “I hope these teenagers find meaning in what they’re going through, through their writing.”
For Kale Futterman, writing is a basic element of life, much like oxygen.
“I struggle to process the world without making stories out of it,” she said. “Even when I am telling myself I don’t need to go write a new sample or a new pilot, there is just something about my writer brain that everything I encounter ends up becoming, ‘Oh, can I make a story out of this?’”
I struggle to process the world without making stories out of it.
— Kale Futterman, writer
When the strike began, the Santa Monica-based Futterman, whose work includes the Netflix series “Ginny & Georgia” and the Lifetime feature “Black Girl Missing,” had just finished the script for a pilot and was just hours from sending it. But rather than dive into another script, she decided to try her hand at another creative passion, a fantasy novel.
“I’ve been sort of afraid to try for a while,” she said. “I’m a huge reader. I especially love reading a lot of fantasy. I’ve done a lot of grounded contemporary stuff for my professional career, but I have all of this time, so I figured, let me try something that feels completely out of left field for me.”
Beyond her novel being “set in a world different from our own,” Futterman said the project is allowing her to stretch in other ways.
“In screenwriting, it’s so much about what can you actually see is onscreen. For me, a pivot has been thinking about the internality of character.”
She added, “I’m really allowing it to just be a creative exercise that I’m enjoying.”
When the strike turned to dust a project Donal Lardner Ward was pitching, he decided to dust off what he called the 40-year “elephant in the room.”
Ward, who co-wrote and co-directed the 1993 independent film “My Life’s in Turnaround” and more recently was a writer on the Showtime series “The Affair,” had a childhood filled with larger-than-life characters and colorful real-life tableaux. He is the great-grandson of writer and humorist Ring Lardner — a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway — and the grand-nephew of Ring Lardner Jr., the Academy Award-winning screenwriter (“M*A*S*H,” “Woman of the Year”) and blacklisted member of the “Hollywood Ten.”
His father, Donald Ward, was one of the founders of Elaine’s, the fabled Manhattan restaurant that from 1963 until it closed in 2011 was the place the New York Times called “a see-and-be-seen hangout for writers, editors and actors.”
Ward, who lives in New York, realized that he had a significant story to tell: his own. “I’ve just never been able to wrap my head around it and have avoided it.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he began digging, but it wasn’t until the strike that Ward got serious.
After he sat down to work, he said, “I just looked up and I had 20,000 words that had just poured out of me. I couldn’t stop. Every day I was more excited to get back in front of the keyboard. It was like a drug.”
Ward has found the process not only cathartic on a personal level but he has also reveled in the chance to simply write — without the usual limitations of writing for movies and television.
“There was something just so freeing about writing prose,” he said, “just barreling ahead, just getting it out.”
And he noted that, as there was an added bonus, the process is free of the dreaded studio notes. “Nobody’s going to be trying to say, ‘Hey, you know, can you set this on Mars in a spaceship instead?’”
Television showrunner, producer and writer Janet Lin has recently turned to pottery as a creative outlet and to help keep her centered during the strike.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The last writers’ strike, which lasted 100 days in 2007-08, turned into a fertile and influential period for some writers, birthing what would become the DNA for successful internet content programming.
“Funny or Die,” the experimental comedy video website and film-television production company, got its start when director and former “Saturday Night Live” writer Adam McKay, Will Ferrell and writer-director Chris Henchy said, “Let’s screw around.”
It also became something of a spin-off generator. The site’s associated production company went on to make genre-busting programming, including the lacerating online talk show “Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis.”
During this go-around, one of the first creative seedlings of the strike occurred when the late night shows shut down.
Greg Iwinski, a former writer for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” and other late night cohorts began producing a semi-regular YouTube show called “Contract TK” (initially known as “Picket Tonight” and at times, “The Jokes You Love From the Picket Signs but We’re Saying Them Out Loud”).
The show sends up the studios while raising trenchant, humor-laced points about why the writers are on strike in the first place.
In one bit, Iwinski deadpans, “As you may know, writers are on strike. What you might not know is according to nine out of 10 doctors, if a late night writer does not do monologue jokes for too many consecutive days, they die.” This was followed by a photo montage of those nine doctors, including Dr. Fauci, Dr Pepper, Dr. Phil and Dr. Zhivago.
