Striking writers in New York City said they disrupted filming FBI: Most Wanted for a second straight day, thwarting a scheduled shoot in a Brooklyn public park on Friday morning and later causing delays in work on the Dick Wolf EP crime drama starring Dylan McDermott and Alexa Davalos at a nearby sound stage.
Union organizers, who advertised a location at Monsignor McGolrick Park in the Greenpoint neighborhood, showed up at 7 a.m. Friday morning and waited, but no film crew showed up, officials from the Writers Guild of America East told Deadline.
It was unclear if the show’s producers halted filming due to picketing, but officials from the WGA said they saw callouts there confirming filming and credited them with intercepting filming before it began could.
Strikers and their supporters halted production FBI: Most Wanted also on Thursday for a few hours.
Some shootings took place Friday a few blocks away at the Broadway Stages production complex in Greenpoint, but without some stagehands and truckers – members of IATSE Local No. 52 or the Teamsters – who refused to cross the picket line posted outside. WGA officials said.
On a hot day with little cloud cover, the pickets chose a treeless industrial district next to a warehouse and scrap dealer and a block from a sewage treatment plant for their latest confrontations with film and television producers after the writers’ contract expired last week. (Pickets were also scheduled to march outside Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard office and industrial park on Friday, WGA officials said.)
As afternoon temperatures rose to over 80 degrees, a total of about four dozen people marched in front of the Broadway Stages on either side of a paved outdoor truck bed nearly the width of a football field FBI: Most Wanted is nearing completion of production on season five.
Sean Piccoli/Deadline
Members of WGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE and at one point three men from the United Steel Workers union walked down a street lined with delivery trucks and cast trailers and guarded the shed where work crews could be seen behind chain link fences a building enter and exit hangar-sized and load and unload trucks.
The protesters didn’t block people or vehicles, but on a gate with a key code lock they taped a handwritten sign that read “You’re crossing a picket line (cool!)” A series of scribbled diamonds marked the number of picket crossings.
Sean Piccoli/Deadline
They shouted slogans, waved signs and handed out sunscreen and water bottles. Some paused to get ice cream from a truck sent and paid for by the hosts of five talk shows.
On Friday, WGA member, screenwriter and showrunner Dan Futterman marched in front of the Broadway Stages (Capote, The Looming Tower, American Rust). “A lot of themes aren’t so much about showrunners,” Futterman told Deadline, “but it’s important that we stick together and show that we care, especially for the younger writers.”
Futterman said one of the worst developments for younger writers is the proliferation of mini-rooms — speculative work environments where writers are hired to develop stories and scripts for an idea that might be picked up for production or for a second season or whatever not .
“This edition of mini-rooms was ridiculous,” he said, “and I’ve been in several of them… The pay is absurd.” It’s always low and you have to be the idiot trying to convince people to please go into the mini-room get. When you’re done with that, you’ve moved on to another show.”
“And then the group that was in the mini room doesn’t get credit for the show, even though they were instrumental in getting the show picked up in the first or second season,” said Futterman. “It’s a terrible situation. It is unfair. And it’s union busting.”
Futterman, who is married to film and television writer Anya Epstein, with whom he co-writes episodes grace pointHe also said, “It’s incredibly important to show the studios that we’re not bending.” And if you look at the line and you see SAG-AFTRA out here, we’ve got Teamsters at stake, IATSE at stake, and we mean business.”
At Steiner Studios, “you have members and mixed members from different unions in front of every single gate,” he said. “We’re not going away.”
Meanwhile out on the other coast: