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NEW YORK — Tom Fontana’s fiefdom fits neatly in a red-brick, four-story, 19th-century West Village townhouse — its colossal, multistory windows befitting the library it was and still, in part, remains. Fontana bought and refurbished the building in 1997 with the relative fortune he made in an earlier golden age of TV — from his first writing break on “St. Elsewhere,” the ’80s NBC drama about a teaching hospital, then onward as writer-producer for NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street” in the ’90s, then as creator of “Oz,” the admired HBO prison drama that ended in 2003.

Upstairs, Fontana rises each morning at 5 to write TV scripts and plays, longhand on a yellow legal pad. Downstairs is its own kind of teaching hospital, full of aspiring writers instead of surgical residents, who work here for and with Fontana, hoping to make a life in a business that lately seems to be coming apart before their eyes.

The TV industry Fontana started in more than 40 years ago, when the networks ruled the airwaves, is nothing like the TV industry of 2023, where the streaming revolution has sputtered, executives talk of handing over writing duties to artificial intelligence, and both writers and actors unions have been on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/07/20/hollywood-strike-guild/" target=_blank>a combined strike</a> since July 14.

Fontana’s townhouse seems like a monument to a career that might no longer be possible. In the library, where he often hosts both guests and table reads, Fontana’s mahogany bookcases stretch 15 feet, floor to ceiling, with nearly 15,000 books, many of which can only be reached by a catwalk on the second floor. Scattered around are objects Fontana has collected through the years: an old globe, a statue of an armless and legless (yet modestly endowed) Minotaur from his 2011 series “Borgia.” There’s a rowing machine that uses water instead of a flywheel to create resistance.

“One day, they’ll find me slumped over it,” says Fontana. He’s 71 and doesn’t foresee 101. “I’m no <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/norman-lear-put-his-foot-down--and-trumps-white-house-flinched/2017/11/26/1b08527a-c5b1-11e7-84bc-5e285c7f4512_story.html" target=_blank>Norman Lear</a>.”

Fontana is comfortably perched in a wooden armchair on the second floor of the library, sipping a tumbler of Buffalo Trace bourbon and smoking a Churchillian cigar with his friend Arian Moayed, who portrayed Kendall Roy’s private-equity friend Stewy Hosseini on HBO’s “Succession.”

It is a blazing Monday in late July, and the calm before the storm. Tomorrow, Moayed will give a fiery speech in Times Square decrying the industry’s lack of living wages, while Fontana will picket Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.’s building on Park Avenue South. The forecast calls for bad weather, and Fontana has his armor: a white Yankees cap and a brown T-shirt with a picture of a typewriter and the words “I’m a writer. Don’t piss me off.”

So are the tens of thousands of other writers and actors, on strike together for the first time since 1960.

“People are not getting residual checks the way that they should, or any sort of compensation, because we don’t know what the hell’s going on,” Moayed says, waving his cigar. He blames the streaming subscription model, which did not consider the resulting loss of advertising revenue. “They keep breaking these systems and calling it ‘innovation,’ but it’s just the same old s---.”

Fontana adds: “Any kind of innovation, they go, ‘Well we don’t know if we’ll make any money off it. Can we just wait until the next contract?’ Then the next contract comes. ‘Well we’re not going to talk about that! We already made a deal about that!’”

“It’s all ‘Succession,’” Moayed says, laughing bitterly. “This is all ‘Succession.’”

And that’s why they’re viewing this strike as a battle for survival. This is Fontana’s fourth writers strike: the least consequential to his own well-being, perhaps, and yet the most important to his profession.

“I’ve been very blessed in my career,” Fontana says. “I got a job in ’81, and I have worked since. The bottom line is this strike will not affect me, pretty much at all. … But I feel I not only owe it to the people who went on strike in 1960 but my fellow workers. We’re at a time when we have to come together, or we’re f---ed.”

Jeenah Moon

Fontana grew up in Buffalo, the fourth of five kids, in a “lower-class family that struggled to be a middle-class family.” His father was a salesman and his mother ran an OB/GYN clinic at a hospital.

“My parents worked their butts off to see their kids had a future,” he says, and so did he: a gig at Freddie’s Doughnuts helped put him through a Jesuit prep school.

After graduating Buffalo State University in 1973, Fontana moved to New York City. He began spending summers in Williamstown, Mass., where, as a struggling playwright, he befriended actress Blythe Danner. The three-month writers strike in 1981 brought to town Danner’s husband, producer and director Bruce Paltrow. He offered Fontana, then 30, a writing job on “St. Elsewhere.”

“I don’t think he would have come to Williamstown for the entire summer had they not been on strike,” Fontana says. “In a way, I owe my career to the 1981 strike.”

When the writers went on strike again four years later, he joined them without hesitation. Unions were in his blood. His oldest brother was a longtime member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. His second-oldest joined the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union while working at a Buffalo supermarket as a teenager. His sister is a member of the United University Professionals. After he started at Freddie’s Doughnuts in high school, Fontana joined a baker’s union.

