New Hollywood horror: the robowriter on the mogul’s knee
Better storytelling could be a welcome spin-off from the writers’ strike in the dream factory city
Just a few years ago it may have seemed too implausible to imagine as real, but could have tempted a big studio into a blockbuster dystopian sci-fi film. Man versus machine: complicated messy humanity versus cold, clinical technological efficiency — except the battle is taking place not in industrial plants but on the yellow brick roads outside Hollywood’s biggest dream factories.
The Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) embarked on a strike this week as its members closed their laptops, picked up their wittily written signs and joined picket lines outside the big studio and television offices in Los Angeles and New York, for the first time in 16 years. They’re protesting against what they feel is a devaluation of their craft by executives and a worrying trend for turning what were once believed to be indispensable creative contributors in the production of the content needed to feed the streaming beast, into gig economy workers. These are then paid the bare minimum with ...
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