Nearly two years ago, at the outset of the first writers’ strike in 15 years, Edward Drake made some adjustments to the script of the low-budget indie he was directing in the interest of the safety and welfare of his cast and crew. Nearly a year later, his union expelled him after a discipline procedure that he claims violated the union’s own constitution and federal labor law.
That’s according to an appeal letter of the decision from Drake that became accessible to members of the Writers Guild of America on Friday, alongside the union’s position statement and reply to Drake’s allegations, painting a starkly different account of the situation. Drake is one of four WGA West members pursuing an appeal in a bid to change their situations. Members will have a chance to peruse both sides’ arguments before a voting period takes place between May 6 and 9 that will determine whether the discipline will be preserved or an alternative action will be taken.
The documents that were released in Drake’s case and an interview that The Hollywood Reporter conducted with Drake offer a rare look under the hood of the WGA’s often shrouded internal discipline process, a procedure that has in the past ensnared the likes of Jay Leno and Joan Rivers.
In an interview, Drake said he pursued the appeal to the membership in order to bring more transparency and accountability to the union’s discipline procedure. “If it can happen to me, it can happen to any guild member,” the writer-director said. “They asked for my trust and then weaponized it against me.” The Writers Guild of America West declined to comment.
The dispute stems from Drake’s work on the set of low-budget indie Guns Up, a film he also wrote, with physical production taking place over 18 days in June and July 2023 in New Jersey. Kevin James and Christina Ricci starred in the Millennium Media action comedy, centered on a former cop-turned-mob lackey attempting to save his family after a job gone wrong.
Drake freely admits to making some script adjustments on the set, but he says they corresponded with his role as a director, not a writer, and tackled crucial concerns. “To address health and safety issues that arose during principal photography, I made script adjustments in my capacity as a director that were in line with the DGA [Directors Guild of America, the directors’ union] advice to hyphenate writer-directors of the time” — including moving an outdoors scene indoors due to smoke from that year’s Canadian wildfires, Drake writes in his appeal letter.
In its response to Drake’s letter, the WGA points out that Guns Up was not a DGA production and Drake isn’t a member of the union. Drake maintained in an interview with THR that the production initially promised the film would be DGA and he still attempted to abide by DGA rules.
Writer-directors were in a unique bind at this time: The WGA’s strike rules forbade writer-directors like Drake from performing work that the DGA considers directing work, like cutting for time and making changes due to “unforeseen contingencies.” Still, directors might have been required to make these sorts of minor script changes, the DGA warned its members during the strike, a situation that set off a confusion among many in the writer-director cohort, especially early on in the work stoppage.
In his letter Drake says an entertainment attorney, DGA and WGA members told him these modifications wouldn’t break the strike rules. He would have made “1,001 creative changes” if he wasn’t attempting to honor the strike, he writes. He walked the picket lines and was supportive of the union. In its reply to Drake’s appeal letter, the WGA counters that Drake never consulted the union itself during the strike.
The script was changed in other ways beyond his control, Drake says: Production tweaked and shortened some scenes for “sides.” On one shoot day he received a rewritten version of a scene he was set to film and was told secondhand that a producer had done the unauthorized rewrites. This kind of last-minute surprise isn’t unusual in the low-budget indie world, Drake said in the interview: “I even went to the guild about it [as a breach of the union’s Minimum Basic Agreement] multiple times over the years.”
Once the union’s investigative body of strike-time infractions — the “Strike Rules Compliance Committee” — got wind of the situation, committee head Glen Mazzara investigated. Drake explained the situation to Mazzara and declined requests to provide drafts of the script and name the producer he heard had rewritten his scene.
Drake says in his appeal letter that he feared legal exposure from both the studio, which owned the scripts, and the producer. Moreover, he didn’t feel right naming someone whose work he had heard about only secondhand. This set up a dilemma: The WGA strike rules call for members to “inform the Guild of the name of any writer you have reason to believe is engaged in any strike breaking activity or scab writing.” The WGA, moreover, states Drake did not mention his lack of firsthand knowledge of alleged strikebreaking in his hearing.