Last month, “Late Night” host Seth Meyers and his brother Josh Meyers, an actor and writer on “MadTV” who also appeared on “That 70’s Show,” launched the podcast “Family Trips With the Meyers Brothers,” where the brothers recall their own sometimes less-than-idyllic vacations along with guests including Amy Poehler.
For some writers, the strike is an opportunity to detour entirely from storytelling day jobs.
Janet Lin, a writer and producer in Los Angeles on such shows as “Bridgerton” and “The Orville,” found that hours on the picket lines left her too exhausted to pick up a pen. So when other writer friends suggested she join them at a pottery studio in Culver City, she jumped.
A self-described massive fan of the British show “The Great Pottery Throw Down,” Lin began taking a weekly wheel-throwing class. “It’s a different kind of creativity, which is nice,” she said. “It’s a tactile creativity.”
Before the strike, Lin was working on three development projects for studios including Disney+, Netflix and the cable network AMC and was frustrated that two of the projects had “died.”
Pottery has shifted her perspective.
Some of Lin’s pottery.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“It feels ephemeral when I’m writing these scripts that will never see the light of day,” she said. “It’s not like your writing will be in print and it won’t be remembered forever. It’s like we’re creating air. We’re not building a bridge, we’re creating entertainment.”
But when she’s at the wheel, Lin said, “You make something, and then at the end of the day, it gets fired and you glaze it and you bring it home and you can use it. It’s a thing that will exist in your life beyond, you know, a nighttime of TV.”
She added, “We’re on strike. We’re talking about very heady things; you know, an existential threat to our livelihoods.” And “it’s kind of nice to just make a pot. It’s a little bit more like I have control over this.”
Screenwriter, TV writer, and singer-songwriter Emily Halpern with daughter Frances.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
For Emily Halpern, the strike has provided an opportunity for her to work on a deeper, more personal creative level.
A co-screenwriter on “Booksmart” and “80 for Brady” and the ABC-TV series “Black-ish,” she has been writing songs and performing at small venues in Los Angeles including the Hotel Café. “I’ve loved music my whole life and had always wanted to try and just see if I could write songs and perform,” she said.
Halpern, of West Hollywood, first delved into her musical side during the pandemic, putting out an EP, “Carry Me Home.” Once the strike began, she picked up her guitar again. Unlike screenwriting, with music, Halpern is able to explore a more vulnerable side to her art.
“Everything I do in the industry is collaborative to some degree,” said Halpern, who is part of a screenwriting team. “And that’s a wonderful thing. But there has been something nice about this. It’s just my own thing. And so it’s both terrifying and liberating.”
And then there’s Elizabeth Benjamin. “I would say, yes, it’s hard to turn off your creativity,” said Benjamin, a successful Los Angeles-based writer and producer on shows such as “The Flight Attendant.” “You just can’t be creative on the projects that are making you money.”
She has been refocusing her ingenuity on what she calls “urban homesteading,” tending to her artisanal chickens, amending the soil in her organic garden and planning to re-sand her kitchen. It’s not writing, but after a fashion, it is creating.
“I had this dance teacher who used to say, ‘You always have to fill up the well creatively. It’s your job as an artist to fill yourself up.’ I always took that to heart.”
After weathering a pandemic, dual strikes and massive wildfires, Hollywood is finally getting a lifeline.
California legislators voted Friday to more than double the amount allocated each year to the state’s film and television tax credit program, raising that cap to $750 million from $330 million.
The increase is a win for the studios, producers, unions and industry workers who have lobbied state legislators for months on the issue.
Other states and countries have increasingly lured productions away from California with generous tax credits and incentive programs, leaving many in Hollywood without work for months. In interviews, town halls and legislative committee hearings, industry workers said that without state intervention, they feared Tinseltown would be hollowed out, similar to Detroit after the heyday of its auto industry.
“It’s now time to get people back to work and bring production home to California,” Directors Guild of America executive and Entertainment Union Coalition President Rebecca Rhine said in a statement. “We call on the studios to recommit to the communities and workers across the state that built this industry and built their companies.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom called to expand the annual tax credit program last year, saying at the time that “the world we invented is now competing against us.”
