Ryan Murphy reportedly threatens WGA strike captain with lawsuit
After a month of speculation about what’s going on in “Murphy-land,” the prolific and powerful TV creator has turned up the heat
Aux News Ryan Murphy
Now in its second month, the WGA strike continues unabated. As of last week, the AMPTP has yet to return to the bargaining table, so it’s unlikely we’ll have any resolution before the extended SAG-AFTRA talks end on July 10. As the strike continues, complications have become commonplace in what few productions continued despite the picket lines, particularly in New York, where Ryan Murphy has three shows in production at the moment. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Murphy produced three of the four east coast productions still rolling, and he’s going to fight to keep them going. When WGA strike captain Warren Leight accused one of Murphy of threatening to blackball Guild-supporting crew members, the American storyteller reportedly threatened the strike captain with a lawsuit.
In a memo obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, the WGA revealed that Murphy’s attorney wrote to the Guild: “Ryan Murphy sent a letter threatening litigation against Warren Leight. Warren Leight will not be saying anything further than his last tweet related to Ryan Murphy.” As a result of the letter, Leight is no longer a strike captain. However, the memo states that the union “will not quit on Ryan Murphy” and “will continue to picket his shows.”
“Our foe in this fight is not other members, it is the AMPTP,” the memo states. “If we turn on each other, the AMPTP wins.”
Last month, Leight tweeted, “Crew members have told us they’ve been told if they respect our lines, they’ll be blackballed in Murphy-land.” The tweet has since been deleted, but the aftershocks can still be felt. Murphy disputed the claims through a spokesperson, calling the accusations “absolute nonsense” and “categorically false,” according to Variety. Leight later apologized on Twitter. He wrote, “In the heat of the moment, I made the mistake of not verifying the accuracy of such claims and posted a tweet with this misinformation. I immediately deleted the tweet. I wholeheartedly apologize to Mr. Murphy.”
In late June, Business Insider reported that Ryan Murphy is on the cusp of signing a new deal with Disney as soon as his $300 million Netflix deal expires.
48 Comments
What is this article? Did Murphy threaten his crews? Did Leight make the whole thing up or cite a bad source? At the very least, there seems to be a pretty big disconnect between the headline and the body.
The headline matches the body. Murphy is defying the strike beyond what most anyone else is doing, and then this one guy made a potentially actionable claim that may have been false or may just not be provable enough to risk a libel case against a much, much, much richer person, so he withdrew it in the face of Murphy’s lawsuit threat. It’s all there.
Yep. I don’t think it’s that hard to follow.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/6/23785645/go-media-ai-generated-articles-gizmodo-av-club-artificial-intelligence-botsIt has begun.
“We are both a leading technology company and an editorial organization that covers technology in world class fashion across multiple sites,” editorial director Merrill Brown wrote in an email.Emphasis added by me to further enhance the comedy of this statement.
And of course Spanfeller did not announce it. Thank you for this.
The AV Club
The average Hollywood writer makes only $260,000 a year. Modern slavery.
[citation needed]
That scumbag scab of a sexist racist isn’t me, I’m me!
Salary.com says $53,148.
Since nearly all of them live and work in Los Angeles County, that puts them $23,000 below the median family income, per the U.S. Census Bureau.
That scumbag scab of a sexist racist isn’t me, I’m me!
Are you though? Who’s getting more engagement?
Just had to pull out this little chestnut from the pillow fucker: Are you though? Who’s getting more engagement? Holy SHIT this dude has the brain of a 13-y-o. It’s almost adorable.
He’s probably home for the summer so a few months off from paste eating and getting stuffed in lockers.
The average AVClub poster named dudebra makes 2 millions dollars a post. It’s true. I heard it on the internet
That scumbag scab of a sexist racist isn’t me, I’m me!
I don’t get the point of impersonating another account. It’s as useless as that guys who just responds “so brave” to every post
His mother obviously rejected him and now he craves any attention. I took a psychology course, once.
You are such a loser.
U mad bra?
Fucking weirdo
Oh this is the imposter dudebra. Get a life imposter person.
And what’s the average Hollywood writer career span?Thanks for the ignorance, now go fuck off.
