Your Impact

From supporting strikers at the Universal Studios Barham picket line to continuing our work with our community programs, public events, and Library and Archive, we at the Writers Guild Foundation were busy in 2023. Donors like you make it possible for us to impact the screenwriting community, so THANK YOU for supporting WGF! As a special thanks, here’s an update on how we’ve put your generosity into action last year. 

at a glance

programs

Writers’ Access Support Staff Training Program

• Showrunner Glen Mazarra hired two Writers’ Access alumni — Jenna Bosco and Catherine Oyster — for his new Netflix show.

• Three writers — Daniela Labi, Gia King, and Ida Yazdi — were promoted from support staff positions to staff writer positions.

• Writers’ Access alum Jess Morse supported striking writers by managing the Pizza Strike Fund. Jess and her team raised $35,000 and delivered over 3,000 pizzas to hungry picketers each and every day of the strike.

In August, WGF partnered with IATSE Local 871 to host a Writers’ Room Support Staff Appreciation Picket at Fox. Writers’ Access participants, alumni, and other support staff joined writers on the picket line to celebrate and honor the important work of support staff. It was one of the most attended special pickets at the Fox picket line.

Veterans Writing Project

In 2023, we continued our partnership with comedian and writer Rich Talarico (Key & Peele) with a Veterans Day comedy benefit show at the Dynasty Typewriter theater featuring our own comedy troupe of vets from the VWP. Special guests Riki Lindhome (Another Period, Garfunkel and Oates), Kiran Deol (Sunnyside, I Would Never), and Mike Falzone (Surrounded Crowdwork, Dynamic Banter) rounded out the lineup. We recognized Mentor Timothy Wurtz with our 2023 VWP Leadership Award for his years of service and dedication to the Veterans Writing Project. Funds raised from the event supported the Veterans Writing Project.

Visiting Writers & Volunteer and Mentorship

The Visiting Writers Program facilitated eight educational discussions between WGA writers and classrooms across the country. The pairings included Terence Winter with University of the Arts Philadelphia; David Johnson-McGoldrick, Scott Beck, and Bryan Woods with Fitchburg State University; Grasie Mercedes with Sagrado University; Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault with Emerson College; Soo Hugh and Kerry Ehrin at Brown University; and Dee Harris-Lawrence and CSU Northridge.

WGF has continued partnering with local nonprofits to support literacy and writing programming as part of our Volunteer and Mentorship Program. Examples from 2023 include:

• Organizing monthly speakers for classes through Get Lit’s Poetic Screenwriters Lab, a yearlong writers’ workshop series that gives selected young screenwriters who have trained as poets the opportunity to work on their short film, feature film, podcast/web series, or TV episodic pilot scripts.

• Facilitating two speaker sessions at 826LA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages six to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills.

• Connecting writers Jennie Snyder Urman and Rachel Bloom with the Los Angeles Music and Art School (LAMusArt), a nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to offer the K-12 community of East Los Angeles with equitable and affordable access to multidisciplinary arts education programs. WGF received LAMusArt’s Creative Paths Award in September for this partnership.

In 2023, WGF connected WGA writers with other organizations and initiatives such as the Northwestern Prison Education Program, The Art of Cinema Excellence Foundation, The HiveMind Unified, New York Stage and Film, Pathos Labs/PopShift, and the United States Veterans’ Artists Alliance.

Global Partnerships

Internationally, WGF partnered with the Public Television Company of Armenia and Albantsho’s iDraft screenwriting workshop in Africa by providing educational resources and connecting U.S. writers to their screenwriting programming in Armenia and Africa, respectively. Groups of writers from the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia and the Korea Radio Promotion Association’s Broadcast Format Academy in South Korea also toured the Shavelson-Webb Library last year.

We continued our long-standing partnerships with the French Consulate of Los Angeles, Villa Albertine, the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD), and the Series Mania TV festival. We helped secure Lisa Joy as the President of the International Jury at Series Mania, which WGF Executive Director Katie Buckland also attended. In November, we welcomed Aude Hesbert as Villa Albertine’s new Director of Film & TV with a reception in the library.

