Transcript
Into America
Healing in Buffalo
Archival Recording: Because the power of the union don’t stop! Ain’t no power like the power of the union because the power of the union don’t stop! What do we want? Clear contracts! When do we want it? Now!
Trymaine Lee: We’re deep into the third week of the writers’ strike, which has stopped production on television shows and movies across the country. Late night shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” have gone dark, and hits like “Abbott Elementary” and “Stranger Things” have halted production.
Archival Recording: Outside Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, Netflix and the other Hollywood studios and on the streets of Manhattan, striking writers united behind a single message
Archival Recording: Fair pay. Fair compensation for our creative work. Ain’t no power like the power of the union —
Lee: The strike came after talks broke down between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The WGA is the union that represents TV and film writers, and the Alliance is the organization that bargains for over 350 production companies.
The WGA says the industry’s turn to streaming means lower wages, less job security and lower residual payments for their members. The union says they’re also fighting for better work conditions and job protection from AI programs like ChatGPT.
Archival Recording: Writers should be getting paid what they deserve and we shouldn’t be getting replaced with technology. As advanced as it should be, it’s never going to be better than human beings at the keyboard.
Archival Recording: Because I, as a writer, know what it’s like to have been paid, not being paid for a free work and all that kind of things. And I just want to make sure that we’re all getting our fair due.
We create these stories. Everything, all from the memes, stuff that you see online. It comes from the brains of these writers and I feel like we should be paid and compensated for it.
Lee: Meanwhile, the Alliance says they’ve negotiated in good faith and that the wage increase they’re offering is the biggest in 25 years and including benefits like healthcare and pensions. The package is more than double what the Union claims it is.
Into America’s parent company, NBC Universal, is part of the Alliance for the Television and Movie Productions.
Archival Recording: What do we want? Contracts! When do we want it? Now!
Lee: Writers began tweeting photos of 3-cent paychecks as evidence of their underpayment on episodes they wrote for streaming platforms. And others were tweeting horror stories of working long hours with no pay on shows that were never released.
Celebrities like Drew Barrymore, Rob Lowe, and Sherri Shepherd have lent support. Even President Biden chimed in.
Joe Biden: I sincerely hope the writers’ strike in Hollywood gets resolved and the writers are given a fair deal they deserve as soon as possible. This is iconic, meaningful American industry, and we need the writers and all the workers and everyone involved to tell the stories of our nation.
Lee: The WGA and the Alliance negotiate a new contract every three years and usually, they come to an agreement before the deadline. But that hasn’t always been the case. In 1988, writers took to the picket lines over creative rights and residual payments.
Archival Recording: This is a third writers’ strike in seven years, and right at the start, it smells like a long one.
Lee: In the end, the two sides each gave in a little and reached to compromise. The strike ended in 153 days and ultimately cost the industry $500 million. The last writers’ strike was in 2007. At the heart of this work stoppage, more money for writers and setting a standard for payment for streaming, which was a completely new landscape at the time.
Archival Recording: The companies have refused to agree that writers must receive fair compensation when their work is broadcast on the internet or downloaded on iPods or cell phones.
Lee: Massive hits like “The Office” and “Breaking Bad” were forced into smaller seasons. The State of California lost $2 billion in revenue across not only the film and television industry, but also the industries that support it, like restaurants and construction.
After 100 days on the picket line, the WGA had some big wins, like setting a standard for streaming residuals. But as the industry has shifted to streaming in a more significant way, the writers say they deserve more.
This time, writers say they’re in it for the long haul again. Depending on how long the strike lasts, industry experts say we can expect more reruns, delays and possible show cancellations. Just this week, the major networks released their fall slates and they’re leaning heavily on unscripted content.
Archival Recording: And if the strike stretches, there could be an impact on fall shows, even future blockbusters.
Lee: But while all writers are impacted by the strike and by the changes the union is fighting for, some writers have more at stake than others, like black writers.
