#john rogers

[thundergrace]

Just a couple of dudes reminding you that Aldis Hodge is, in fact, the sexiest man alive. In addition to being a horologist, he's also a painter and a violinist. He also went to school for architecture.

[aquitainequeen]

John Rogers, on Day 100 of the WGA Strike.

Never forget: "Rejected our proposal. Refused to counter."

[thefirsthogokage]

Great thread by John Rogers on why writers need to be on set for TRAINING purposes, written late on May 6th, 2023:

(click to enlarge and probably for better quality)

(link to first tweet)

Bonuses:

Link to John's thread about having writers on set for DIALOGUE.

[lets-steal-an-archive]

[leveragehunters]

Source.

So anyway watch Leverage.

[anxi0us-0p0ssum]

Poor John Rogers. He’s gotta be feeling like a writer for The Onion trying to make an entertaining show about justice in an unjust world, and it all just. Keeps. Getting. Worse.

[outcider]

Season 3's production is in full swing I see

[nudityandnerdery]

[Image Description: A series of sixteen tweets by John Rogers @jonrog1 that say:

1) A moment at the Teamsters/UPS rally this morning clarified our current struggle with the studio CEO's (among other bosses). Teamsters got a lot of wins, but one of the main sticking points is the pay for the 65% of local UPS workers who are part-time …

2) If you read the SAG-AFTRA demands, a truly STUNNING amount of their points involve protecting background actors, and trying to improve conditions for the 87% of their union who makes less than $26,000 a year.

3) As WGA members know, this is not a strike for the showrunners. We're trying to fix the fact the the current younger generation of writers can't even afford housing and their pathway to advancement has been cut off.

4) Like … folks, I'm fine. There are maybe two proposals in there that affect me. I'm walking in 90% weather and losing over 50% of my income for the year because I want the younger writers to get what I got at this stage of their careers.

5) Our unions and the CEO's and various negotiators have a fundamental cognitive disconnect. Because CEO's types only succeed by FUCKING THEIR PEERS.

6) Zaslav, Iger , those types of execs, etc have never gone without so a fellow exec or a junior exec could thrive. A fellow exec failing is the moment to use your own leverage to advance past them, if not destroy them.

7) Part of it is the money but part of this, I think, is a genuine inability to grasp even the concepts of any labor action. Because it is always other-directed.

8) So many people treat capitalism as part of nature red in tooth and claw, but it's not. It's a human construct. There are different rules you can play by -- but not if you want to win.

9) The greatest gift capitalism ever granted was the ability to validate selfish behavior as a virtue because that's "just what's necessary, I don't make the rules!" (Look ma, it's reification!)

10) This is where I usually point out that Adam Smith wrote that you have to overpay workers to keep your labor force up, and you need to take into account the psychic damage of capitalism to the workers, and that admiring the rich is the greatest source of moral corruption …

11) But I'll stave off that diversion to just land with … this is a discontinuity of attitudes which I think was once breached by the fact that management USED to come from people who loved building their company or their trade, even if they eventually did management shit.

12) Now, even that thin thread of SYMPATHY (Adam Smith joke, get it? People?) is gone. The CEO's are working off a different scorecard, practically and morally. We're not just playing by wildly divergent rules, our lives and careers are DEFINED by those wildly divergent rules.

13) To them, we are IN FACT being "unreasonable", as our behavior does not make sense in their moral framework. They don't think they're being evil, they think they're playing by the actual rules, and we're nuts.

14) There's not great conclusion to this, other than to note that the bit about making writers homeless was described as "cruel but necessary" because they genuinely don't understand the meaning of cruel, because they are always on the other side of the power dynamic.

15) And if they're ever NOT on the top of the power dynamic, they're not suffering, they're dead. They are un-people in their own eyes.

16) These men are not irrational, but they are deranged. This isn't about money, it's about identity. And in a fight about identity … they will set billions on fire.

Because they can always get more money. But they'll never shed the stink of losing to their lessers."

end of image description]

[leverage-ot3]

[bringbackwendellvaughn]

[abnerkrill]

fyi john rogers (writer/showrunner of leverage and librarians) started up a newsletter since twitter is dying/dead, where he talks about life/screenwriting/some media recommendations :)

[onlylonelylatino]

Blue Beetle and the Teen Titans versus Lobo by Rafael Albuquerque

[spnscripthunt]

When @mittensmorgul + I were on the struggle bus for selecting the nonprofit for our final (?) fundraiser, I saw his retweet of this article and 💡 so I thought I should tell him because retweeting that article led to 621 people having some/all of their medical debt abolished...

NATE: People like that, corporations like that -- they have all the money. They have all the power. They use it to make people like you go away. Right now, you're struggling under a great weight.

(beat)

We provide ... leverage. (x)

[thefirsthogokage]

Fuck AMPTP and the bullshit going on. I'm tired, might not do this well:

(link to article in above picture) From The Article

Receiving positive feedback from Wall Street since the WGA went on strike May 2, Warner Bros Discovery, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Paramount and others have become determined to “break the WGA,” as one studio exec blatantly put it.

