We asked Hollywood actors and writers to imagine the strikes on screen. Some told us it would be a rom-com. Others suggested a mystery, an alien abduction movie, or even a heist flick!
The backstory: The Writers Guild of America won a new contract after striking against the major studios and streaming companies for nearly five months. The union SAG-AFTRA is still negotiating for contracts with their strike ongoing.
What's next: After months of strikes and deal making, who in Hollywood would actually greenlight and bankroll this picture? Stay tuned.
The saga of this year's historic double strikes in Hollywood is not over yet. The Writers Guild of America won a new contract after striking against the major studios and streaming companies for nearly five months. Now performers in the union SAG-AFTRA are waiting for their happy ending.
How will this cliffhanger end, and how might it play out on screen?
Would it be a TV reality show? A sitcom? A horror movie? A period picture titled, Hot Labor Summer or Two Strikes You're Out?
Picket signs during the Hollywood strike pointed to possible scenarios.
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A David And Goliath Story, a sci-fi flick, a romance...
"I think it's a David and Goliath story," WGA strike captain Geetika Lizardi told me. She's a real-life writer from the series Bridgerton. "The studios have all this power, especially now that they're so big. We're just a rounding error to them. You've got Apple, Amazon, these giant companies, and then it's just a bunch of us who ... are barely making a living."
TV writer Valerie Woods offered another idea: "Somebody might do a love story about the writers guild strike," she said. "Or somebody might do a sci-fi."
Woods joked about an alien abduction plot, but as far as rom-com plotlines go, some picket lines actually did include host singles meetups, so the story might center on lonely screenwriters:
"I've been single for four years," said writer Augustus Schiff, who was also there. "So I'm thinkin' this would be a nice side effect of being out here."
Or the story could follow the struggles of a writer for a hit TV show, like Brittani Nichols from Abbott Elementary. She told me about getting paltry residuals, "Sometimes you just get a stack of checks for seven cents."
Writers Geetika Lizardi, Maria Elena Rodriguez, Steve Harper, Valeria Woods, Nicholas Geisler picket outside Amazon Studios.
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… An ensemble cast is essential
That story's ensemble could include struggling actors, too:
Taylor Orci told me, "My spouse and I are currently on food stamps. You know, sometimes it's Cheez-Its for lunch, but it's something."
Other actors and writers I met on picket lines suggested a variety of genres: a superhero movie, "where unexpected sidekick SAG shows up and now they're the hero," offered writer Nicholas Geisler.
"An HBO political movie about the absurdity," chimed in writer Maria Elena Rodriguez.
"Or a musical," Woods added. "I mean, we've had all of those karaoke machines and flash mobs."
It's true, at almost every picket line, strikers sang, danced and played music.
Of course, a Hollywood movie also needs its heroes and villains.
On one side, have been studio heads like Disney's Bob Iger, in the role of the corporate boss. He enraged strikers over the summer when he told CNBC the workers' "level of expectation" was "just not realistic."
After Iger and other studio executives join the bargaining tables with the unions, TV writer Steve Harper had a suggestion for how to cast them — inspired by the show Succession.
"I think for the movie you get Brian Cox and you replicate him through A.I. You put him in different clothes," he chuckled. "You just hear from him a little bit, and then you hear from him in another voice. That's all you need."
SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher held a press conference announcing the strike back in July.
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On the other side, Fran Drescher, could play herself, perhaps with a flashback to her starring role in the '90s sitcom The Nanny. As real-life president of SAG-AFTRA, her Norma Rae moment came when she chastised the studios and streamers.
"How they plead poverty, that they're losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs," Drescher said while announcing the strike. "It is disgusting. Shame on them. "
we’re now 6 months into these strikes. half a year of jobs lost and lives destroyed. and when I look back at it all, I mostly just can’t believe how mean everyone has been to me. all I ever wanted to do was bankrupt creative people on behalf of a few monopolistic tech companies
The movie or show could include grainy long shots of the fake Carol wandering around the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where the AMPTP headquarters are located. (The shopping mall was once a location for the 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High.)
Another location idea for this story —the offices of SAG-AFTRA— just steps away from the still bubbling La Brea Tar Pits where paleontological research continues. So maybe our screenplay could include a dinosaur-comes-to-life scene?
While no one has made a movie about the summer of strikes yet, Lizardi notes the Hollywood workers have so far been able to control the narrative of the strikes.