From there, state lawmakers looked to expand the provisions of the program. A separate bill going through the Legislature would broaden the types of productions eligible to apply, including animated films, shorts and series and certain large-scale competition shows. It would also increase the tax credit to as much as 35% of qualified expenditures for movies and TV series shot in the Greater Los Angeles area and up to 40% for productions shot outside the region.
That bill, AB 1138, was unanimously approved Thursday by the state Senate Revenue and Tax Committee. It will be up for final votes next week.
California provides a 20% to 25% tax credit to offset qualified production expenses, such as money spent on film crews and building sets. Production companies can apply the credit toward any tax liabilities they have in California.
The bump to 35% puts California more in line with incentives offered by other states, such as Georgia, which provides a 30% credit for productions.
Lawmakers and industry insiders have said the increased tax credit cap and the proposed criteria changes to the incentive program must both be approved to make California more competitive for filming. The bill was written by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles) and state Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica).
“After years of uncertainty, workers can once again set the stage, cue the lights, and roll the cameras — because California is keeping film and TV jobs anchored right here, where they belong,” Zbur said in a statement about the $750-million cap. “This is a historic investment in our creative economy, our working families, small businesses, and the communities that depend on this industry to thrive.”
Just two and a half years after OpenAI stunned the world with ChatGPT, AI is no longer only answering questions — it is taking actions. We are now entering the era of AI agents, in which AI large language models don’t just passively provide information in response to your queries, they actively go into the world and do things for — or potentially against — you.
AI has the power to write essays and answer complex questions, but imagine if you could enter a prompt and have it make a doctor’s appointment based on your calendar, or book a family flight with your credit card, or file a legal case for you in small claims court.
An AI agent submitted this op-ed. (I did, however, write the op-ed myself because I figured the Los Angeles Times wouldn’t publish an AI-generated piece, and besides I can put in random references like I’m a Cleveland Browns fan because no AI would ever admit to that.)
I instructed my AI agent to find out what email address The Times uses for op-ed submissions, the requirements for the submission, and then to draft the email title, draft an eye-catching pitch paragraph, attach my op-ed and submit the package. I pressed “return,” “monitor task” and “confirm.” The AI agent completed the tasks in a few minutes.
A few minutes is not speedy, and these were not complicated requests. But with each passing month the agents get faster and smarter. I used Operator by OpenAI, which is in research preview mode. Google’s Project Mariner, which is also a research prototype, can perform similar agentic tasks. Multiple companies now offer AI agents that will make phone calls for you — in your voice or another voice — and have a conversation with the person at the other end of the line based on your instructions.
Soon AI agents will perform more complex tasks and be widely available for the public to use. That raises a number of unresolved and significant concerns. Anthropic does safety testing of its models and publishes the results. One of its tests showed that the Claude Opus 4 model would potentially notify the press or regulators if it believed you were doing something egregiously immoral. Should an AI agent behave like a slavishly loyal employee, or a conscientious employee?
OpenAI publishes safety audits of its models. One audit showed the o3 model engaged in strategic deception, which was defined as behavior that intentionally pursues objectives misaligned with user or developer intent. A passive AI model that engages in strategic deception can be troubling, but it becomes dangerous if that model actively performs tasks in the real world autonomously. A rogue AI agent could empty your bank account, make and send fake incriminating videos of you to law enforcement, or disclose your personal information to the dark web.
Earlier this year, programming changes were made to xAI’s Grok model that caused it to insert false information about white genocide in South Africa in responses to unrelated user queries. This episode showed that large language models can reflect the biases of their creators. In a world of AI agents, we should also beware that creators of the agents could take control of them without your knowledge.
The U.S. government is far behind in grappling with the potential risks of powerful, advanced AI. At a minimum, we should mandate that companies deploying large language models at scale need to disclose the safety tests they performed and the results, as well as security measures embedded in the system.
The bipartisan House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, on which I served, published a unanimous report last December with more than 80 recommendations. Congress should act on them. We did not discuss general purpose AI agents because they weren’t really a thing yet.
To address the unresolved and significant issues raised by AI, which will become magnified as AI agents proliferate, Congress should turn the task force into a House Select Committee. Such a specialized committee could put witnesses under oath, hold hearings in public and employ a dedicated staff to help tackle one of the most significant technological revolutions in history. AI moves quickly. If we act now, we can still catch up.
