A Year After the Strikes, Young Writers Are Still Fighting for Their Place in Hollywood

Inevitable Foundation president Richie Siegel and recipients of the L.A. Young Adult Relief Fund grant on their unprecedented career challenges amid employment contraction and how the fund is preventing their industry exodus.

Inevitable staff and fellows hold towels supporting the Hire Disabled Writers initiative during a cooling station event in 2023. Credit: Inevitable Foundation 

By Abbey White

Getting into Hollywood has never been easy, but within the last few years, entering Los Angeles’ entertainment workforce has felt like an insurmountable challenge for many young writers. Two historic work stoppages, stagnating wages, ongoing layoffs amid multiple studio consolidations, and a production contraction in L.A. have drastically impeded opportunities amid “so many people financially struggling and jobs disappearing,” says Chelsea Franklin, a Northwestern University graduate living in L.A. “There’s still so many layoffs, and not as many projects being made.”

“Those first couple of months after the strike, I was holding out for that finger-snap moment of, there's so many jobs that are going to be back on the market, and we're all going to be hiring, and everyone's going to be working again,” Donovan Fisher, a 2022 graduate of Columbia College Chicago also working in Los Angeles, recalls. “But it doesn't feel like that's happened. It's still that post-pandemic balance of the spreadsheets that we're seeing. Especially the big companies, very publicly. Every streamer has ads now, and writers still aren't being paid proper residuals, despite the fact that TV’s becoming cable again.”

It’s an experience even more challenging for creatives with disabilities, who have always faced additional barriers in finding and securing work in Hollywood. Along with having their in-person training and networking experiences stymied by a global pandemic, strike, and post-strike landscape, writers say they’re facing complications maintaining their health during a particularly stressful several years, as well as finding entertainment jobs and housing in L.A. “It's been especially hard as a member of the disabled community in that it narrows the jobs you can do in and outside of the industry,” says Fisher.

For Inevitable Foundation, an organization that since 2021 has worked to expand the presence and power of disabled writers in Hollywood, it's been a particularly concerning moment. “It’s a period of lost career growth,” acknowledges the organization’s president, Richie Siegel. “It’s a generation that's not necessarily having access to the opportunities that their peers before them had, especially the disabled community, a segment of the creative community who are deeply underinvested in.”

That loss, alongside the potential wholesale exodus of writers from the industry, is something the organization hoped to stave off during the 2023 strikes when it established its Emergency Relief Fund. That effort would emerge again this year with its Young Adult Emergency Relief Fund. Created with the support of the Snap Foundation and aimed at early career scribes ages 18 to 26 living in Los Angeles, the YA Fund provides $500 emergency grants and has served as a rare lifeline for early career disabled writers facing daily employment barriers in addition to issues created by this unprecedented moment for the creative community.

This latest fund is counter to the foundation’s work historically, which has largely focused on more established professional TV and film writers. But the post-strike year’s challenges presented the nonprofit with a new dilemma, says Siegel. Because if Hollywood loses the next generation of disabled writers, the future of disability inclusion on- and off-screen could be set back by decades.

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Current challenges for younger writers began four years ago among students enrolled in and graduating from the pandemic classes – college-aged writers whose coursework was reshaped, and in some cases, erased when it came to hands-on training and internship opportunities. 

“We were supposed to take production courses our junior and senior year to understand more advanced cameras or how to produce on set with a larger crew,” one University of Southern California graduate recalls. “I did get to work a bit with a larger crew on my senior thesis, but I didn't direct with one my junior year.”

Fisher, virtual for more than a year of their undergraduate program before completing their final term in person in L.A., was able to secure an internship at a film production company before graduating. But they were advised to skip over other internship experiences in the months leading up to the strikes – roles that could network build or convert to a full-time position – and instead find a full-time job to avoid being impacted by the work stoppage. 

The pandemic forced young screenwriters to enter the workforce with less training and fewer resume-building experiences vital for landing their first post-graduate position. Any available internship or entry-level roles were also predominantly remote, meaning graduates “didn’t get much of an opportunity to know the people at the company,” says one writer – a necessity in an industry that relies even more heavily on personal connections amid massive work contraction. 

“It’s a big detriment to get hit with [the pandemic and strikes] back to back. It was hard enough while in school to make some of those connections, even among peers,” Fisher says. “We were coming right out of that into the entertainment sphere saying we've got to cut down costs and on our people.” 

Once out of school, writers have historically had several options to begin building a stable, professional career. The emerging writer and USC graduate got hired at a talent agency under the auspices that this “common route to get into TV writing” would be their break-in. 

“You land on a desk for TV literary or maybe even film literary agents. You get to know their clients, get to know other people at other companies,” they explain. “You hear about jobs through that desk, and after you work for a year or so, your boss recommends you for a job. Then you start somewhere as a writer's or showrunner’s assistant or even a writer’s [production assistant]. A lot of those creative development jobs also require at least a year of agency experience, so I just wanted to get some desk experience, get that prerequisite, and then see what opportunities opened up.”

