Hey everyone, it is Academy Awards Week, the Oscars. Pretty soon the nominees will be

dawning their fanciest outfits and jula-rate so they can see and be seen at a safe six-foot

distance. Meanwhile, the rest of the Hollywood Royal family will gather in their decked-out

media centers to watch the ceremony from home, like the rest of us. So we thought it was a good

moment to revisit the story of a Titanic battle that's been playing out behind the scenes in Hollywood

over the past few years. The fight between screen and television writers and the talent agencies

that represent them. Over how they all get paid. This episode originally aired in 2019,

but stick around the end for an update featuring a pandemic twist and a dramatic victory.

Here's the show. This is Planet Money from NPR.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit the TV writer David Simon at a little black box theater in

New York. David, hey, Alexie, how are you? Are you ready? Yeah, I think we're just going to use

this room. I don't know if you got my- David is the writer of Big Time TV shows like The Wire,

Tramey, The Duce. So I'm wondering, you know, you're a screenwriter. You've written a lot of

episodic television. Where do you think this story begins? What's the establishing shot?

The establishing shot is probably me on the rewrite desk at Baltimore's son.

It's the late 1980s. The young David Simon still has some hair on his head. Right now,

he's just a humble newsman on the police beat. I thought I was going to be a newspaper reporter,

and I thought I'd probably stay in Baltimore if the paper stayed good. I'd write books every few

years, and you know, I just wanted to be a journalist. But in the early 90s, David Simon gets around

to writing his first book, Homicide, Life on the Killing Streets. He gets an agent who tells him

there's a good shot this could sell in Hollywood. So his agent teams up with another agent at one

of the biggest outfits in the entertainment business. This place called Creative Artists Agency,

...