EVENTS

Virtual Events

We paused public events programming between May and September in solidarity with the WGA. However, we still hosted 14 virtual events in 2023. Events with recordings on our YouTube channel include: 

• Anatomy of a Meet Cute: Writing Romantic Comedies  

• WGF Library Script Breakdown with Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert  

• The ABC’s of Writing for Kids and Family Television  

• Showrunner Sessions with You’s Sera Gamble  

• Scare Tactics: The Craft of Writing Horror Films

Altogether, over 9,500 people RSVPed to attend our virtual events live, and the recordings of our 2023 events have more than 20,000 views on our YouTube channel (as of the time of this report).

A HUGE thanks to Certified Career, Business and Life Coach, Jim Arnoff, for partnering with us on five Zoom workshops in 2023, primarily during the strike. In his workshops, Jim helps coach participants on how to create a career plan, craft a pitch, and give and receive feedback, among other related topics. More than 2,300 people RSVPed to attend these workshops.

In-Person Events

In June, we participated as a programming partner for the Hollywood Climate Summit, an annual multi-day conference that creates a community space for thousands of cross-sector entertainment and media professionals to take action on climate. Programming included panels on climate advocacy in screenwriting, pitch events, and networking receptions. WGF also partnered with WME/Endeavor Impact on a panel and workshop with WME writer clients and participants from our community outreach programs and local nonprofit partners, including Diverso, Get Lit, and our Writers’ Access Support Staff Training Program.

Events During the Strike

During the strike, we brought back WGF Trivia by hosting two Trivia Day theme pickets at the NBCU Barham picket line. Teams battled it out on the line for three (plus a bonus!) rounds of challenging film and TV trivia. In the June game, The Professors took first place, Green Devils came in second, and Do The Write Thing brought home third. Then, in July, The Blank Pages won our second trivia picket, with Stan & Maureen in second and At Least There’s Shade…WAIT, WHAT?! in third.

In August, we partnered with Script Anatomy and Winnie Holzman to host Writers Time, a series of four hourlong Zoom sessions to help writers stay inspired and motivated during the strike. In the first half hour, attendees wrote silently “alone together” on their respective projects or using each session’s writing prompt. For the second half hour, attendees participated in Q&As with Special Guest Writers, including Jason Katims, Ed Solomon, Ilana Peña, and Winnie herself.

Thanks to the generosity of filmmaker Charles Day and to show solidarity with the WGA during the strike, WGF also created the Why Stories Matter video interview series with WGA members sharing why they became writers and continue to write. Participants included Eric Heisserer, Ali Leroi, Christina Ham, Kristina Woo, Claire Keichel, Matt Weiner, Teresa Hsiao, and Glen Mazzara.

LIBRARY and archive

Collections

We closed the Library from May to September in solidarity with the WGA strike. In the months before and after the strike, however, patrons made more than 3,000 visits to the Library in 2023 and requested to read over 1,000 scripts. The most popular Library reads of 2023 were:

We added 1,290 items to the Library catalog in 2023. This brings the total number of items in our collection to 49,841.

In 2023, we processed seven archival collections totaling 43 boxes of writers’ scripts and papers. We also put a call out in the WGA member news for people to donate strike-related ephemera and created a 2023 WGA strike collection. Fifteen people donated great buttons, T-shirts, funny picket signs, flyers, friendship bracelets, and even a custom jigsaw puzzle. To help sort through these new archival collections, we hosted three Archive interns in 2023.

Our librarians took advantage of the Library closure to complete a massive collection management project, sending nearly 500 less frequently requested feature screenplays to off-site storage, making room for new script acquisitions. (The scripts sent to storage are still available to read upon request).