Mazzara appears to have accepted these explanations. Drake says the committee head heard him out and told him he didn’t believe the issue would go much further than that. (Mazzara declined to comment.) Nevertheless, the union eventually summoned Drake to a disciplinary hearing to take place in May 2024.
Drake admitted to being “so naïve” about the situation. He did not bring an attorney or prepare a defense for his hearing. He said he felt assured by his interactions with Mazzara and by a pre-trial meeting with a WGA representative, where he claims to have been told the hearing was just a “formality,” that he would be “fine” and that the matter would remain confidential, he said in the THR interview.
But when he arrived, he says he encountered a surprise: “The friendly WGA representative I spoke to pre-trial was actually the WGAW’s Prosecutor,” he writes. During the procedure — which took place before five writers, WGA legal counsel, the WGA representative, Mazzara, a stenographer and two individuals who didn’t identify themselves, he said — he claims he was denied the ability to call a witness, a WGA staffer who could have offered context for his argument. During the hearing he says he assented to send the union drafts of his script, as they had previously asked for; he says the WGA never followed up on that offer, though he had been charged with declining to provide them.
During the proceedings, Mazzara testified that he felt Drake had been “forthcoming” and should have been sent a letter rather than subjected to harsher discipline. “I didn’t feel that should be escalated. The Strike Rules Committee really wanted that name [of the potential strikebreaking producer],” Mazzara said in an excerpt of the trial transcript included in Drake’s appeal letter. A few months later, in a text to Drake included in the appeal letter, Mazzara wrote that he did not believe Drake was a “scab”: “It was a mistake at a confusing time. I believed you and still do.” Still, under the WGA’s disciplinary process, the SRCC only investigates and does not determine guilt.
The trial committee unanimously found Drake guilty, ruling that Drake lacked “remorse” and hadn’t taken accountability for his actions. It recommended an 18-month suspension, with Drake able to be reinstated only after he named the producer who potentially rewrote his scene. The WGA West’s board of directors, which had the final say, went further and voted to both expel Drake and make his excommunication from the union public, marking one of just two known examples of a WGA member being kicked out for breaking strike rules during the 2023 strike.
In the WGA’s view, it was a cut-and-dry case: Drake hadn’t gone fully pencils-down while the rest of the membership was withholding its labor, end of story. “Scab writing cannot be tolerated. It is anathema to the culture of solidarity among the membership that makes the Guild a fighting union,” the union says in its position statement.
But Drake kept fighting to change the decision. Months after his trial, Drake did identify the producer who he suspected rewrote his scenes to the union. The studio and the producer had parted ways, and he felt his risk of liability had decreased, he says in the reply to the WGA’s position statement. That action didn’t sway the WGA West board to change its stance: “He did so only after he was expelled in an attempt to negotiate down his discipline,” the WGA statement says.
Meanwhile, Drake maintains that the union violated its own constitution by not allowing him to call his witness and infringed the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act by failing to give him a “full and fair hearing.” The WGA denies this, saying he “showed contempt for the process throughout,” citing remarks from Drake during the hearing that the union should just kick him out. Drake argues these comments were made in frustration once he realized the hearing was adversarial.
Now, members will decide which argument they find most convincing — and whether Drake’s actions merit him being kicked out of the union. For his part, Drake says his appeal is no longer about reinstatement into the guild: “Nothing will give me back a year of my life or negate the stress of this ordeal,” he writes in his reply to the WGA’s position statement.
Rather, he wants to draw attention to the process. He tells THR, “This is about highlighting that the guild decided to ignore that the head of the SRCC, a guy who’s been on two strike committees, ignore their own trial committee, go back on their word to keep all of this private [and] elevate the discipline. It’s to shed light on an unfair process no member should ever be subjected to.”
Read the documents from each side below.