I know this is a troll account, but that’s a bullshit number. The typical Hollywood writer isn’t making anywhere near that “average” even if it is mathematically accurate when you take account of all the salaries across all the writers (which would include multi-million dollar deals of the very top).
It’s like saying the average personal wealth of employees at Twitter is in the millions because you included Elon Musk’s in the mix. It’s nonsense with no bearing on real experience.
FYI:
The dudebra
(account: dudebraa) imposter
account posting here in this
thread is NOT the
long-established account
user known in the Giz
family.
The
shriveled-soul imposter has
several accounts being used to
harass Kinja users, by
posting sexist, racist and
other vileness here
, but primarily on The Root
and on Jezebel, trying
to discredit the actual,
long-established account
users.If the real dudebra does post here, it’ll be account: dudebra and won’t be racist.
Thank you.
The second layer to this is that if the strike goes long enough to qualify as a “force majure”, Murphy and a lot of other big-name showrunner/creators who signed massive deals in the Peak TV era will have their contracts invalidated and potentially lose hundreds of millions of dollars.
Oh no! Anyways…
This is what the studios want though. A lot of writers will tell you this why the studios are holding out first and foremost. Although the writers have a big reason to also hold out with the changing nature of streaming, and the threat of AI writing.
Easy tiger, don’t want to piss off the writers too much. They may trash your shows by writing something that seems interesting until you’re invested, then suddenly switch the back half into a stupid dumpster fire unrelated to the first half, making viewers wish they’d never bothered watching in the first place. You’d never get the stink off your name.
Doesn’t Murphy write most of those shows? Glancing through IMDB, it looks like he’s got writing credit on at least a couple episodes of each season of AHS.
That’s why AHS proved to be the perfect franchise for Murphy, who never wrote anything that wasn’t awesome for the first season** and a complete trash can fire for every season that followed. There’s never a second season! Just first seasons ad infinitum.**Not everything has been awesome, of course. But you get the point.
He had some real klunker seasons in that show too.
There is a racist imbecile impersonating my user name. Please ban it.Thank you.
Or are you the real racist imbecile? Hmm? I’m just kidding.I don’t get how these weirdos get their rocks off on trolling platforms like this. Just like the guy who for years now has been trying to do a fake “Dr. Lazardo” account. Unfortunately for the good doctor and probably for you there seems to be no real moderation and banning of accounts that do this. Same guy may be doing both the fake account with your name and Lizardo. I’ll still report the account though.
I don’t know which one to shoot
The other one.
I flagged its post that somehow made it out of the grays, though that one was just stupid and false rather than racist.
I’m inclined to think Murphy is in the wrong and overreacting; especially after how badly Ryan Murphy reacted/lashed out at Kings of Leon, Slash and Dave Grohl when they turned down his requests to license their songs for ‘Glee’.
This is a weird article.Warren Leight pretty much said that his tweet was inaccurate. Maybe there was a world where Murphy could have just reached out privately, but the blackballing doesn’t seem to accurate.
Ehhh…. I’m interested to hear that the WGA removed him as a strike captain.I’m also a little disappointed to see the WGA giving asshole egomaniac showrunners like Ryan a pass. He may *not* have threatened his crews but with that much money on the line it’s hard to believe he’s not applying pressure somewhere. They say “We don’t want to turn on each other” and I get that. But I honestly don’t see Ryan as “each other” in that scenario. He’s a fucking producer. He’s more aligned with the AMPTP than the WGA as far as financial interests go.
‘he didn’t do this thing, but he’s definitely guilty of SOMETHING’
There’s no proof that he didn’t. The only thing we know is that Leight tweeted about the blackballing rumor without confirmation and then when he was (reasonably, even if Murphy is a turd) threatened with a lawsuit backed down. That proves nothing except a guy not wanting to get sued. Murphy acting like the claim is ridiculous is itself fucking ridiculous. The guy has multiple productions going, it’s not crazy to suspect he’d be pressuring his people.
I don’t believe that she didn’t know what kind of person he is when she married him. I think she’s mad that he’s going public with things he used to say only in private.