To do so, the studios and the AMPTP believe that by October most writers will be running out of money after five months on the picket lines and no work.

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”

The studios and streamers’ next think financially strapped writers would go to WGA leadership and demand they restart talks before what could be a very cold Christmas. In that context, the studios and streamers feel they would be in a position to dictate most of the terms of any possible deal.

[Image IDs: Twitter thread by David Slack posted July 12th, 2023 that reads in totality:

And right on cue, here’s the inevitable Deadline article claiming that the AMPTP and their CEO bosses are ready to wait us out and let us “go broke.”

They’re not. They can’t. This studio propaganda, and here’s why.

In the increasingly mega-merged and hedgefundified Hollywood, these companies live or die on their quarterly earnings reports. It only takes one bad quarter for their stock price to plunge, putting the company and the CEO’s job in jeopardy.

But their stock prices are holding steady, right? Right. For now. Because our industry is a pipeline that starts with writers. The TV and movies they’re releasing now are shows we started making for them 4-12 quarters ago. But what happens when that pipeline runs dry?

What happens is they run out of product. No new shows in streaming to drive and sustain subscribers. No new shows in broadcast and ad-supported to bring in ad revenue.

No shows, no money.

No money, bad earnings report.

Bad earnings report, bye-bye stock price. Bye-bye CEO.

After 70+ days with no writers to create their product for them, the pipeline is running dry.

Their stock price isn’t tanking yet. But if they don’t make a deal with us, it will.

And they know it.

If they make a deal soon, they might be able to weather it. Stretch out releases. Rush some new stuff through.

But the longer they keep us out, the longer that pipeline runs dry, the more unavoidable a catastrophic dip in new high-quality shows becomes.

And they know it.

So yeah, the studios are planting articles in the trades that make it sound like they’re so determined not to pay us the 0.02% of company revenues we’re asking for that they’re willing to hold out forever.

Bullshit.

I’m sure the AMPTP bosses would love to break our union. But they love their jobs more. They love money more. They can’t make that money without us.

And they know it.

Ignore the trades, walk the line, stand together, and win. #WGAStrong

/End ID]

Bonus: John Rogers' Reaction

[Image ID: A tweet from John Rogers that he posted July 12th, 2023 that reads:

I was trying to be cool and professional about this strike, but this AMPTP “we want to drive them to homelessness” shit means I’m going to be dug in at WB Gate 4 like Hiroo Onada. They’re gonna have to send @ellenstutzman with a bullhorn to order me out of the bushes.

The second image is Ellen Stutzman's Twitter bio that says:

Cheif Negotiator for WGA MBA, Assistant Executive Director, Writers Guild of America, West; Cornell ILR and UCLA Anderson alum. Views are my own.

/End ID]

EDIT: Please see the update on this HERE

[lets-steal-an-archive]

" ... Leverage creator John Rogers himself is coming on board as Season 3’s new showrunner*."

*Serving as EPs alongside Rogers and Devlin are Redemption co-creator Chris Downey, Marc Roskin and Rachel Olschan-Wilson. (TV Line)

[aardvaark]

I like how it seems Beth Riesgraf (Parker) made a really wild impression on the Leverage creators, executive producers & network, from all the interviews...

Leverage Cast: S4 Behind The Scenes - Auditions

Beth Riesgraf: I left the [audition] room and it was one of those moments where you go down to your car and something clicks, and you really get something that you didn’t get in the room. So I walked back up and they’re like "well, he’s got about five more people to see" so I was like "oh, awesome". So I waited. John comes out of the room and I’m like [suddenly very animated] "hi! so listen!" and by the time I was done, I had him like this [grabs Timothy Hutton, who’s seated next to her, by his lapels with both hands] and I didn’t even realise, but I got so excited that I was like "no no no, just let me do it again!" and John was like, "no no no, I think you’re fine… I think you got it. I think you got the character".

LA Screening Q&A with Devlin, Rogers & Downey

Dean Devlin: Fun story with Parker is that there were two actresses who came in for the final reading for the studio. And one of the two actresses - beautiful girl, very competent actor, very good […]. But after she left, we turned to the people at the network and we said, "she’s great, we like her - this next girl’s the girl we’d really like to hire. She’s not kind of the typical girl you’d normally hire in a show like this". So then Beth [Riesgraf] came in for the audition. Didn’t say one word. Just came in- John Rogers: None of this "hi, I’m here", yeah. Dean: She just read in character, and then walked out of the room. At which point the head of TNT turned to me and said, [whispering] "is she… crazy?". [normal voice] I said, "I don’t know, but I love her". John: Her hair was in her face, remember? She came in and did like, the crazy, angry, just-hates-everyone Parker.

The way these link up so well is so funny to me & it gives such a hilarious picture of the Parker audition process.