Archival Recording: If we don’t get those things, the people who are going to be squeezed out of writing television and film are the people who are on the margins. We have to make a living and we don’t have the economic means to stay in the business. It’s always going to be a difficult career, but it was never supposed to be an impossible career. And that’s what we’re fighting for.
Lee: And if black writers can’t stay in the business, the quality of our shows, the way we’re portrayed, and the culture overall will suffer.
Archival Recording: What does that mean for what our TV and film images and stories about us are going to look like in a year, two years, five years’ time?
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee and this is “Into America.” This week, I’m joined by Anthony Sparks, a longtime TV writer, showrunner, and executive producer, who spent the last few weeks on the picket line. We talk about his journey into television writing, why the issues at the heart of this strike are especially important to black writers and why a good deal for writers means better television for all of us.
Anthony Sparks, first of all, the best name in the business, man. Anthony Sparks. How are you doing, brother?
Anthony Sparks: I’m doing well and it is legit. I did not change my name. That is my birth name. But thank you.
Lee: Tony Sparks.
Sparks: That’s right.
Lee: Tony Sparks. Dr. Tony Sparks.
Sparks: Yes. How are you? So great to be here.
Lee: Anthony Sparks is an award-winning writer, producer, and showrunner whose roster of shows includes “Queen Sugar”, “The Blacklist” and “Bel-Air.”
Sparks: I got my first job 20 years ago this month, in fact. Prior to that, I was a stage actor in New York and playwright, but I’m really just a kid from the South Side of Chicago who’s out here trying to live his dream. And I’ve been riding the wild horse of being a writer in television and film, a black writer, black male writer, specifically, in drama and television and film.
And anybody who knows anything about what it is to work behind the scenes as a writer knows that in those phrases I just said, I just said a lot of things without saying a lot of things.
Lee: It’s charged up. It’s charged up and loaded.
Sparks: It is, but I’m still here trying to fight the good fight, you know, and happy to talk to you today.
Lee: You said you’re from the South Side of Chicago. Talk to us about, you know, where you’re from and what it was like growing up in the South Side of Chicago, and also, how you got that bug somewhere along the line to act.
Sparks: So, for me, getting into the arts actually came through the black church. My brother, who’s now a pastor actually, I was always tucked up under his wing and he was very active in churches on the South Side of Chicago, and I was always right there.
So, I was the kid who was reciting, you know, James Weldon Johnson at the Christmas program and the Easter program and all of that other stuff. So, I began to understand performing and writing, and anything creative was always connected to the notion of community for me.
Lee: Anthony went from acting in church and school in Chicago to studying theater at the University of Southern California to trying to make it as a performer in New York City.
Sparks: And then while I was in New York, honestly, was where it really took hold. I was in “Stomp” performing in that show for five years, and I was looking for my next act.
And I was blessed and fortunate that I had basically performed as an actor, a stage actor, since the moment I graduated college, but was having a little bit of trouble moving into TV and film in the way that I wanted. And I remember being at a bookstore. I hung out at bookstores a lot then, and I ran across a book called “The Showrunners: The Real Stars of Television.”
And I read about it and what the job description was, and it was like, oh, these are the people who actually determine what we see on the TV screen. And the reason I’m having trouble as a black actor, a young black actor, is because they are telling me that I don’t exist. They’re telling me that they don’t think that people like me come from the South Side of Chicago. They’re telling me that I don’t represent what I actually do, in fact, represent.
And the reason that’s happening is that by the time you get to an audition, the cake has been largely baked at that point. And I went, I need to become a part of this conversation sooner than an actor typically gets an audition.
And I had always been a writer in high school. It was sort of a more private pursuit. And then I decided to really embrace that and I decided that that was my next act for my career, which was participate in the creation of those stories, those scripts, those images at the very beginning stage. And that’s very important to me.
Lee: So even then, you recognize these gatekeepers exist and you don’t want to keep banging your head up against these gatekeepers in their gates. You said, you know what? Maybe I can become one of these gatekeepers.
But there are still steps between being an actor and a showrunner. So, you started writing.