"I think people had a perception of us before, that we were all, like, comfortable, wealthy. We're not," she told me. "Now that the public knows that we have the same struggles everyone else does, like how how do I pay my bills? How do I, you know, get my kid through school? People are rooting for us. We are the protagonist of this story."
For now, though, the story remains a cliffhanger while SAG-AFTRA and the studios negotiate a deal.
"You know what it is? It's a heist flick," says actor Jason George, known for his work on TV's Grey's Anatomy and the daytime soap Sunset Beach. He's on the union's negotiating team. "You get the team together. They figure out how to get the money from the big bosses, and this is the part of the movie where it looks like they're down and out, and you're thinking, 'oh, no, how's George Clooney gonna get out of this one?'"
"You find out we laid seeds early on in the picture, we doubled down and we get more determined than ever," George predicts. "We come out and we win the day."
After months of strikes and deal making, who in Hollywood would actually greenlight and bankroll this picture? Stay tuned.
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
is an arts and general assignment reporter on LAist's Explore LA team.
Published September 19, 2026 5:00 AM
Guadalupe Rosales, center, was part of the L.A. party crew scene in the mid-1990s.
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Topline:
Guadalupe Rosales, who was at the center of the ’90s LA party crew scene, felt her joyful experiences and those of her friends were being erased, overshadowed by a narrative of gang violence. So she wrote East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood to make sure their stories would not be forgotten.
Why it matters: The '90s party crew scene was a multi-faceted movement that involved mostly Latino youth in Southern California. It involved music, fashion, flier art and the commerce of staging parties.
What it drew on: The memoir’s foundation was the online archive Veteranas and Rucas, a repository of Rosales’ photos from the party crew scene, and photos, largely from women, from those times.
The backstory: Rosales began documenting the party crew scene years after being in it, while she was earning an MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Read on… to read about the party crew names and the women’s dominant fashions in the scene.
In the '90s, Guadalupe Rosales was a teenager in Los Angeles, part of the party crew scene. She remembers it as beautiful and empowering — but that’s not what she saw years later when she searched for stories about the scene online.
“I noticed that anything that was about Latino culture, '90s culture in L.A. specifically, [focused on] gang violence, everything that was mostly criminalizing,” Rosales said.
Rosales’ new memoir, East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood, is her effort to correct the absence of personal histories of people who were a key part of that scene.
The book is part historical archive, and part personal narrative. It’s also a log of her efforts to bring the scene to life for people in the 21st century, using her training as an artist and a scholar, three decades after the scene’s heyday.
Street Beat magazine documented the California party crew scene in the '90s.
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Rosales's artistic work today is in demand. Her most recent solo show was "Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo"in 2025 at the Palm Springs Art Museum. The Broad acquired a piece by Rosales that it's including in a group show titled "Has the myth been shattered"opening in November.
Her pieces are in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Hammer, LACMA and others. Rosales has taught at UCLA and UC Riverside.
She brings that sensibility to the book. “I really wanted to think about something that could live on hundreds of years from now, something that could be studied, something that could feel empowering, especially for women,” she said.
A recent photo of artist and scholar Guadalupe Rosales.
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The new memoir, East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood is about the 1990s party crew scene in L.A.
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The party crew scene in a nutshell
The ‘90s party crew scene was a multi-faceted movement that involved mostly Latino youth in Southern California. The center of the phenomenon was the party, which could take place in small backyards or large empty warehouses.
Photos from the scene.
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The music was variations of underground techno far from the pop mainstream. DJs played and mixed records on analog turntables, from people like DJ Irene and DJ Attack.
The scene also generated a lot of business activity. Partygoers paid entrance fees, and for alcohol, party organizers paid venues to hold the party and for the DJs to keep people dancing.
It was common to go out with the same group of people. The groups came up with names for their crews, such as Chicanos With Pride, Firme Hinas, Aztek Nation, Frek Show Tribe, Hispanics Causing Panic, and Playerz Cauzin’ Pleazure, among many, many others.
It was all covered by Street Beat, an independent publication loaded with photos of party crews and parties, while individuals honed graphic design styles for the fliers used to promote each party.
Fashion was another essential component of the scene.
Photos from Street Beat magazine in 1992 show the party crew scene in Southern California.
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In the book, Rosales describes the mesmerized feeling she had when she saw her first house party. She was about 13 years old and watched the young women show off their style through the window of her house in East L.A.
