The Writers Guild of America has just secured a landmark four-year agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The deal represents a genuine achievement — hard-fought, historic in scope, and a testament to the organizing muscle the Guild has built over years of increasingly contentious labor battles. Writers won meaningful protections on artificial intelligence, strengthened residuals and raised minimums that reflect the economic realities of a business that has spent the better part of a decade restructuring itself at the writers’ expense. And yet.

There is an open secret in Hollywood that no collective bargaining agreement addresses, no trade publication investigates with any seriousness, and no executive at a studio or a talent agency is particularly motivated to fix. It is the quiet scandal of deal lethargy — the maddening, expensive, creativity-killing lag between the moment a writer shakes hands on an assignment and the moment a deal is actually closed and papered.

Six months is not unusual. Eight months happens regularly. A full year is not unheard of for what amounts to, in most cases, a paint-by-numbers transaction both sides have done dozens of times before.

This is not a niche grievance. It is a structural failure that costs writers real money, drains creative momentum from projects, and ultimately produces worse films and television shows. The WGA’s new agreement sets floors for what writers earn. It says nothing about when they get paid.

Consider what deal lethargy actually means in practice. A writer closes a deal verbally in January. By the time that deal is fully papered — business affairs, legal, the interminable back-and-forth over step definitions and passive payments and separated rights — it may be September before the first check clears. In the meantime, that writer is expected to be fully invested in the project: taking notes, meeting with producers, perhaps already generating pages. They are working. They are simply not being compensated.

There is a financial cost that is easy to quantify and easy to overlook. The WGA minimum for a draft and a set on a high-budget feature — $145,469 under the new agreement — sounds like a fair number on paper. But if that deal takes twelve months to close, the writer receives the purchasing power equivalent of roughly $141,100 in real terms, assuming modest inflation of 2 to 3 percent annually. That is a quiet, invisible pay cut that the minimum scale table will never reflect.

And that is for a writer fortunate enough to be working at minimum. Writers earning above scale are watching the real value of their negotiated fees erode in exactly the same way, at every level. The creative toll is harder to measure but no less real. Projects have their own energy. A room has a certain electricity at the moment a story comes together, when a writer and a producer are aligned on what the thing is and why it matters. Deal lethargy kills that electricity slowly, the way a slow leak flattens a tire.

By the time the deal closes and a studio expects a writer to begin in earnest, months have passed. Key creative decisions have drifted. The writer needs to be re-educated on the project. The producer needs to re-sell their own enthusiasm. And in the worst cases — a scenario that plays out with dismaying regularity — the executive who championed the project has moved on to another job entirely. The project is an orphan. The writer is expected to bond with a new steward who had no part in the original creative conversation, who may have entirely different instincts about the material, and who inherits a relationship already frayed by the impersonal mechanics of a deal that took forever to close.

The industry has precise, contractually mandated timelines for almost everything else. Reading periods are defined. Writing periods are defined. Step deadlines are defined. The MBA is exquisitely detailed on the subject of when a writer must deliver and what happens when they do not. The assumption, baked into every page of the Guild’s basic agreement, is that time is a meaningful variable in the creative process — that it matters when things happen. And yet dealmaking, the act that initiates the entire relationship, operates in a kind of contractual no-man’s-land where no clock runs and no consequence attaches to delay.

This is the problem. Here is a solution.

The WGA should negotiate — or, failing that, advocate loudly and publicly for — a ticking clock provision on dealmaking. From the moment of a verbal agreement between a writer and a signatory company, a defined window opens: thirty days to reach a fully negotiated deal memo on material business points. Both parties get the option to extend for one 15-day period, so the max is 60 days when it’s a complicated deal. If that window closes without agreement, an informal arbitration process commences — conducted under WGA auspices, conducted by phone, and conducted fast. Both sides present their positions. A resolution is reached. The deal is closed. The same logic should apply to the papering process itself, the document drafting and redlining that drags on long after the business points are ostensibly settled.

The long-form contract has become a byzantine artifact, a ritual of delay that benefits no one except perhaps the law firms billing hours on both ends. A hard deadline for completion of the long-form — sixty days from deal memo, say — with a similar informal arbitration backstop, would transform the back half of the process the way the deal-memo clock transforms the front.

Skeptics will say this is naïve — that these deals are simply too intricate to be hurried, that the machinery of Hollywood contract-making cannot be made to move faster than it moves. The industry itself put that argument to rest in the weeks before the 2023 strike. As the clock ran down on the previous MBA, agents and business affairs executives who ordinarily stretch a negotiation across seasons suddenly found themselves closing the same deals in days. Sometimes hours. The complexity of the underlying transactions had not changed. What changed was the presence of a hard deadline with real consequences on the other side of it. When both parties had sufficient reason to move, they moved.

The pre-strike scramble was not an aberration — it was a proof of concept. Critics will argue that complexity cannot be rushed, that every deal has its idiosyncrasies, that thirty days is an arbitrary number. These objections are not without merit, but they prove too much. The question is not whether every deal can close in thirty days. The question is whether the system, left to its own devices, will ever generate the internal pressure to close deals faster. The answer, clearly, is no.

The only thing that has ever changed entrenched behavior in Hollywood is a deadline. The WGA won something historic. But the fight for writers’ economic security does not end with the agreement signing. It continues in the months — sometimes many, many months — between the handshake and the check. The Guild should start the clock.

George Heller is a manager/producer at Brillstein Entertainment Partners. He represents filmmakers, TV creators and actors. Most recently, he executive produced the Justin Lin-directed film Last Days which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and Role Play for Amazon starring Kaley Cuoco and David Oyelowo, which was also based on his own original idea.