Tony Gilroy Takes New York Picket Line by Storm With Fiery Speech Remarking the Importance of Victory for Writers
We’re nearly four months into the current writers’ strike, and the standoff between the guild and the AMPTP, which represents the major Hollywood studios, has no obvious end in sight. Thankfully, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and AMPTP have been negotiating and exchanging offers over the last couple of weeks, but as of now, there’s no way to know how or when the strike will conclude. Plus, there’s the also-ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike to consider as well. If there was any hope by the studios of the WGA getting tired and slowing down their efforts to march through the streets of Los Angeles and New York City, Tony Gilroy just proved them wrong.
Very few Hollywood productions have been able to continue unaffected by the strikes, and the present slate of Star Wars shows on Disney Plus is no exception. Last month, we heard that Andor had to end filming on its second and final season a bit sooner than expected because of the SAG-AFTRA strike that had just begun. Now, showrunner Tony Gilroy, who has been a steadfast supporter of the WGA strike since the beginning, has once again made his stance regarding the importance of the ongoing labor action clear. Better yet, he did it with a speech that would’ve made Maarva Andor proud.
Tony Gilroy was at the WGA/SAG-AFTRA picket line in New York City yesterday (hat tip to TheWrap and Deadline), along with Andor writer Beau Willimon (you may know him for writing the prison arc in season 1), where he spoke to a group of his fellow demonstrators. The showrunner began his speech by recounting his experiences during the WGA strikes of 1960 and 1988:
“I’m second-generation guild. My father went on strike for the first time in 1960. I was four years old. I have no recollection of that, but it’s not hard to conjure the memory every time a green envelope arrives in the mail, or a doctor’s visit gets complicated, or you begin to contemplate your future. Because that’s what they did. The writers guild and SAG linked arms, and they held on long enough to solidify our relationship with residuals, health care, and a pension plan.
“Twenty-two weeks. And it almost fell apart at the end. I heard this my whole life. Marriages fell apart, friendships were broken forever, people really did lose their houses. That sacrifice was to win all this s**t that we take for granted.
“I joined the guild in ’86. In ’87 when the strike hit we had a new baby, a studio apartment, and no money in the bank. My wife went back to work, I picked up a side hustle writing magazine articles, and we hustled and stumbled and went broke, and it took us a long time to catch up.”
Gilroy continued by recapping the 2007-2008 WGA strike, which unfortunately fell short of the writers’ goals at the time:
“Twenty years later, by 2007, my life had changed. I had been involved in Hollywood all that time. I knew everybody, I knew the guild, I knew the issues, I knew what was important to me. I had watched all these issues stack up and be sort of taken care of along the way, and there was a backflow in there. And I had a movie, my first movie, that I had made. It was coming out and we were just starting the red carpet festival carousel when the strike hit in November.
“We were online then, so things started happening quickly. And we organized quickly, and we made a lot of noise, and we made a lot of new friends. And as it went on we looked at the calendar and we realized that if we were willing to shut down the Academy Awards, we would really have some leverage. We went through that whole season. We shut down the Golden Globes, we got closer and closer and two weeks before we were there, the directors guild settled behind our backs and it was over.”
Thankfully, the veteran writer/director’s speech wasn’t all doom and gloom. Tony Gilroy emphasized that, as he sees it, the WGA is far more likely to succeed in its current action against the AMPTP than in previous strikes from decades past. He didn’t pull any punches when describing the AMPTP’s approach to the strike either:
“We are so much different. All of us old-timers, this doesn’t look anything like what we went through before. This guild is older and wiser in many ways but it’s younger and more passionate and it’s more connected and it’s faster on its feet. And we have a media landscape and a press that’s actually willing to report on our story with interest and with accuracy for the first time in history.
“We have one problem. And that’s that the AMPTP does not have their s**t together. They do not know what the f**k they are doing. We are facing across the table now a group of people who have never done this before. They’re doing this for the first time and they have almost nothing in common but greed. They have 25 different business models, and all their different agendas, and all their various motivations… Man, they hate each other, but they gotta come together and do this.
“One would think that with all these new tech people and all these venture bros and all this management bulls**t that they would come be like ‘Ok well we’re gonna get some new visionary problem-solving.’ No. The irony is that they’ve gone back and they’ve taken the same tired piece of s**t playbook that they’ve had for the last 40 f**king years and they brought it out. So it’s like brand-new wine in this ancient bottle.”
The Andor showrunner also underlined the importance of writers in the filmmaking process and reiterated that without their creativity, neither entertainment media nor its many tie-in products would exist.
“If we’ve learned anything in the last 15 years, it is our value. And they know it. And the directors know it. And the producers know it. We are the content. It’s our ideas that fill the theme parks and the toy stores. It’s our characters on the lunch boxes and the Halloween costumes.
“They gaslight us and they set the guilds in opposition to one another. And they try to use the press as a wind-up toy to spread fear, and we are not having it anymore at all. We are the natural resource from which the product is made, and we are tired of being strip-mined. It’s done.”
Tony Gilroy then ended his speech in the most fitting way possible, shouting “One way out!” before walking away. It’s undeniable that the outcome of the simultaneous WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes will determine the long-term health not only of the writing and acting professions but of the film and television industry as a whole. As Gilroy states here, strikes and unions have helped workers make essential gains in terms of pay and benefits in the past, and writers, like all laborers, are entitled to fair compensation and job security for their work, as well as pension plans and health care coverage.
Deadline reported on Thursday that the latest WGA proposal to the studios would cost the AMPTP an average of 0.18% of their annual revenue. And unlike what the studios probably thought when the strike was called, the writers are stronger every day, with picket-line photos all over social media and an overall demonization of the greedy companies that they likely did not anticipate. Writers and actors have also forced the studios’ hand to paralyze the entire industry and delay some of their upcoming movies, and considering further action on their 2024 schedules. For now, Star Wars is continuing business as usual for the most part, except for The Mandalorian season 4 likely not being able to start shooting before the end of the year as they had hoped.
We here at Star Wars News Net wish Tony Gilroy and his fellow participants in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes the best of luck in achieving their goals, and for the studios to come to their senses in the current and future negotiations.
You can see Gilroy’s full speech here:
(WATCH) Tony Gilroy speaks to demonstrators today at the NYC screenwriters picket #WritersStrike pic.twitter.com/mvRAzoI6jA
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) August 24, 2023
Eric has been a fan of Star Wars ever since the age of five (or so) when his parents sat him down in front of a TV with pizza and a Sprite and showed him the original trilogy. He keeps trying to convince more fans to read the amazing 1980s Star Wars newspaper comics by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson. When he's not reading, watching or playing Star Wars media, he's often enjoying other great fantasy and science fiction sagas or playing roleplaying games with his friends.
