Jeremy Kaufman is a Washington University alumnus currently walking the picket lines in Los Angeles as a member of the Writers Guild of America (which has been on strike since May 2). A writer in Hollywood for more than a decade, he's worked on shows that have appeared on Amazon and Starz. He is also a writer on Dead Boy Detectives, a Netflix series adapted from a Neil Gaiman book scheduled to air this fall. We asked him about the writers strike as well as how his time at school in St. Louis impacts his line of work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What's the vibe like on the picket lines?
I wasn't there in 2008 for the last strike, but everyone says the vibe is much more enthusiastic this time. Every time I go, I go with my headphones on to listen to some podcasts, but then I will run into someone I haven't seen for a few years, or some writer that I know, or someone I recognize, like the guy who wrote Fast and Furious. It's cool. It's an interesting way to spend your day, to run into people you haven't seen in a while and reconnect with them.
I've read that in the last decade and a half it's gotten harder to be a writer in Hollywood. Tell me more about why that is.
It used to be that with broadcast TV shows on ABC, NBC, Fox — all the normal TV you grew up watching — they would have a writers room between 8 to 12 people. Each season would be 22 episodes, meaning you'd be hired for 40 weeks out of the year. ... Now with streaming, because the seasons can be six episodes, it's never gonna be 40 weeks. You'll probably be working for 20 weeks out of the year, if you're lucky. And it might be a year and a half between seasons.
Since your schedule has been uprooted, what have you been doing with your newly found free time?
We can still write. We just can't write for anything involved with the studio or a studio line producer. But you can be working on your own spec projects, which is basically anything that's your own creation that you want to write and develop yourself to eventually sell. I've been working on a couple TV series ideas with friends.
Has your time at Wash U benefited you out in Hollywood?
In the entertainment industry, everybody went to USC or NYU or, like, Harvard. There's not that many people from Wash U, but when I see someone who I know who went there, there's an instant connection. ... There's definitely been a bunch of people who I see out on the picket lines, who I only know vaguely, though I know they went to Wash U. I see them, and I'm like, "Oh hey, like, let's chat."
What's the one thing that someone only vaguely following the strike should be aware of?
The strike here is the same thing as across all of America: labor versus management. ... This isn't rich writers trying to get every extra dollar and shutting down the industry just so we can do that. This is the average middle class person in Los Angeles or New York just trying to make it so they can have kids and maybe someday buy a house.
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