Tony Gilroy Says There Is Only "One Way Out" From The Writer's Strike
Image Source: IMDb
Both the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike and the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strike are still going strong. Both unions are fighting for similar things within their contract negotiations, including AI regulations, a fairer residual pay model, and fair, equal minimum pay standards, among other goals. Tony Gilroy, a prominent writer, producer, and director, recently made a speech front and center on the picket line.
The last writers’ strike was in 2007-2008, which the filmmaker was also a part of. During his speech, Gilroy reaffirmed the importance of writers and their roles in creation (via Deadline), “If we’ve learned anything in the last 15 years, it is our value. We are the content. It is our ideas. It’s our ideas that fill the theme parks and the toy stores. It’s our characters on the lunchboxes and the Halloween costumes. … We are the natural resource from which the product is made, and we are tired of being strip-mined.” Without the writers putting the stories into a tangible creation, those stories wouldn’t exist, at least not in the forms we know them today.
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Image Source: IMDb
He shifted focus to the strike’s opponents and what kind of difficulty they pose to the cause, “We have one problem, and that’s that the AMPTP does not have their sh*t together. They do not know what the f*ck they are doing. We are facing across the table now a group of people who have never done this before. They’re doing this for the first time, and they have almost nothing in common but greed.” Gilroy ended his speech, leading to a now-classic line from his show Andor, “We’re there. It’s our show. We cannot wait, we cannot stall… One way out.”
Fellow writer and producer Beau Willimon spoke just before Gilroy, sharing his words with the crowd. He explained, “The longer this strike goes, the tougher it gets, the stronger our solidarity must be. Because we have an obligation not just to ourselves but to those who came before us and to those who come after us.” Willimon also wrapped his speech up with a “one way out” reference, drawing energy from the episode he helped write.
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