Sparks: Oh, yeah.
Lee: You were still conscious of like, I’m doing this to get there, though.
Sparks: Yes.
Lee: You were like —
Sparks: I was. I didn’t know all the steps that were involved. You know, some level of ignorance can be a little bit of bliss about how hard it was going to be. And I was in New York, not L.A., which is the center of the TV writing world.
But I knew good writing is good writing is good writing. And so, I started putting up plays while I was in New York, while I was also doing “Stomp,” doing seven eight shows a week. On those Mondays that we had off, sometimes Sunday nights, I was actually putting up my own shows at the HERE you know, Theater Arts Center downtown, you know, Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I was working hard. I was young and had a lot of energy and I was going for it.
Lee: Finally, Anthony’s writing caught the attention of a TV talent scout.
Sparks: By now, I’m a young married man. My wife is also an artist. And I asked her, would you please go on this crazy journey with me? Leave everything you know on the East Coast. Go to the West Coast. I think that’s where our life is going to be and give me a few years to see if I can crack this nut.
And, you know, it took some time once we got to Los Angeles. It’s a tough city like New York. But eventually, within about a year or about a year or two, I ended up getting my first TV writing job and have been writing the ups and downs and ups again of that ever since.
Lee: And your first writing gig, what was that first gig?
Sparks: It was “The District” on CBS. After that, I went to “Lincoln Heights” and that was sort of a combination of a cop show and a family show and worked with a trailblazer, I believe, in our business. Her name is Kathleen McGee-Anderson. She’s a playwright as well as a television and film writer and she was the showrunner of that show.
And I have to give her a lot of credit. She believed in me. She pulled me aside often and said, I think you can go far. I think you can do this. You got all the right stuff. And she actively taught me how to be a television producer.
I got to work with J.J. Abrams for a little bit on a show. Then I spent a long time, the longest time so far of my career, on “Queen Sugar” on the Oprah Winfrey Network, and eventually was tapped to be the showrunner and head writer of that show. So, I did that show for six seasons.
When I first started in the business, I had to be a little bit quiet about the fact that I was as conscious as I try to be.
Lee: Why so?
Sparks: Because there was not as much room in the public space for you to say that you were interested openly in the images of black people, and that’s why you came to write for TV. Like they weren’t trying to have that conversation 20 years ago as openly. It was always happening, but it was sort of, you know, you would meet people and it’s like, are you here just to make money or are you here to try and, you know, edify something?
Lee: It sounds like if the spook that sat by the door was Hollywood —
Sparks: A little of that.
Lee: — and you’re just kind of opening the door quietly —
Sparks: Yes.
Lee: — just letting them in.
Sparks: Yes. And you’re here to entertain. It’s arts and entertainment, obviously. But as black people in this country, have we ever had the luxury of just entertaining? I don’t —
Lee: Right.
Sparks: — know. We’re always doing image making, image breaking, image building work, whether we want to or not. Now, not everybody embraces that on the level that perhaps you or I would like, but I find that to be true.
You know, I like to say that I’m trying to get into the negro artist section of heaven. And when I show up and they ask me what I did with my opportunity, the answer cannot be I bought a lot of shoes. You know, there’s that famous clip that goes around about Toni Morrison where she says what your real job is, you know, and she says, you know, your real job after you get these fancy titles and you get these nice offices and you get a decent paycheck, that’s actually not your real job. Your real job is to hold the door open for somebody else behind you.
And for me as a young actor who was facing challenges in TV and film, becoming a television writer and producer and showrunner, always embedded in that was a purpose for me of making it just a little bit easier, if I could, for the young actor, the young artists that would come after me to have opportunities to play roles and put images out there that are qualitative and not destructive, you know, if I can speak in sort of an easy binary like that.
Lee: So, when you think back to that young black man trying to break into the business where you kind of had to be hush hush about how valid you really were about your community and your people.
Sparks: Yeah. That I was blackity-black?
Lee: That you were blackity-black. You was migration black. That what I call it, migration black.
Sparks: Yeah.
