I hear criticism sometimes that I reduce Hollywood to a big sporting event—winners, losers, and who’s outplaying the other guy and girl. Maybe, but I can’t be alone in equating the Writers Guild losing its chief negotiator to medical leave three weeks before the start of the most important studio talks in a generation to, say, the Lakers losing LeBron James to injury amid a desperate final push for the NBA playoffs.

That’s not to minimize WGA West executive director David Young’s undisclosed personal situation, which I really hope isn’t serious, or the stakes here. LeBron and the Lakers get paid about the same and work under the same conditions regardless of the outcome. The writers? Not so much. A negotiation beginning on March 20 could determine the playing field for thousands of WGA members for years to come. But both of those setbacks happened this week, and the sudden loss of these star players could impact their respective team’s fortunes in material ways. 

I know that Young is controversial—hated, even, among adversaries and within certain quarters of his own guild. The career labor negotiator has been the red-faced, scorched-earth, bulging-veined screamer of the Writers Guild since he was promoted to executive director in 2006. This is the guy who led the guild into that 100-day abyss in 2007-08, and who, in 2019, summoned the heads of the biggest talent agencies into what they thought was a negotiating session for a new agreement but instead turned into an inquisition of “racketeering” in their TV packaging practices—which foreshadowed the events a few days later, when the guild sued the stunned agencies and cut ties until they acquiesced. (They did.)