Three of the four main agencies have countersued the writers for refusing to condone agency packaging with studios
When the Daily Beast calls the standoff between the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood agencies “the war ripping Hollywood apart,” you’re seeing an industry crisis reach a spillover point into wider public consciousness. The Beast’s Tarpley Hitt writes, “At its core, the writer-agent war revolves around an increasingly familiar problem, understood by anyone at work in the gig economy: the rights of freelancers in the face of corporations. Specifically: what happens when those companies take billions in private equity, and what they do to protect their bottom line.”
The increasingly hostile situation—which began in April when 7,000 writers fired their agents—now may be threatening the IPO of one of the Big Four agencies. When William Morris Endeavor released its financial reports for investors who might want to buy its stock when the company goes public, they revealed that the agency has $4.6 billion in debt. Given that debt, how likely is it that WME will readily stop its practice of packaging, which the current fight is all about? (Packaging is when agencies take money directly from the studios for the teams of talent they package together—rather than making their income as a percentage of what they get for their client-writers). In Variety, Cynthia Littleton and Brent Lang report, “Packaging-fee income is surely a significant portion of the division’s $335.2 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.”
The Writers Guild sued the Big Four talent agencies in April, alleging that the agencies had violated their fiduciary responsibilities to their clients. Three of the four massive agencies have since countersued the Writers Guild. WME led off on June 20, followed on June 27 by United Talent Agents (UTA), followed on July 1 by Creative Artists Agency (CAA). That last suit’s court filing puts things into an antitrust context, alleging that the writers are “attempting to restrain competition on a staggering scale using illegal means.”
The energy for the fight may not be waning among the writers, many of whom see this as a battle for the fundamental relationship of authors and agents without conflict of interest. When author-director Phyllis Nagy started crowdfunding to help Guild writers who couldn’t pay their union insurance costs, Variety reports, the campaign raised $25,000 in days, and as of this writing it has surpassed $44,600.
Bottom line: Industry observers on both sides of the issue see lasting changes ahead for writers as well as agents. As Hitt writes, one opportunity could open right up for enterprising agents willing to agree to take no packaging fees and work with writers on their own terms for “a chance at doing business with high-profile scribes while the legal battle rages.” And still another viewpoint is that in marshaling its members to resist so staunchly, the Writers Guild may be making itself the channel for writers’ work, exerting something similar to the “control that the NBA exerts over agents for professional basketball players,” as Littleton and Lang write.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