Lee: What was most important for that young black man that you were, most meaningful in terms of helping to nurture the talent that you had in the desire and drive, but in an ecosystem that might not have been so supportive?
Sparks: It was people who saw me, like I mentioned, Kathleen McGee-Anderson, Pam Lee Sae (ph) gave me my first job. That was important. But also, it was important that at that time, the economic ecosystem of television would allow you to work long enough to learn how to get good at what you were doing.
TV, in particular, takes place behind such a closed door, such a veiled process that the real way to learn it really is you have to do it. You also have to respect the medium. I’ve always respected the medium and what it could do.
I always understood that this was the medium that was playing a large role in what my daily experience as a black person and a black man might be on any given day. It’s powerful. It’s a powerful medium. It’s in everybody’s house and has been for 75 years.
I sometimes say, what is a medium? A medium is a thing in the middle, the middle of reality and perception, right? The medium. So, TV is that medium.
If you live in L.A. and you’ve never been in New York, you only know what New York looks like because you saw it in some, you know, piece of media. I always find it fascinating that so many people in our country have an opinion about black people and black people only live in about 10 places, you know.
Lee: Right. Right. Exactly. You ain’t never seen one outside of TV. You ain’t never talked to one. You ain’t never —
Sparks: You’ve never talked to us. You’ve never seen us really or you’ve just passed by us. You don’t really deal with us, you know, the way that our country is segregated. Make sure of that.
So, why does everyone have such a strong opinion about black people? Well, there seems to be sort of an investment and making sure that that’s so to support, you know, the status quo and racial stratification and things like that.
So, I see television as being deposited right in the middle of that conversation. And so, it is important that we are at the table. Who else can tell our story better than us if we’re really given the means to do so?
To say that I’ve been a TV drama writer for 20 years, black writers, there was this unwritten rule in TV that you didn’t even get to write drama 25, 30 years ago or only a very, very few. And when I say a few, I don’t mean a hundred. I mean, you could count them on two hands.
If you were going to be a black TV writer 30 years ago, you were writing comedy. And I’ll leave it for all of the theorists to unpack what that means that you could write comedies about your people, but you could not tell dramatic stories about your people, right?
That’s not the case anymore. Thank God. Things have improved in that respect, but only recently. It hasn’t been that long that we’ve been able to fully participate in some level at different levers and different genres in our television industry.
The goal is to keep it going and grow it because we’re not where we should be yet at all, though it is better than it was. What’s the saying? If you stabbed me with a knife and, you know, 12 inches and pull it out six inches, I’m still bleeding.
Lee: Listen.
Sparks: You know, so we have a ways to go.
Lee: When we come back, how Anthony’s taking the lessons from his career and moving them into action on the picket line to change the game for himself and other black writers.
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Lee: So, here you are, 30 years into the business, 20 years as a writer and showrunner with a number of hits under your belt, it almost seems like you’re just getting started. Right now, it’s like, man, now you’re in this other room and these other conversations and then the strike.
Sparks: Yeah.
Lee: Like what’s going on here for those of us who do not follow the news around Hollywood much. We watch what’s produced, but we don’t know what’s going on.
Sparks: Right.
Lee: Talk to us about the strike.
Sparks: And it feels like an incredibly privileged problem. Like some writers are mad, they’re on strike. Why should I care?
It’s a relatively small number of people who control what you see creatively. I can’t say writers control that, executives control that, but we are the ones who create the, quote-unquote, “content” that determine what you see on your TV screen when you turn it on.
If you care about the diversities of stories that are being told, if you care about the quality of stories being told, then just from a creative standpoint, one could care about this strike. But what we are actually here on these streets striking is about sort of the economic foundations of how we get paid and how that allows us to even have a career.
Television and film, it is a high risk, high barrier of entry business, but it has always had the capacity to be a high risk, high reward business. It is now turning quickly into a high risk, low reward.
