WGA’s David A. Goodman & Michele Mulroney On Being “Stonewalled” By AMPTP, “Free Work Nightmare” & Other Compensation Issues

David A. Goodman and Michele Mulroney marched alongside approximately 200 strikers at Paramount Studios in Hollywood on Tuesday in support of the WGA which is battling the AMTPT for better wages, among other things, on the first official day of the strike.

The duo was joined by actors Rob Lowe and Ike Barinholtz; writers Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz, Craig Mazin, Jenni Konner and Nancy De Los Santos.

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“The main sticking points were that the companies stonewalled us on the very important issues that we raised in this negotiation,” said Goodman, co-chair of the WGA Negotiating Committee. “They refused to even have a discussion to engage in a negotiation. We were able to negotiate around some other issues and we did make some compromises and we did take some things off the table. But there were main issues of this negotiations that the companies flatly rejected even a conversation about, and they forced us to go out on strike.”

He later elaborated on some of those main issues, including “writers being able to maintain a career; writers in features not being able to afford to stay feature writers; comedy-variety writers, they wanted a day rate; television writers not being able to afford to live in the city where their shows are produced — all those compensation issues are one issue and they dismissed all of them.”

Mulroney, a screenwriter who worked on Power Rangers (2017) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), and Ex-Officio member of the WGA Negotiating Committee, is prepared to strike “for as long as it takes.”

“This is going take as long as the companies want it to take. When they’re ready to get serious about our agenda, we’re ready to negotiate,” she said. “I’m a features writer in this union, and our features agenda once again, for many cycles now, has been completely dismissed by this these companies and they flatly refused to address any of the very basic and core features issues that we brought to the table including a fundamental denial of the existence of the free work nightmare that plagues our members in television and features and in comedy-variety. They really stonewalled us in a way that was frustrating, surprising and completely inappropriate given the moment that we’re in this business.”

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