SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
A historic Hollywood merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery got another step closer to reality this week after Paramount settled a lawsuit filed by 12 states and the Writers Guild of America. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the lawsuit, defended the settlement to Morning Edition's A Martínez on Tuesday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
ROB BONTA: We landed at this deal resolving our antitrust concerns and making very significant commitments that support workers' jobs, the economy, our state and our country.
DETROW: But many people within the industry are not happy, and that includes writer and showrunner Michael Schur, a key person behind "The Office," "Parks And Recreation" and "The Good Place." Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MICHAEL SCHUR: Thank you for having me.
DETROW: Let me read back to you a social media post that you wrote about all of this. You wrote, by the time this merger ruins HBO, destroys WB, gets 5,000 people fired, moves production overseas and guts the quality of the movies the new studio makes, most people will have forgotten how fast the AGs caved and how little they got in this deal. Writers will not. Attorney General Bonta's response is this is going to be good for jobs. This is going to be good for workers. Why, to you, is he wrong?
SCHUR: Well, if you look what he actually secured, it's incredibly minimal, in my opinion, and very easily work-aroundable (ph). You know, there are things like, well, they're going to distribute 30 movies a year. Well, distribute isn't make. Distribute could mean you buy a movie for a dollar on the independent market and then release it in theaters for a week or something, and that counts as a movie you've distributed. The actual production commitments are pretty minimal. They agreed to increase their production expenditure by, I think, $300 million a year. Well, the last "Mission: Impossible" movie costs $291 million to make. So they're essentially saying, we'll make one more giant action movie per year.
And if you go down the line of everything that was agreed to and secured, these things are only meaningful if they're enforced, and there's very little to indicate who's enforcing the new rules, who is going to go after them if they don't abide by them.
DETROW: The guilds are a little split here. The Directors Guild put out a pretty enthusiastic statement of support about this settlement. Why do you think they view things so differently than the writers do?
SCHUR: Well, I do not want to speak ill of my fellow union members or their leadership. I will only say that when the Writers Guild met and talked about this internally, our instantaneous conclusion was that this is a disaster for all artists, not just writers, for all of the people whose livelihoods depend on production. In Hollywood, mergers are never good. We saw this happen seven years ago when Disney and Fox merged. Things did not get better for anyone. They didn't get better for writers. They didn't get better for directors or actors or craftspeople or, you know, teamsters or anybody. Because the simple truth is that when two giant companies merge, there's a lot of redundancy. The company has taken on an enormous amount of debt in order to finance the purchase, and when you have a lot of debt and there's redundancies, you fire people and you reduce production.
So again, I'm not privy to any discussions in the Directors Guild. All I know is that the instantaneous conclusion from the Writers Guild was these mergers are bad. They're bad for artists. They're bad for craftspeople. They're bad for consumers. They're essentially bad for every single person except for the billionaires at the very top who are going to personally profit to an extraordinary degree by this corporate merger.
DETROW: A lot of the focus and conversation has been about what this means for the film industry. Can you tell me specifically about your worries for television?
SCHUR: Well, that's the problem - right? - is the center of the antitrust proposed lawsuit was on film. And if you look at what was agreed to by the attorneys general, none of it has to do with television production. That wasn't, to be fair, their focus. Their focus was on film and what it meant - you know, antitrust for film. But it's worse for television. I mean, there are more writers employed in television than there are in movies currently. And there's no commitment for new television production. There's no commitment for, you know, additional spending or distribution or anything. And that's really bad.
I mean, if you really break it down to its essence - I'm a writer, right? I have an idea. I go and pitch the idea to Paramount+, and then I pitch it to CBS, and then I pitch it to HBO Max, and then I pitch it to, you know, whoever else. Well, now, all of those places are owned by the same company. There's only one door to knock on. So you know, as the number of potential landing spots for your project keeps decreasing through these mergers, it gets harder and harder to sell anything. There's, you know, a half a dozen places left when there used to be 25. I mean, you know, even if they're independent outlets, they're still owned by the same parent company. They're not going to fight each other over these ideas.
So it's just a - it's an increasingly small pond that writers are swimming around in. And again, I think the same could be a set of actors and directors. It's just the number of projects is going to get smaller and smaller, and that's less and less opportunity for steady employment.
DETROW: Michael Schur is a writer and showrunner. Thank you so much for talking to us about this.
SCHUR: My pleasure. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