Under Paltrow’s mentorship, his career flourished. But as his fortunes buoyed him to the upper class, he watched his industry get swept by a series of “tsunamis that I survived.” The 1985 strike, Fontana’s first, lasted two weeks, as writers fought for higher payouts from VHS sales. Conglomerates began trading networks and cable channels, opening chasms between creatives and executives. When General Electric acquired NBC in 1986, “the network went into a box,” Fontana says. “Lightbulbs here. Airplanes here. NBC here.” Top execs, he says, slowly stopped answering showrunners’ phone calls.

In the 1988 strike, as “St. Elsewhere” concluded, writers fought for syndication residuals, pushing the TV industry into a marathon stretch of closed sets and reruns. During the 2007-08 strike, which hinged on residuals from DVDs and internet content, Fontana marched Manhattan in the dead of winter — as a union man since his doughnut days, and a leader who didn’t want to lose touch.

“That’s where I think the bosses fail morally,” Fontana says. “They get so far away from the ordinary people who do the work, that they’ve lost all sense of them.”

Now, in 2023, shows that define his legacy — “Homicide,” Showtime’s “City on a Hill” — can’t be found on any streaming service, because it’s cheaper for the companies to act as if they don’t exist, according to Fontana. Streaming provided an explosion of opportunity at first, but profits dried up along with the pool of potential subscribers. The dual strike is happening in part because companies focused on cost-cutting measures like shorter seasons and smaller writers rooms. There are more shows, says the Writers Guild of America, but fewer opportunities for a sustained career as a writer.

“There’s a lot of head-scratching going on at these media corporations, trying to figure out how to get out of the hole they dug themselves in,” Fontana says. “Part of the way they want to get out of the hole is to make us pay for it. They made mistakes, and they want us to pay for them.”

He doesn’t want to pay. He’s worked too hard to get here.

“I’ve seen myself go from peasant to — not a king — but a duke,” he says.

Writers Guild of America

The morning after cigars, on the 85th day of the strike, Fontana and a few compatriots ride into battle in a Lincoln SUV, headed for the picket line on Park Avenue South. In the driver’s seat is Richard Rivera, a firefighter who grew sympathetic to the writers’ cause through his friendship with Fontana.

Fontana’s in a good mood, even though the sky keeps darkening and his knee is acting up (an ACL torn in his “last-ever bar fight,” 30 years ago).

Whenever he doesn’t feel like marching, he thinks back to the “brutal,” snowy 2007 picket lines, when temperatures dropped to the teens. One powdery day he popped in to a diner near Times Square to warm his hands on a cup of tea, and realized he could just walk away. No one would notice. “And I looked up,” Fontana says, “and I saw <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/walter-bernstein-scriptwriter-who-skewered-mccarthy-era-blacklist-in-the-front-dies-at-101/2021/01/23/01580a4a-5dbc-11eb-b8bd-ee36b1cd18bf_story.html" target=_blank>Walter Bernstein</a> — the great, great screenwriter Walter Bernstein — who had once been blacklisted and who was, at that point, 80-something. And he was out there.”

Fontana missed only one day of that strike, because of a cold. So, what’s a little rain during this one?

“F---ing Walter Bernstein. I never forgave him.”

They arrive to find Jerry Greenfield — the Jerry of Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream empire — bear-hugging picketers as they got free scoops.

“Stephen Colbert gave me a scoop last week,” says TV writer Jorge Zamacona, who rode in the SUV with Fontana, his mentor and friend since the ’80s. “I didn’t even recognize him, and I love him.”

A DJ keeps the music blaring, flipping from Sinatra to “The Flintstones” theme song to Schoolhouse Rock’s “Conjunction Junction.” Another man enthusiastically plays a keytar.

Today’s signs, wrapped in rain-resistant protective plastic, are particularly colorful — protesting in solidarity are animation writers, most of whom don’t qualify for the writers guild but face similar issues. Slogans include: “Do the write thing” and “A.I. doesn’t have to pay rent. I do.” Drawings depict Beavis and Butt-Head (“We want uhhh … fair wages … yeah, heh-heh …”) and Spider-Man (“Animation writers assemble!”).

“We haven’t got a word in our mouths without” your writing, voice actor Dwayne Hill tells the crowd. “You are the oil in our engine, the blood that pumps through our veins.”

“Without you, we’re just an improv troupe,” says fellow voice actor Jim Conroy, “and does anybody like an improv troupe?”

“No!” the soaked crowd shouts back. Unbothered by the lightning flashes, they resume marching.

The scene is captured by dozens of cameras: TV crews, iPhones of intrigued onlookers, Androids turned to selfie mode by the picketers themselves — all ready for the nightly news, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube.

It delights Fontana. Finally, useful weapons. In the ’80s, executives controlled the story. Fontana remembers reading the essence of their messaging in the trades: “‘Look what these selfish writers are doing. You’re not getting your favorite TV shows. All these other people are out of a job.’”

