A bitter dispute between thousands of film and television writers against Hollywood’s top talent agencies came to an end on Friday, almost two years after it started.
William Morris Endeavor became the last major agency to reach a new franchise agreement with the two Writers Guild of America unions, saying it had done so on Friday afternoon.
“Writers have been part of this agency since our inception and will continue to be part of the WME’s lifeblood,” said Ariel Emanuel, chief executive of Endeavor, which controls WME. “We look forward to serving once again as your advocates during this unprecedented period in our industry.”
In the end, the writers’ unions got what they asked for, but only after an impasse involving court battles and various accusations of misbehavior. In one episode, a senior WME executive accused a union leader of wanting to “kill him”; the union leader denied saying that.
“I said several times that no one wanted the agency’s campaign more than I did, and I am delighted that we have achieved our goal,” said David Goodman, the chairman of the West Coast guild branch. He added that “the agencies that represent us now have their financial interests aligned with those of their writing clients.”
In April 2019, thousands of Hollywood writers fired their agents because of what union leaders described as corrupt agency practices. The dispute revolved around two agency practices that, according to the unions, created serious conflicts of interest. Agencies have long maintained that practices existed to benefit writers, not to harm them.
But the slowdown in Hollywood production during the pandemic put pressure on agencies, and the top three fired dozens of their employees last year. The union dispute was costing them revenue they would have earned by closing deals for their writing clients.
Last July, United Talent Agency struck a deal with the writers’ unions, and ICM Partners did so a month later. In December, the Creative Artists Agency signed a new agreement with the unions.
As part of the agreements, the agencies said they would soon end a practice called packaging. In addition, they will maintain only a minority shareholding – limited to 20% – in production entities that have started to increase in recent years.
Packaging, a decades-old practice, involved bringing writers to other agency clients for a TV or film project. When agents charged packaging fees, they waived the usual 10% commission from their scriptwriting clients and were instead paid directly by the studio that did the business. The unions argued that this meant that the agencies were not putting their writers’ financial interests first.
When the agencies created sister production entities to make TV shows and films themselves, the unions argued that the writers could not be fairly represented by people who were also their bosses. The agencies argued that the companies would create more competition in an industry that was being dominated by well-funded tech giants like Netflix, Apple and Amazon.
In the past 22 months, writers have remained broadly united, although there was an effort in 2019 – supported by many of Hollywood’s greatest writers – to displace union leaders by people more willing to make a deal with the agencies. This effort failed after nearly four out of five writers continued to support the leadership team.