Ted Lieu, a Democrat, represents California’s 36th Congressional District.
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Perspectives
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- The era of AI agents represents a seismic shift from passive information retrieval to autonomous task execution, where AI can independently perform real-world actions like scheduling appointments, booking travel, or submitting legal documents, as demonstrated by the author’s use of an AI agent to handle op-ed submission logistics.
- Unregulated AI agents pose significant dangers, including strategic deception (where AI pursues misaligned objectives), malicious actions like draining bank accounts or fabricating incriminating evidence, and propagation of creator biases, exemplified by xAI’s Grok inserting false claims about white genocide in unrelated responses.
- Current regulatory frameworks are critically inadequate, necessitating mandatory transparency through disclosed safety audits, embedded security protocols, and upgrading the Congressional AI Task Force to a Select Committee with subpoena power to address risks before agent proliferation becomes unmanageable.
Different views on the topic
- AI agents are poised to revolutionize business efficiency by autonomously orchestrating complex workflows—such as fraud detection, supply-chain optimization, and marketing campaigns—through advanced reasoning and real-time data synthesis, fundamentally transforming operations across finance, HR, and logistics[2][3][4].
- Technological advancements in 2025—including faster reasoning, expanded memory, and chain-of-thought training—enable agents to operate with unprecedented speed and accuracy, reducing human intervention while ensuring reliability in tasks like customer service resolution and payment processing[1][3].
- Enterprises already deploy “digital workforces” where humans and AI agents collaborate seamlessly, as seen in Salesforce’s Agentforce and Microsoft’s Copilot Vision Agents, which independently update CRM systems and execute cross-platform commands to enhance productivity without compromising safety[3][4].
Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen has invested in Hollywood with the $69-million purchase of retail property near the legendary TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.
In a bet on the future value of local real estate, Mateen and his brother Tyler bought the Hollywood Galaxy shopping center and the historic Petersen Building next door.
The purchase comes at a time when most institutional investors such as pension funds have stopped acquiring property in Los Angeles. Values of many buildings in the region, including office skyscrapers, have fallen in recent years as the loss of tenants that started during the pandemic and other factors have driven down sale prices.
The Mateens, however, see this as an opportunity. They bought prominent properties in Beverly Hills and Westchester last year and are now stakeholders in Hollywood.
Justin Mateen is known for being a co-founder of popular dating app Tinder but is also a solo venture capitalist through his JAM Fund. He and his brother have a strategy to invest in their hometown of Los Angeles during a cooling commercial real estate market because they expect the region to bounce back in the years ahead.
“I’ve always been a contrarian investor,” he said. “Whether it’s startups, public markets or real estate, I take the long view and hold through cycles for forever. While others are pulling back from cities like L.A., we’re doubling down. Its resurgence feels inevitable.”
The Mateens plan to spruce up the Hollywood property sold by Federal Realty Investment Trust and seek tenants who want to interact with the millions of tourists who visit the blocks around the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue annually.
The three-story Hollywood Galaxy shopping center, which was completed in 1990, is nearly 80% leased to tenants including Target and LA Fitness. The remaining space could go to a high-profile business such as Nintendo or Lego that wants to create an interactive, immersive attraction for Hollywood visitors, Tyler Mateen said.
The brothers are looking for tenants “who benefit off heavy foot traffic and value a large format with visibility,” he said. That might also be a flagship store for a big brand like Nike, Adidas or Sephora.
The Petersen Building at Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Drive, which is also part of the deal, was built in 1929 as the home of a Cadillac dealership. It’s now occupied by a Marshalls department store and La La Land souvenir shop.
Last year the Mateens and their partner Pouya Abdi bought Wilshire Rodeo Plaza, a five-story office building at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. They are in the process of signing new retail tenants for the building and planning a rooftop restaurant.
The Mateens also bought the HHLA entertainment center in Westchester near Playa Vista last year and are in the process of refurbishing it. Among its new tenants will be Meow Wolf, an immersive entertainment firm.
All three properties are in high-profile locations where it is difficult to develop new projects, Tyler Mateen said. “We want to own assets that you can’t build again and that the market can’t ignore.”
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