“They wore tank tops and baggy pants with puffed-out front pockets or overalls. Their sneakers — Adidas or Converse Chuck Taylors,” she said. “Two of the girls wore oversized shirts that hung loosely on their frames, and they had short hair like Demi Moore in the movie Ghost. The others wore their hair longer, styled in that wet, wavy look that was so popular, half pulled up with a clip. One took out a travel-size Aqua Net hairspray and mousse, then scrunched up her hair with one hand while spraying her hair with the other.”
The style and dance moves wowed her, she said, but what captivated her then, and to this day, was these young women’s confidence in who they were. It was magnetic, pointed her in a direction she wanted to go.
A photo of Guadalupe Rosales on her 15th birthday, her quinceañera.
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The stories
For photos, Rosales drew on her online archive Veteranas and Rucas, (which roughly translates as “experienced ladies and broads“) which she’d kept going through the years, a repository of her own photos from the scene, and other photos from the time, largely from women. She began the project while earning an MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
A photo from Guadalupe Rosales' collection of 1990s ephemera.
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The book includes CD covers from popular bands at the time, Dr. Dre and Eazy-E, as well as photos of youth at protests against Prop. 187, the anti-immigrant California ballot measure.
“Youth culture exists for everyone. It might look different depending on where you live and who you are. And for us, as teenagers, we're living in that moment,” she said.
In the book Rosales connects a student walkout at her high school in Montebello with memories of her mother taking her and her sister to protests years before.
“Being an adult, working on this book, being an artist is also about reflecting back and also learning a lot of things that I wasn't aware of,” she said.
East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood is published by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House and is available Sept. 8.
Maira Solis is the show’s architect — as well as the director of Mariachi Tierra Mia, the L.A.-based group that will perform a mariachi program the night of Sept. 27 before launching into a set of Smiths covers with the band, The Last Line of Defense.
As to the enduring love Mexican Angelenos have for The Smiths, Solis will be the first to admit she didn’t know.
“This was, like, not intentional at all,” she said of the crossover.
Learning about The Smiths
The inadvertent mash-up happened in December 2024, just hours before Mariachi Tierra Mia was set to play a house gig — a “lucha libre-themed Christmas party” — when their client asked if the group knew any songs by The Smiths.
That would be the ‘80s Manchester band — led by singer-lyricist (and the Pope of Mope himself) Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr — that crafted songs as gorgeous and achy as they are wry and over-the-top. “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” and “Girlfriend in a Coma” are popular titles.
“I was like, ‘I don't think so,’” Solis said. She double-checked with her husband, Ivan Peña, guitarist and singer.
“He turned around, and he's like, ‘I f—ing love The Smiths,’” she recalled.
The Smiths tour posters photographed in London this month. The band and its lead singer remain very popular with Mexican Americans.
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A few hours later, Peña, with a serape draped over his Charro suit and little preparation, belted out “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” — and brought down the house.
“Like, the mariachis were jamming out, the taco people, the bar people, everyone in attendance was just like, ‘Yeah,’” Solis said.
That performance, captured on video, went viral on social media. Then the requests started to flood in.
“Hey, we love all your traditional songs,” her clients would tell Solis. “But can you put a Smiths song in there?”
Learning mariachi's centuries-old songbook one gig at a time
Solis picked up the violin in middle school and continued on in high school. Both schools in Boyle Heights offered mariachi programs that exposed her to the music.
Some of the students, she said, were already doing paid gigs and took her under their wing.
Solis was very much humbled at her first backyard gig, armed with a repertoire of about 20 songs learned from school, around age 14.
“I realized, ‘Oh my God, I don't know anything,’” she said, comparing her knowledge to the music’s vast songbook that has been passed down for generations.
Then there are the subgenres. “People will ask for a bolero, a huapango, a son, a ranchera,” she said.
And the music keeps adding new numbers, such as “Risk It All” by Bruno Mars.
Is it really so strange (yes, that’s indeed a Smiths reference) then, that mariachi would meet The Smiths?
“A lot of mariachi songs stand the test of time because they're very poetic,” she said, as they are commonly about heartbreak and hardships. “The melodies really give life to those words.”
Just like the music of The Smiths.
“That's why they're timeless,” Solis said. “The whole purpose of our ‘Mariachi Meets The Smiths’ — it’s gonna blend that.”
How to go
Mariachi Meets The Smiths
Where: The Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Los Angeles When: 7:30 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 27 Tickets and info: theford.com
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Los Angeles Dodgers owner and chairman Mark Walter speaks during a ceremony to honor the Major League Baseball 2024 World Series Champion team in the East Room of the White House, April 7, 2025, in Washington.
