EXCLUSIVE: On the third day of its first strike in 15 years, the Writers Guild of America closed down Wall Street drama Billions for several
EXCLUSIVE: On the third day of its first strike in 15 years, the Writers Guild of America closed down Wall Street drama Billions for several hours Thursday.
The shuttering of the Showtime series started on a chilly, gray Thursday morning in New York after a tow truck hauling a prop Jeep to the set pulled up to a parking lot near the Brooklyn waterfront and came to a stop in the street amid picket signs and WGA members. Elsewhere in the Big Apple, Teamsters showed solidarity with another group of picketing scribes and turned their trucks around outside where American Horror Story‘s latest season is filming.
Over at the Billions studio, an entryway was blocked. A line of picketers — several dozen sign-waving film and television writers and their supporters — were not making way as the tow truck driver tried in vain to ease forward, with help from a New York City police officer. “Day or night/rain or shine/you don’t cross/a picket line,” the protestors chanted as more officers arrived outside Seret Studios, one of several production hangars in a warehouse district facing the East River and the Manhattan skyline.
Watch video from the scene here:
The roughly four-hour shutdown of Billions today occurred after cast and crew members decided not to cross the WGA picket lines. Representatives for Paramount could not be reached by Deadline on Thursday to comment on the temporary shutdown.
However, that decision by cast and crew not to cross the WGA picket line was respected by the production and Showtime parent company Paramount Global, and there will be no repercussions, sources connected to Billions tell us. Filming did resume on the show later Thursday.
Even so, it is also worth noting that there were no writers today on the set of the final season of the series created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin, even if unionized stagehands or actors working under no-strike contracts were expected to be. In that context, a WGA East rep noted, “I don’t know how you run a production without writers on set.”
With labor actions taking place at several locations across New York, the WGA East chose Seret in particular for picketing Thursday because of the production going on within. Accordingly, the demonstration spread across several blocks, with bands of protestors breaking off from the main group to picket other facilities used by Billions.
Outside the parking lot, a WGA union organizer stood next to police officers in the middle of the street and said the marchers had the right to walk the curb. “You’re blocking the driveway,” the officer replied. The local precinct commander showed up minutes later and spoke by phone with a union leader to explain that “impeding business” by blocking driveways is illegal in New York State. About 20 minutes after the tow truck arrived, protestors opened a lane for the driver to pull in, with cries of “scabs!” trailing him into the lot.
“We want them to get their message across,” the precinct commander, NYPD Deputy Inspector Kathleen E. Fahey, said of the protestors. “But we also want to preserve the peace.”
Demonstrators did succeed in turning away at least two production trucks from pulling into Seret’s main delivery bay, but it was unclear whether their drivers found other ways through side streets or interconnected industrial docks in the sprawling neighborhood.