Judd Apatow says studios may not want a quick solution to writers’ strike
The American comedian and filmmaker Judd Apatow has opined that studios and streamers likely already know when the writers’ strikes will come to an end. He added that many studios and involved organisations will be comfortable with a drawn-out solution: “They’ve probably been planning this for years.”
“I think they probably already know what they’re going to bend on,” Apatow told Variety in an interview at the Rock4EB benefit in Malibu over the weekend. “I would assume they already know what date this is going to end. They’ve probably been planning this for years.”
Apatow echoed comments overheard in Los Angeles and New York after the writers union began to strike Tuesday. He added that he believes the strikes to be a calculated business move by high-up Hollywood executives.
“I always think that whatever happens, they could have figured it out already,” he said. “When these things conclude, you never go, ‘I understand why it took that long.’ It’s never something so inventive and groundbreaking that you think, ‘Oh, people needed to go to war for months over it.’ It’s always a very obvious position. So that’s what’s scary about it is that there is a solution, but I’m not sure that all of the business interests are interested in getting to it quickly.”
Apatow explained that while he currently has no projects directly impacted by the strikes, the disruption “affects everything because we’re in development on a lot of things, so you just have to stop…then as soon as the strike ends, everybody says, ‘Oh, now we have a backlog; we don’t need anything.’”
“That aspect of it complicates everything that we’re trying to do,” Apatow added. “We’re not in the middle of anything other than writing.”
“We’re like Twitter’s employees, that if they want to save money, they just get rid of 80 per cent of the workforce,” he continued. “That’s why it’s an existential problem. If the ecosystem of writers doesn’t exist, no one will learn how to do it. No one will be able to survive doing it. And then everyone will go, ‘Well, maybe I’ll write video games, maybe I’ll make TikToks at home and become an influencer.’ It’s a lot of creative people who can do other things. So you don’t want the whole system to collapse.”
He continued to assert that the increased pay the WGA is seeking at the moment is nothing to do with monetary greed. “We have a system now that that does not reward success for a lot of these projects,” Apatow said. “If you make something and a billion people watch it, you don’t make more money than if it was a disaster, right? That’s not good for creativity because it takes away a lot of the motivation for the creative people, because people work really hard to create some sort of cushion for their lives”.
He added: “All of our work is ebb and flow. The successes pay for the time when things aren’t going well. Sometimes they go well and sometimes they don’t, but you can live off of the time that you wrote something that had a lot of residual [fees paid out]. It’s always been a tenuous career. But if you take away most of the linchpins, it’s a career that a majority of people can’t survive.”
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