In mid-April, seven thousand Hollywood writers fired their agents. The collective action came at the behest of their union, the Writers Guild of America, and followed several months of failed contract negotiations with the Association of Talent Agents, or the A.T.A. At issue are two agency practices—“packaging” clients and charging studios for access to them, and starting their own production companies—which, according to the Writers Guild, are diminishing the mutual economic interest that writers and their agents have traditionally shared. Negotiations are scheduled to resume again in June, but the impasse could take weeks, if not months, to resolve.

The firings took place just before staffing season, when broadcast networks fill hundreds of writing jobs for the year ahead. Writers posted images of the letters they sent terminating their agents. One posted a page from the screenplay of “Norma Rae”—the scene where Sally Field holds aloft her sign reading “UNION” on the factory floor. But many writers liked their agents, and schmoozing can be hard for introverts.

“I don’t know how to negotiate at all. I’m a literature major,” Julieanne Smolinski, who writes for the Netflix comedy “Grace and Frankie,” said. Of her former agent, Jordan Cerf, at William Morris Endeavor, or W.M.E., she said, “All I have to do normally is call him and say, ‘Hey, I’d love to get a job,’ and he calls me back a few days later.” She considers Cerf her friend. They have the same dog trainer. Cerf takes her out on her birthday. They still follow each other on Instagram, like exes. “I feel maternal concern,” she said, wondering how he spends his days.

“It was really hard, because my agents and I definitely hold opposing views on the situation,” Liz Alper, who was recently a writer for the ABC drama “The Rookie,” said. “For me, it was basically saying to a relative, ‘I know you voted for Trump, and I love you, but I very much didn’t, and I don’t agree with you, and we can’t work together now—or, at least, for the time being.’ ”

Not everyone is on good terms. In May, Deadline reposted a Twitter thread by Jorge Reyes, a writer who fired his agents at Gersh for the union cause, then decided to hire a new agent at Verve, a midsize agency that has agreed to accept the Writers Guild’s code of conduct. Someone from Gersh then cancelled a scheduled meeting at Fox without letting Reyes know. “If they did that, who’s to say they wouldn’t badmouth/talk shit to the execs I’ve already met?” Reyes wrote. (In a statement, Gersh said, “When the client signed with another agency, the meetings were removed from the books as is normal protocol.” Reyes said that the agency later apologized.)

The exchange indicated the extent to which agents, who work for the writers who hire them, also hold power over those writers’ careers. The last time that the Writers Guild and the A.T.A. negotiated a contract was in 1976, and, in the years since, agencies have become bigger and more powerful. Seventy per cent of television and film writers are now represented by four talent agencies: W.M.E., United Talent Agency (U.T.A.), Creative Artists Agency (C.A.A.), and I.C.M. Traditionally, agents have earned ten per cent of the income that they help negotiate for their clients. Now an increasing amount of an agency’s income comes from packaging fees—the fees they charge to the studios to provide access to talent for a particular television show or feature film. When a writer’s work gets packaged, she does not have to pay her agent ten per cent, but she is also left uncertain whether her script went to the highest bidder or if her interests were folded into a deal that represented the best outcome for her agent.

The Writers Guild claims that packaging is working both sides of a deal. “If you saw it in sports representation, if an agent could say, If you want this player, you have to pay me directly for access to him, that would seem crazy,” John August, a screenwriter of the new “Aladdin” remake and other movies, who is part of the W.G.A.’s negotiating committee, said. “Yet that’s the thing that’s happened for decades in Hollywood.” The A.T.A. claims that packaging allows more shows and movies to get developed, financed, and made, and that representing the group of creative talent on a given project is more valuable than prioritizing the incentives of each individual.

Some agencies have also started producing their own shows and movies, which, in some cases, could make an agency both a writer’s client and her boss. The Writers Guild claims that affiliated studios, as they are known, could get preferential treatment from agents who work for the same companies, and that an agency-owned studio would have an incentive to increase its own share of the profits rather than the profits of its clients. (The A.T.A. said, in a public statement, that “more buyers will equate to more opportunities for artists and a more vibrant marketplace.”) The Writers Guild has demanded that agencies sign a code of conduct that would limit them to the traditional ten-per-cent, commission-based model. The biggest agencies refused to sign. So the writers fired them.

In addition to the mass firing, the Writers Guild has sued Hollywood’s four biggest agencies, claiming that packaging fees are a violation of an agency’s fiduciary duty to its clients. One of the plaintiffs in the Writers Guild’s lawsuit against the agencies is David Simon, the creator of the HBO series “The Wire” and “The Deuce.” In a post on his Web site, last March, Simon detailed his own negative experiences with packaging, a practice in which he has refused to participate since learning, in the nineties, that the television adaptation of his book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” had been packaged without his consent.

“Motherfucker, you’re talking about bad precedents?” Simon writes, re-creating a conversation with his agent. “C.A.A. repped both sides of a negotiation without informing me so that your taste of the profits would dwarf mine, your client.”

In the same post, Simon noted that television has been all but recession-proof, and that the conflict was “an argument over an embarrassment of riches.” Still, many writers’ wages have stagnated, a problem that the Writers Guild attributes to agents not doing their jobs and that agents claim is caused by other factors, including shorter television seasons. The W.G.A. estimates that agencies earn at least a hundred and fifty million dollars each season from packaging shows, money that comes directly out of production budgets. If a show is profitable, a typical packaging arrangement gives an agency a percentage of profits. For a feature film, an agency is typically paid five per cent of the production’s budget to secure talent, including writers.

Without the intellectual property that writers create, the Writers Guild argues, agencies would have nothing to sell. “The folks that write movies and television, if they’re not bringing in the most money, they’re definitely the ones that are starting projects,” August told me. “You want to have a strong lit department”—the part of an agency that works with writers—“because that gives you the capital that generates all the projects down the road.”

Agents typically get scripts in front of producers and showrunners, urge people to read the scripts, negotiate payments above the minimums set by the union, advise clients on which offers to take seriously, and look the part of power-wielding sharks by being the only people in Los Angeles to dress regularly in suits. This year, they’re doing less of that. Writers can only speculate about how their agents are filling their time; except for a few public statements by the C.E.O.s of the major agencies, the agents have stayed mostly silent.