Sitting at the negotiation table from 2005 to 2007, when Fontana served as vice president of WGA-East, felt like “you’re a peasant sitting across from a military junta.” The tide turned, he says, during the 2007 strike, when creatives began making short YouTube videos — some funny, some educational, some inspirational — and putting a face to the picketers.

Now, with unions using sophisticated storytelling methods, public opinion feels more on the side of writers and actors, Fontana says. Two weeks earlier, no one at his physical therapist’s office had heard of the strike. When he went to work on his knee before marching the rainy picket line, a tech assistant told him, “'They need to pay you people more money.'”

“He was furious!” Fontana recalls with amazement.

Kristina Bumphrey/Starpix

As he makes his way around the picket with a cane instead of a sign, Fontana wonders whether younger writers view him the way he viewed Walter Bernstein: as a veteran setting an example — or following one, even when he doesn’t have to.

“Michelangelo said he was still learning at 81,” Fontana says. “If Michelangelo could be learning at 81, I can certainly be learning at 71.”

A younger generation works on the first floor of Fontana’s townhouse, in offices he built along a lengthy hallway. In an industry where rookie writers say they can no longer get the necessary experience to climb the ladder to be a showrunner — a point of contention in the negotiations — Fontana has a system, a way to pay forward Paltrow’s mentorship. He hires writers as personal assistants. Two years later, they’re promoted to script coordinators. Two years after that, they get a crack at a script on whatever show he’s running.

And it works. Fontana’s friend Jorge Zamacona, who just wrapped Season 3 of “Law and Order: Organized Crime” when the strike began, feels his career path has been something of a “unicorn,” and that he owes it “to the training Bruce gave Tom, and Tom handed down to me.”

When Emily Ragsdale “did the classic ladder climb” at Fontana’s office, she thought it was the industry norm — a notion of which the strike helped disavow her. As an assistant, she would catalogue his library’s thousands of books. Eventually, she became a writer and a producer on his “City on a Hill,” where she had the “invaluable” experience of being on-set. She considers it “a gift” that’s become less common with short-term contracts in the streaming age.

“A writer is not going to become a writer-producer until they have adequate experience on set,” Ragsdale says. “Tom puts you there.”

Fontana also prepared her for the strike. He’s a storyteller, often perched in his library with a cigar, a tumbler of bourbon, and tales of his previous clashes with executives. When this strike arrived, Ragsdale was professionally — and emotionally — prepared to step away from her role as supervising producer on Season 3 of Amazon Freevee’s “Bosch: Legacy.”

So was Matthew Nemeth, a 37-year-old writer who climbed the Fontana ladder. In 2019, shortly after he finally found representation, the writers guild urged many of its members to fire their agents to protest the bundling of talent in deals, which arguably led to fewer opportunities across the board.

“I finally had some footing, and we had to offload our agents,” Nemeth says. It was a difficult decision, but “Tom talked me through that. He said, ‘You just got to do it. A union sticks together.’” Fontana did the same as this strike approached, serving as a “north star” for a new generation of writers, because “he’s been through this before.”

“He’s made it easier on me,” Nemeth says. “I know not everybody has a Tom Fontana, so I’m really grateful I do. He’s the best of what we have to offer.”

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

As the rain pours over the picket line on Park Avenue South, British actor Eamonn Walker scans the line with his phone camera, and the lens falls upon Fontana. Walker’s thrilled by this coincidence. He credits his American career to Fontana, who cast him in “Oz” in 1997.

Walker rushes over to Fontana. The men haven’t seen each other in about a year. Drenched, they heartily embrace.

Fontana invites Walker to come over to his place. They get in the Lincoln SUV.

At the townhouse, they change into dry T-shirts before sitting down to cigars and bourbon, reliving the past 85 days of battle.

“We’ve been punting for years,” Walker says. “There can be no more punting. We have to deal with it now, because otherwise in the next 20, 30 years, it will be the same. People have been exploited. I’m one of the lucky ones. Tom’s one of the lucky ones. But it isn’t about me, personally. It’s about the principle, because I’m never going to forget the young actor I was, who had no money, who really wanted to do it.”

“And who was underpaid on ‘Oz,’” Fontana adds, through puffs of his cigar. “Let me go on the record as saying.”

Walker currently portrays a fire chief on NBC’s “Chicago Fire,” and actual firefighters often work as extras. The actor envisions a scenario in which a studio exec swings by, offers a few bucks to the extras, and suddenly owns their likenesses.

“They might not realize they could be used in any shape or form, and they don’t own anything,” Walker says. “They’d own your face and your voice for 50 bucks.”

Fontana’s face wrinkles at the thought.

Because He's Jeff Goldblum

LSU, BA in English and Film

Travis M. Andrews is a feature writer for The Washington Post. He is also the author of "Because He's Jeff Goldblum," a rumination on the enigmatic actor's career and an exploration of fame in the 21st century. He joined The Post in 2016.

Travis Andrews

Tom Fontana has been through four writers strikes. He’s still picketing.

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Tom Fontana is furious // The veteran TV writer has been through 4 strikes and he's still picketing

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Tom Fontana is furious. And thinks you should be, too.