Fisher chose another route: production work. After securing an in-person internship at a film company ahead of the strike, they graduated in December 2022 and began the job hunt. But even after successfully interviewing for multiple post-production roles, “one of the big [areas] still really hiring” following their graduation, jobs were being frozen or scrapped. The reason, they were told, was the impending strike. “I knew a couple of people who I graduated with who moved away because they had a job right out of school, and then it got cut,” they say. 

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With the pandemic, strikes, and industry contraction, young scribes say the traditional pathways to breaking in have essentially disintegrated, even for those who were able to get some kind of work early on.

During those six months of the strike, the USC graduate saw colleagues voluntarily leave for other jobs or be laid off. In the interim, they were asked to perform the duties of multiple staffers before a hiring freeze stymied their chances for upward mobility. “No other desks had openings, so I didn't have the chance to get that assistant experience,” they recall. 

After months of uncertainty, the agency they worked at shut down this year. The young writer has since managed to find a contract position, but it’s only part-time, leaving them with residual financial and health challenges. “The pandemic was already really taxing on me,” they say. “I am fortunate to have a therapist who has helped me so much during this time, but it was a true challenge of, ‘Will there be a way through it?’ It just felt like there wasn't. I was really anxious. I was pretty depressed. I was very stressed throughout it.” 

For Fisher, after being unable to find non-writing work during the strikes, he went to picket lines in L.A. to help “advocate for my future in this industry.” At the same time, he was still trying to network and meet people who could set them up for work post-strike, “but that, in turn, was hard because I was trying to stay afloat and survive, too.” 

While he’s seen some jobs posted again, the wages haven’t increased, and “a lot of those entry-level positions you need to know the right person to even get it because they're asking for a year or two on a desk or at an agency. Yet with all the stoppages and consolidating happening, it's hard to get that first year and open that first door to climb the ladder.”

To stay in the industry, writers have turned to taking multiple jobs or seeking the assistance of their family – as is the case with Fisher, who says he’s “drained so much of my own and some of my family’s savings trying to pursue my dreams.” More recently, he’s managed to get back on sets through student productions, which snowballed into a paid freelance job. 

“Last year was a lot of trying to job hunt, and I've finally started getting work, doing script coverage or on set as a script supervisor,” he says. “I think I've only interviewed once since the strikes have ended. It's mostly been scrounging for the experience.”

For Franklin who had at one point secured a “great” assistant job at a management company, most of the support she found during and post-strike was emotional, with assurances from more established industry members that they’d find a job “immediately.” While she has managed to work a few temp positions since that initial experience, she has been unsuccessful in making it past the final round of interviews for several industry full-time positions and has since begun working at a job outside the industry.

“What I accepted based on what my mentors were saying was that after a certain amount of time, you don't have a choice. So, like many writers, I had to get another job,” Franklin says. “I do my best to stay in the industry, but it’s much, much harder right now with multiple disabilities and chronic illnesses. All of that limits my resources just for applying.”

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Other disabled writers say they’ve faced similar challenges while attempting to attain work in and outside the industry, long before the pandemic. “I don't have a thumb. My wrist doesn't bend on this hand,” Fisher explains of navigating out-of-industry work during the strike. “Waiters typically carry big plates, but I can't do that, and that eliminates a whole way to make money while I try to get off the ground. Heavy lifting is also eliminated because I can't grip objects properly.” 

Siegel notes that with both the pre- and post-pandemic ways writers have to break in, they can run into accessibility issues or challenges that slow their career progress. “If you're Deaf or hard of hearing, and your way to get in is by working on the desk of an agent where you're answering phone calls all day and that agency has no interest in trying to solve that access problem, then that entry point doesn't work for you,” he says. “And we can trace this across so many entry-level positions, which have deeply physical, long hours.”

These access barriers are evidenced, in part, by the application queries around the YA Fund, which inspired the nonprofit to increase the fund’s age of eligibility from 24 to 26 years old. “There's a separation between someone's age and their career progression. You can be 40 and be emerging. You can be 23 and be established. These are not correlated things, necessarily,” he says. “But what we found is that because of the lack of accessibility in this industry, disabled people, generally speaking, are breaking in later in life than their nondisabled peers.” 

The grants are helping stop that gap from growing during this challenging year, where early-career writers are also facing rising housing costs, no healthcare, and stagnant wages in costly industry hubs like New York and California as they continue their efforts to break in as professional, full-time writers. 

Despite the challenges, and with some support from the Inevitable Foundation, writers say they will keep fighting to remain in the industry. “I don't know how sustainable it's going to be,” Fisher says. “But it hasn't wavered, my want to be in this industry. As discouraging as it can be, I don't see anything else that I'll truly be happy doing.”

“I've had conversations with a lot of my peers. I've heard a lot of people who want to leave. I've had people give me advice to seek out other industries, and I completely understand why,” adds the USC alum. “But I think it's my passion. I don't know how, but I am still holding on to this hope that things will get better. I want to stay.”