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Topline:
Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter and multiple insurance companies he owns have been sued, alleging they failed to disclose an ongoing federal probe to customers while directing policyholders’ money into Walter’s other companies.
Who's behind the suit: Ira Rosner, a 67-year-old Florida man, brought the class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Miami on Wednesday. He purchased a policy from Delaware Life in April and he had until late May to withdraw his money without penalty. However, the company did not disclose the investigation to him until June, Rosner is seeking a jury trial in the lawsuit that seeks damages for negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract and aiding and abetting fraud.
The backstory: Walter has been under investigation since last year by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission following a whistleblower complaint regarding alleged misrepresented loans made between companies within his business portfolio.
Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter and multiple insurance companies he owns have been sued, alleging they failed to disclose an ongoing federal probe to customers while directing policyholders’ money into Walter’s other companies.
The lawsuit lists Walter, Delaware Life Insurance Co., Clear Spring Life and Annuity, TWG Global Holdings and Walter’s Guggenheim Partners investment firm as defendants.
Ira Rosner, a 67-year-old Florida man, brought the class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Miami on Wednesday. He purchased a policy from Delaware Life in April and he had until late May to withdraw his money without penalty. However, the company did not disclose the investigation to him until June,
Rosner is seeking a jury trial in the lawsuit that seeks damages for negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract and aiding and abetting fraud.
TWG Global didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
Walter has been under investigation since last year by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission following a whistleblower complaint regarding alleged misrepresented loans made between companies within his business portfolio.
TWG Global Holdings is the holding company through which Walter controls Delaware Life, Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co. and his stake in Guggenheim Partners. TWG Global denied any wrongdoing involving the probe in a statement last month.
Walter and co-owner Todd Boehly sold their stakes in English Premier League club Chelsea this week. Last month, Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers in a surprise move less than a year after buying the NBA franchise from the Buss family. The deal is under review by the league.
The Dodgers have been adamant that Walter has no plans to sell the baseball team.
Compton Unified Superintendent Darin Brawley has won a national education prize recognizing his leadership in improving student achievement in the district. Brawley will receive the 2026 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education, which includes a $50,000 award, at a ceremony in New York City in November.
Why it matters: The McGraw Center for Education Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, which administers the prize, cited the “extraordinary impact” of Brawley and the two other recipients. Brawley won for his work in K-12; prizes are also awarded for higher education and lifelong learning.
Why now: With about 20,000 predominantly low-income Black and Hispanic students, Compton was singled out nationally for test scores in math and reading that did not fall back during the COVID-19 epidemic and continued to exceed the national and state averages since. The center noted that Compton’s graduation rates increased from 58% to 94%, and college acceptance rates exceeded 95% during Brawley’s 14 years as superintendent. It also highlighted the district’s expanded college and career pathways and innovative industry and community partnerships.
Compton Unified Superintendent Darin Brawley has won a national education prize recognizing his leadership in improving student achievement in the district.
Brawley will receive the 2026 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education, which includes a $50,000 award, at a ceremony in New York City in November.
The McGraw Center for Education Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, which administers the prize, cited the “extraordinary impact” of Brawley and the two other recipients. Brawley won for his work in K-12; prizes are also awarded for higher education and lifelong learning.
“At a time when schools and communities are confronting profound educational challenges, three visionary leaders are demonstrating what meaningful change can look like,” the McGraw Center said.
With about 20,000 predominantly low-income Black and Hispanic students, Compton was singled out nationally for test scores in math and reading that did not fall back during the COVID-19 epidemic and continued to exceed the national and state averages since.
The center noted that Compton’s graduation rates increased from 58% to 94%, and college acceptance rates exceeded 95% during Brawley’s 14 years as superintendent. It also highlighted the district’s expanded college and career pathways and innovative industry and community partnerships.
Last year, EdSource detailed an unusual drama program at Compton’s Dominguez High. Another EdSource article this year highlighted the inclusion of student-centered “calming corners” and learning stations in school renovations.
The McGraw prize, named after the CEO of the McGraw-Hill education publisher, has been awarded since 1988. Other recent California recipients have included Debra Duardo, Los Angeles County schools superintendent; Jody Lewen, president of Tamalpais College, who introduced academic programs at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center; Stanford University professor and researcher Roy Pea; and Sol Khan, creator of a worldwide free online education and tutoring platform.
The higher education prize went to Shai Reshef, who founded the University of the People, the first nonprofit, tuition-free, accredited online university, and the lifelong learning prize was awarded to Michael Webber, a nationally recognized professor of mechanical engineering and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin.
