During the 2023 Writers Strike, This Book Helped Me Understand the Depravities of Hollywood
As I covered the Hollywood strike this year, perhaps the best guide was a 1941 novel by a former Communist Party member about the dog-eat-dog scumbaggery of movie executives and the lying and artless bragging that Hollywood runs on.
Budd Schulberg testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, May 23, 1951. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
Everyone in the business knew 2023 would be a big year for Hollywood’s unions.
Rumors across the town had it that the industry’s screenwriters and television writers, members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), were sure to strike — even if they didn’t want to, the studios were provoking it. Word had it they had been stockpiling scripts and churning out shows so that when the writers walked out, they’d have the programming to fill the airtime.
Having covered 2021’s near-strike by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) — the industry’s “below-the-line” workers, so-called because of where their names appear on production budgets — I planned to do the same for the industry’s writers. But having never written about the WGA before, I needed to do some research.
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