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‘We’re fighting for survival’: Writers on the picket line talk pay, family and how the strike is hitting home [1]
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Date: 2023-05-14
Hollie Overton, a writer and co-executive producer of “All American: Homecoming,” walks the picket line at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. She is among the striking Writers Guild of America members demanding higher pay. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
For thousands of striking writers, the recent weeks have been riddled with stress and existential dread. For Hollie Overton, that goes triple.
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As a TV writer who’s the mother of 2-year-old identical triplets, Overton monitored the negotiations between the WGA and the studios with a bad feeling in the pit in her stomach. Now she finds herself juggling picketing outside Warner Bros. and Walt Disney studios with pediatrician appointments and preschool tours, worried about the future of her family and the career she has built over 15 years.
“I always say to my girls when I’m going to work, ‘Mommy’s going to write,’ because I really do love it,” Overton says, choking back tears. “Before kids, it was always hard when you’re out of work. But now I just don’t want to let down these people who depend on me. And that’s what we’re really all fighting for. We’re fighting for survival.”
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Raised with her identical-twin sister by a single mom in a small town on the Gulf Coast of Texas, Overton arrived in Los Angeles in her 20s with wide-eyed dreams of making it as an actress. She soon pivoted to writing, scoring her first break in 2008 when she was accepted into the coveted Warner Bros. Television Writers’ Workshop. From there, Overton landed jobs on the CBS drama “Cold Case,” Lifetime’s “The Client List,” Freeform’s “Shadowhunters” and the CBS All-Access series “Tell Me a Story.”
In a good year, Overton could make $150,000 for writing and producing before her agent, manager and lawyer took their cuts. But that money would also have to stretch through the lean times when there was no work. “I’d have two great years and then I wouldn’t work for a year or a year and a half,” Overton says. To supplement her income, she began writing crime novels — she has published three — and teaching script-writing. “Sometimes I’d be in the writers’ room all day, and then I’d have to come home and work for three hours on a book to meet a deadline,” she says.
When she became pregnant, Overton — whose husband, David Boyd, works as a tennis coach — relied on her guild health insurance, coverage she and her family could lose later this year if she doesn’t earn the union’s required minimum. “I’m incredibly grateful to the healthcare plan because I had a very high-risk pregnancy,” she says, adding that two of her triplets had a long stay in the neonatal intensive care unit. “One of my daughters had open-heart surgery at 4 months.”
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Daughter Annie is doing fine now, but Overton’s stress came surging back this year when, with the strike deadline approaching, she wrapped work on the second season of the CW sports drama series “All American: Homecoming.” Now she finds herself in limbo, unsure of whether the show will return for another season.
Compounding their concerns, Overton and her husband bought their first house in West Hills last year, a goal that had long seemed unattainable given her inconsistent earnings and the rising cost of living; according to a recent study, the annual income needed to buy a home in Los Angeles skyrocketed past $220,000 in 2022. “The only reason we could even buy a house is I have three careers,” she says. “If I was just counting on my TV money, we would be renting still.”
Overton is doing whatever she can to shield her daughters from her worries. “I sound way too L.A., but last week, when I was so anxious about what was going on, I did this Reiki healing,” she says. “It actually helped. It gave me a more Zen feeling of, ‘OK, this is stressful but I can get through it.’”
This summer, Overton’s husband will be teaching tennis in the Hamptons, N.Y., to bring in money while she cares for the triplets. “When I’m with the girls, it’s a lot easier to shut out all the noise; they want to play, they’re biting each other, they’re pulling each other’s hair,” she says. “With my husband gone, I just get to spend time with them, so in between going to the picket line, I’m going to try to remind myself, ‘Let’s do some fun stuff.’”
Until the strike ends, though, there’s no escaping the constant undercurrent of fear. “Luckily we’re in a position where, at least for the next few months, we’re OK with whatever savings we’ve created,” Overton says. “But I don’t know what’s coming. At some point, you just have to trust that you’re capable and you could do something else. But I think about that all the time: What other job will I have to do if this goes badly?”
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[1] Url:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-05-14/wga-writers-strike-impact
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