And so, since you can go years between jobs or months between jobs, even as a successful, say, television writer, you could work on a show this season and not work on a show next season. You know, you never know how long the money you make is going to last. Therefore, it is important that it is maximized as much as possible.
That has only gotten worse because the orders are so diminished from 22 to 24 episodes a season now to six to eight episodes. And so, they’ve pushed on those salaries to the point where if you, say, make the minimum and you work 10 weeks on a show, it sounds great.
You made $50,000 in 10 weeks. Great. Okay. Except that might have to last you and chances are it’s going to have to last you a year, two years, maybe three. And you’re like, well, okay, that’s not a career. That’s a gig.
The whole point of having a union is that you’re not supposed to be treated like a gig worker, right? So, that’s why the union is out here fighting on all of writer’s behalf that we have a contract with the studios that allows us to make a middle-class living as has always been the case because remember, it takes a lot to get a job in TV and film. It takes a lot.
So, they’re taking the pathways to what used to be a career and turning it into a gig and dare I say even a hobby. There was a woman writer recently talking about the fact that she got hired on a show where they wanted her and her other writers to break the entire season, meaning come up with the entire story arc for the series in a weekend. In a weekend. Okay. And then they were going to farm out the scripts and just —
Lee: Well, first of all, that sounds like how we get so much of this stuff that we see on some of these streaming networks. You’re like, well, how is this made? It sounds like that.
Sparks: Right. Because it was done —
Lee: What is this?
Sparks: — in, you know, a weekend or three or four weeks and then it was rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush. And so, it’s not respecting the writer and it’s not even respecting the audience either because it’s saying we’re going to feed you whatever and you’re going to eat it.
So, the point is, is that we are getting paid a lot less for a lot shorter period of time. And what does that do? That means that the people who can afford to stay in this business will eventually be people who have outside support, who come from money already.
Mom and dad can help float them while they pursue their Hollywood dream, right? And that is going to historically not be black people.
Lee: Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Sparks: Surprise, surprise, surprise. When America gets a cold, we get the flu. My point being, if we don’t get those things, the people who are going to be squeezed out of writing television and film are the people who are on the margins.
So, while we’re fighting for a contract that’s going to be fair to all writers and it is critical to all writers, this has the potential to be devastating to black writers if we do not win this fight, the WGA. Win it for all writers, but also win it for writers who have historically been marginalized.
Lee: I want to ask you about the impact of streaming, all these streaming channels and platforms. You know, what role has that played in and how things have shaped up for a lot of young writers, writers, period?
Sparks: You know, basically television has been streamified. You know, the streamification, if I can say that, of television has happened. And with it coming from Silicon Valley or what have you, they brought a new economic model into television.
You know, we used to always have to like look for a job once a year. Now, you have writers having to look for a job every two months. You’ve seen what some of these people are getting paid that are running these companies and, you know, I guess it’s nice work if you can get it.
All we’re saying is we’re the people on whose backs you are making all of that profit. You can’t cut us off 2 percent? Because that’s what we’re asking for. You know, 2 percent of your profits, that doesn’t make any sense.
If we don’t take this stand as writers right now as a guild, honestly, there won’t be that much to fight for three to five years down the line. It’s a horrible example, but it’s a vivid example of a writer who’s on “The Bear.”
“The Bear” is one of the buzziest shows of the last 12 months, critically acclaimed, nominated for all kinds of awards. It will win awards, I believe. It’s a beautiful, beautiful show.
One of the writers on that show made so little money writing that show that when he went to the award show where the show was being celebrated, he had a negative balance in his bank account and had to put his suit that he wore to the award show on a credit card. So, you’re walking the red carpet, but you’re bleeding red ink at the same time.
Lee: Crazy.
Sparks: It’s crazy. It just isn’t supposed to be like that.
Lee: When you think about these shorter seasons and the higher demands and all of the kind of the murkiness around streaming numbers, and we know people are getting fat, right? We know people are getting paid, but we don’t know, and we’re not getting residuals.
And then you think about the resources being directed to different shows. Are we seeing any disparity in the kind of resources directed towards black shows than white shows? Would the network say, they don’t need much? Do we see any of that kind of thing playing out?
