The Writers Guild of America has just secured a historic four-year agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The deal represents a true achievement — hard-fought, historic in scope, and a testament to the organizational strength the union has built over years of increasingly contentious labor battles. Writers have received meaningful AI protections, boosted residuals and raised bottom lines that reflect the economic realities of a company that has spent the better part of a decade restructuring itself at the expense of writers. And yet.
There’s an open secret in Hollywood that no collective bargaining agreement addresses, no trade publication investigates with any seriousness, and no studio or talent agency executive is particularly motivated to fix. It’s the quiet scandal of deal sluggishness — the maddening, expensive, creativity-killing lag between the moment a writer shakes hands on an assignment and the moment the deal is actually closed and delivered to paper.
Six months is not unusual. Eight months occur regularly. An entire year for what amounts, in most cases, to a paint-by-numbers deal that the two sides have done dozens of times before is not unheard of.
This is not a specialized complaint. It’s a structural failure that costs writers real money, saps creative momentum from projects, and ultimately results in worse movies and TV shows. The new WGA agreement sets limits on what writers can earn. It says nothing about when they get paid.
Think about what deal dormancy actually means in practice. A writer makes a deal verbally in January. By the time this whole deal is worked out — the business affairs, the legal affairs, the endless tiered tariffs, the negative payments and the separate rights — it may be September before the first check clears. In the meantime, that writer is expected to be fully invested in the project: taking notes, meeting with producers, and perhaps actually creating the pages. They work. They simply are not being compensated.
There is a financial cost that is easy to measure and easy to overlook. The WGA minimum for the draft and a host of high-budget features — $145,469 under the new agreement — sounds like a fair number on paper. But if this transaction takes twelve months to complete, the writer gains purchasing power equivalent to about $141,100 in real terms, assuming modest inflation of 2 to 3 percent per year. This is a quiet, invisible wage reduction that the minimum wage schedule will never reverse.
That’s for the writer lucky enough to work at least. Writers who earn big bucks watch the true value of their negotiated fees erode in exactly the same way, at every level. Creative losses are difficult to measure but no less real. Projects have their own energy. There’s a certain amount of electricity in a room the moment a story comes together, when the writer and producer agree on what something is and why it’s important. Sluggish handling slowly kills that electricity, just as a slow leak flattens a tire.
By the time the deal closes and the studio expects the writer to start working in earnest, months have passed. I got carried away with major creative decisions. The writer needs to be re-educated in the project. The product needs to resell its own enthusiasm. In the worst case scenario—a scenario that occurs with alarming regularity—the executive who championed the project moves on to another job entirely. The project is an orphan. The writer is expected to connect with a new host who had no role in the original creative conversation, who may have very different instincts about the material, and who inherits a relationship already strained by the impersonal mechanics of a deal that took forever to close.
The industry has precise, contractually defined timelines for almost everything else. Reading periods are set. Writing periods are specified. Deadlines are specified for the steps. The MBA is wonderfully detailed on the topic of when a writer should deliver and what happens when they don’t. The assumption, found on every page of the guild’s basic agreement, is that time is a meaningful variable in the creative process — and that it matters when things happen. However, making deals, the act that initiates the entire relationship, operates in a kind of contractual no man’s land where the clock does not run and there are no consequences associated with being late.
This is the problem. Here is the solution.
The WGA should negotiate — or, failing that, advocate loudly and publicly — for a deal-making clause. From the moment a verbal agreement is reached between the writer and the signing company, a specific window opens: thirty days to reach a fully negotiated deal memorandum on material action points. Both parties get a 15-day extension option, so the maximum is 60 days when the deal is complex. If this window closes without an agreement being reached, an informal arbitration process will begin – conducted under the auspices of the WGA, conducted by telephone, and conducted quickly. Both sides present their positions. A decision has been reached. The deal is closed. The same logic should apply to the documentation process itself, that is, drafting the document and setting red lines that persist long after the points of action have ostensibly been settled.
The long contract has become a byzantine artifact, a delaying ritual that benefits no one except the law firms that impose working hours on both parties. A strict deadline for completing the long form—sixty days from the deal memorandum, for example—with the support of similarly informal arbitration would shift the back half of the process the way a deal memorandum clock shifts the front half.
Skeptics will say this is naive – that these deals are too complex to be rushed, and that Hollywood’s contract-making machinery can’t be made to move any faster than it is moving. The industry itself put that argument to rest in the weeks leading up to the 2023 strike. As time passed for the former MBA, agents and business executives who normally stretched negotiations across seasons suddenly found themselves closing the same deals in days. Sometimes hours. The complexity of the underlying transactions has not changed. What has changed is having a hard deadline that has real consequences on the other side of it. When both sides had sufficient reason to act, they acted.
The stampede that preceded the strike was not an aberration, but a proof of concept. Critics will argue that complexity cannot be rushed, that every deal has its own idiosyncrasies, and that thirty days is an arbitrary number. These objections are not without merit, but they prove a lot. The question is not whether every deal can be completed within thirty days. The question is whether the system, left to its own devices, will generate internal pressures to close deals faster. The clear answer is no.
The only thing that changed the established behavior in Hollywood was the deadline. The WGA won something historic. But the struggle for the economic security of writers does not end with the signing of the agreement. It continues in the months – sometimes several months – between the handshake and the check. The guild must start on the clock.
George Heller is a director/producer at Brillstein Entertainment Partners. Represents filmmakers, television creators and actors. Most recently, he executive produced the film directed by Justin Lin The last days Which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and Role playing for Amazon starring Kaley Cuoco and David Oyelowo, which was also based on his original idea.
