Hollywood execs scrambling for response to writers strike literally everyone saw coming

As we now coast through what is officially Day 2 of the Writers Guild Of America’s ongoing strike, it turns out that—shock of shocks—the majority of the film and TV executives tasked with handling this seismic event from the studio’s side may not have been fully prepared for the realities of an industry-wide work shutdown. (This, despite the fact that the strike has been looming on the horizon for months now, as the WGA continues to push back against the corporations’ handling of residuals for streaming shows, which have seen writer paychecks drop heavily in recent years as one of their steadiest sources of income continued to dry up.)

As noted by THR, the most recent thing the studios did not prepare for (out of the many things they do not appear to have prepared for, including the fact that writers will get angry if you try to pay them way less for their work) might actually be kind of surprising: They currently have too many scripts sitting in their inboxes, instead of too few. Working writers being working writers, it turns out that a lot of the workers now striking submitted (or, in the words of one exec, “dumped”) scripts to the studios ahead of the Monday night deadline, and now there’s a glut. (Not that that will last; content mill gonna mill, after all.) The current issue facing execs, apparently, is that they’re not sure how to respond to these scripts: Normally, they’d send back notes to the writers as part of the next step for approval, but nobody appears to have put together a cohesive response for doing so now that said writers are operating under guild strike rules, including the key provision that, “You may not attend pitch meetings or communicate with a company representative to receive notes on literary material even if you intend to wait until the strike ends to make any requested changes.”

The response, apparently, has been scattershot: Execs at multiple companies have been told not to even send notes, lest they “add fuel to the fire.” Some are sending the notes along with a disclaimer saying, basically, “Please don’t look at or think about these until the strike is over.” Others are apparently going with a writer-by-writer basis, depending on who’ll be more receptive; some have even said that they like “the idea of being able to get a jump on things when the strike ultimately concluded.” The central issue is that none of them seem to have had a plan in place to deal with this, even though it was completely predictable; meanwhile, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of reflection, either, on the fact that none of these people actually have very much to do, professionally, if writers aren’t providing them with material to work on.