WGA East Leaders Break Down Guild’s ‘Risky and Unusual’ Effort to Honor SAG-AFTRA Picket Lines: ‘We Have to Keep Supporting Each Other’

variety.com:

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer The strike is over, but the fight is not yet won. On Wednesday, as the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike formally ended after 148 days, Variety spoke with newly elected WGA East president Lisa Takeuchi Cullen and WGA East executive director Lowell Peterson about the end of the work stoppage at the East coast guild’s membership meeting to discuss their tentative three-year MBA agreement with the Hollywood studios.

While the deal still needs to be ratified following a member vote to be held from Oct. 2-9, the details revealed about the pact with the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP) are points the WGA East leadership is immensely proud of and has every hope will be cleared by the union. “That’s one of the realizations that’s gonna settle into a lot of members as we go forward — is that, not only did we achieve these gains, we achieved them forever,” Takeuchi Cullen told Variety on Wednesday evening prior to entering the Manhattan Center for the membership meeting. “It’s now codified in our contract, and they can never go back from declaring that writers rooms must exist for television shows, from defining what a showrunner is, and that the showrunner is a writer, from giving us these protections for AI, which we knew was a storm that was right around the corner, and we knew we had to handle it now in this negotiation, or in three years, it would be too late,” she said.

Peterson added: “Early on, we read a lot in the trades and we heard across the table from the AMPTP, and some of the industry side people, the company side people, saying, you can’t want everything, that’s just not the way it works.