Sparks: First of all, I want to thank you for asking that question. It is not a question that is often asked, and I think it’s a question that sometimes people are afraid to talk about because what you’re talking about is how bias and racism gets encoded economically into the system, right?
Such that one show gets $10, you get three, but please make your Yugo look like a Mercedes. And how do you do that, you know? And so, black creators and showrunners, others before me, including myself, I’ve had to be incredibly creative with budgets, and that’s always a fight in TV, you know, how to stretch your budget.
But you’d be shocked at the disparities between some of the budgets between, quote-unquote, “black” shows and other shows. You’d be shocked, shocked, shocked, shocked, shocked, shocked.
And black people watch a lot of television. I wish there was a better way for us to be able to codify that and bring that to bear in our budget conversations.
Lee: And the shows end up being big shows. When you think about the black shows that are big, they end up being big. I don’t see a whole bunch of stuff floating around.
Sparks: If a black show is a huge show, then everybody’s watching it. A lot of times our shows, quote-unquote, I hate to use the term, “crossover,” right? Okay.
So, if you’re making money from a black audience who tends to be the leaders of pop culture and a white audience, it seems to me that you’re doing double work, right? Your show shouldn’t necessarily have a discounted budget, so to speak.
Lee: And I have some friends who, you know, former journalists who are now in that space and all the black folks in the industry, you kind of do actually know each other.
Sparks: Yes.
Lee: So, I’m sure those conversations are like circulate amongst y’all.
Sparks: You do. And sometimes, there’d be times when I’d be leaving my show that I was show running and I get a call from another fellow showrunner, you know, who’s like, hey, I’m having this problem. What’s your take on it? How do you deal with it?
And the reality is, is because when we get a shot, we’re not guaranteed to get multiple shots. If you should be so fortunate and blessed and lucky to survive long enough to be seen as someone who can be entrusted with a multimillion-dollar show, you better be ready.
I almost feel sorry sometimes for people who get their shots perhaps too soon. Oftentimes, those of us who care about the success of black people in the industry try to reach that person and be like, hey, you might want to think about it this way, or you might want to think about it that way because you’re still new, even though you’ve been sort of elevated to the top of the hill. If you fall off this hill, chances are you’re not getting back on it.
So, another thing that the streamification of TV has done, it has broken the pipeline of experience. Remember, I talked about earlier, I talked about how in “Lincoln Heights” Kathleen McGee-Anderson was the person who really poured into me, taught me how to be a TV producer, gave me shots. When I messed up, didn’t throw me out to the wolves, taught me how to be better, things like that. They have cut that pipeline off.
Lee: And I’d imagine when you make it black and then you don’t have nepotism and you don’t have power and you don’t have fancy friends and you’re not in the social networks —
Sparks: Exactly.
Lee: — it makes it even harder.
Sparks: And we have fought for so many years to get to the point where black showrunners and creators could be entrusted with our own shows, breaking that pipeline of training, of people being able to afford to stay in the business, all of that begins to push on all writers, but especially black and marginalized writers. We are the ones who will look up in three or four years and none of us are qualified to run our own shows.
Lee: What’s the implication of that?
Sparks: The implication is that we’ve rolled back the clock and the quality of the stories, the complexity of the stories, the ways in which we are represented become diminished. If you look at a show from the 1970s or ’80s and how we were presented —
Lee: You jive turkey. Man, you just a jive turkey.
Sparks: Right? Okay. That’s because those stories were being written by people who observed the culture from very far away, if they did any observation at all, but did not participate in the culture or they were not of the culture. Okay.
If black people can’t afford to be TV writers and film writers anymore, what happens to our stories? And it’s not like things are perfect now. They’re not, but they’re better than they were.
But if you’re going to bring in these business practices that make it impossible for you to even in success as a TV and film writer, pay your bills, then people are going to leave and go do something else because we don’t have those safety nets.
Lee: So, the economic implications, that’s one thing —
Sparks: Yeah.