Educational Resources

In February, our librarians hosted WGF Library Script Breakdown with Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The Daniels later went on to win the Writers Guild Award and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Our Library team also added more resources to the blog, including:

• Two “Formatting Your Spec Script” posts covering 12 TV shows’ script formatting

• A blog post on where to find scripts online

• A blog post on writing successful bios, resumes, and personal statements

• A brand-new blog series called “Movies & Lyrics” that discussed the influence of screenwriters on musicians and songwriters by taking known songs and examining how a particular turn of phrase or thematic element was inspired by a film’s screenplay.

In partnership with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, WGF produced two oral histories with Yvette Lee Bowser and Eric Roth (recording still being processed at time of this report). Oral histories are interviews with prominent writers that detail their life and career. Every story, from early childhood and breaking into the industry to favorite projects and writing process, is all in their own words. View WGF’s collection of oral histories here.

Despite the library’s closure, the team still managed to give 16 library tours in 2023, including:

• Groups of writers from the Red Sea Film Festival in Saudi Arabia and the Korea Radio Promotion Association’s Broadcast Format Academy in South Korea

• A second grade class from Hancock Park Elementary that also participated in a workshop on story development

• Screenwriting students from Loyola Marymount University, Syracuse University, Stephens College, and Crossroads High School

• A team of designers at Netflix

Outreach and Partnerships

In March, the American Library Association’s American Libraries magazine profiled the Shavelson-Webb Library.

In April, we hosted a book signing with author Jon Krampner to celebrate his book, Ernest Lehman: The Sweet Smell of Success. Jon used the WGF Archive extensively while researching Lehman for this biography.

In May, WGF loaned some of our Archive materials to the Skirball Cultural Center for the exhibit, “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare”. This exhibit explored the history and impact of the Hollywood Red Scare and its contemporary implications for civil liberties, propaganda, and shifting definitions of American patriotism.

In June, for the second year in a row, WGF Librarian Lauren taught a Zoom workshop on script formatting for the Albantsho/iDraft conference. Albantsho is a web-based platform aimed at helping writers all over Africa get their scripts seen by producers. The competitive iDraft conference accepts writers from all over Africa, so writers from Algeria, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and more attended the formatting workshop.

In October, WGF Archivist Hilary hosted an exhibitor table at LA As Subject’s 18th Annual Archives Bazaar, which included 67 exhibitors featuring a consortium of LA-area archives, libraries, and museums. Over 500 attended the exhibit as well as multiple workshops and talks. 

Throughout the year, the WGF Library and Archive team assists historians, writers, and academics with research questions surrounding our collections. A few research requests we supported in 2023 include:

• A French documentary filmmaker researching an unmade film from 1933 about Hitler called “The Mad Dog of Europe” 

• A biographer interested in novelist Dorothy Hughes, who was briefly in the Screen Writers’ Guild (the precursor to today’s Writers Guild of America) and on the board in the early 1950s but then was called a Communist sympathizer and no longer worked in Hollywood 

• A Ph.D. candidate and pop culture researcher looked at our 1950s Superman scripts for his dissertation on the adaptation of comic books to the screen 

• A historian requesting information about guild minimum compensation going back to the 1940s 

strike!

The Writers Guild Foundation stood in solidarity with the WGA by running the check-in tent at Universal Studios Barham from the first week of the strike in May until it ended on September 27.

At the Uni Barham picket line, we witnessed the infamous #TreeGate, fun themed pickets such as the return of WGF Trivia and a Marvel TV day, cast and crew reunions of shows such as Hacks, Superstore, and The Good Place, and plenty of clever signs. More than 680 WGA members—and hundreds of non-member supporters—joined us on the line throughout the duration of the strike. It was great to connect with our writing community and celebrate alongside them as the WGA secured an exceptional deal with the AMPTP.

After the strike ended, we held a thank you reception/reunion party in the Library with our regular picketers. We felt honored to support an important cause and foster community during a challenging time. Go Team Barham!

All statistics are from January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023. To see the 2022 Impact Report, click here.