Lee: — but with any good strike, the protests animate, right, the issues and the solidarity.
Sparks: Yeah.
Lee: Have you been out to these protests?
Sparks: Yeah.
Lee: And is there a special feeling when you’re in a protest line and you see another brother or sister, so you know it’s about all of us, but it’s also about us?
Sparks: Yes. So, yes. I’ve been out there. I’ve been going to studios close to my house, sometimes going a little bit further away from my house and bouncing around from studio to studio as have all of us, quite a few of us, are doing that.
We just had sort of a black bat signal get sent out actually the other day and we had Writers Strike Black and we all gathered at, I think it was outside Paramount Studios. It does take concerted effort for us to get together.
When you had the pandemic on top of that, many of us have not seen each other in person. We’ve Zoomed. We’ve had phone calls and stuff like that. So, I believe it was 900 of us gathered outside the gates of Paramount Studio, yeah, just a couple of days ago.
Lee: Wow.
Sparks: So, you know, when we get together, you know, we like to get together.
Lee: Yeah.
Sparks: So, yes, it was actually a beautiful day of solidarity that we had among black writers, also some white counterparts that were there as well. And we let our voices be heard. We are here. We’re not trying to go anywhere. We fought hard to get in. We’re fighting hard to stay in. And we want to tell our stories and you’re profiting off us telling those stories. So, surely, surely, we should be able to pay our light bill.
Lee: Are you optimistic that things will work out, you know, in the way that you hope that there’ll be more equity and parity and fairness and all that stuff?
Sparks: I think we have to. We have to. Otherwise, this ceases to become a career and it’s a hobby. It’s a gig. And frankly, to succeed in this industry is too challenging and too hard. Like this would be the hardest hobby in the world.
Lee: Right. Is it supposed to hurt like this?
Sparks: It’s supposed to hurt like this.
Lee: It’s a hobby. It’s supposed to —
Sparks: A hobby is supposed to be something you enjoy, you know.
Lee: Right.
Sparks: Sometimes, right? That’s right.
Lee: So, with all this turmoil and uncertainty clouding Hollywood right now, what are you most excited about though? Because, you know, “Bel-Air” which is a favorite of our show, we’ve had folks on with everybody on the actors and the creative, we’ve had folks on, we love it.
Sparks: Yeah. A beautiful cast.
Lee: Big success.
Sparks: Yeah.
Lee: What are you most excited about in the future? Is there any other projects, anything else going on that you’re excited about?
Sparks: I am. I’m just trying to think about who I can tell you that I’m working with because everything is under embargo.
Lee: Listen, man, this is just us talking, don’t worry about the camera and the mic.
Sparks: You’ve got a pretty large audience, man, I don’t know.
Lee: Yeah.
Sparks: But I will say this, I am blessed and privileged right now. I am working with an Oscar winner and creating a show in partnership with that person.
I am working with an Emmy winner and creating a show in partnership with that person. I am working with a Pulitzer Prize winner and creating a show that I really hope will start a lot of great conversations.
And this strike is a little painful for me personally because I got a lot going on. I mean, as when you said, I feel like I’m getting started even though I’ve been 20 years in, that is exactly right. I finally have reached the point where people call me with incredibly meaningful ideas and paychecks to back up that interest.
And so, I have a lot of work to do. But in solidarity with my union, we have to take this stand.
Lee: We reached out to the Alliance for Motion Picture and Television Producers for comment on this story. They sent us a set of responses which said that in 2020, the agreement increased streaming residuals by 46 percent. So, most writers are just now seeing an increase in their paychecks.
The Alliance also says it’s unrealistic to set minimum mandatory staffing requirements because the creative process is different for each show and movie. We also asked the Alliance to respond to the claims that these issues disproportionately hurt black writers and other writers from marginalized groups. They told us they aren’t answering any direct questions.
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“Into America” is produced by Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Dalton and Max Jacobs. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner. I’m Trymaine Lee. We’ll be back next Thursday.