So, now the Screen Actors Guild is on strike, alongside the Writers Guild,
which means that the American movie and TV industry is basically shut down. Nobody’s
happy about it — certainly not the writers and actors, who would have loved to not have
to strike in order to obtain fair compensation for their work. But,
the studio bosses, the executives, the CEOs, they’re not happy about it, either.
After negotiations broke down between SAG — the Screen Actors Guild — and the
AMPTP — the association that represents the studios — and a strike became inevitable,
Disney CEO Bob Iger gave an interview to CNBC’s David Faber where he said, among other things:
“It’s very disturbing to me. We’ve talked about disruptive forces on this business
and all the challenges we’re facing, the recovery from COVID which is ongoing,
it’s not completely back. This is the worst time in the world to add to that disruption.”
Sounds pretty serious, Bob. Sounds like a good reason to settle the strike, Bob.
And settling the strike is your responsibility, Bob — you and everyone else represented by the
AMPTP. Settling the strike is up to you, because you control the money!
That’s why the actors and the writers are on strike to begin with,
because even though their creativity and their labor creates the product, you and yours, Bob,
you keep most of the money. And the writers and the actors are saying “Since the industry
we all work in would not exist without us, we would like some more of the money.” And the
reason there’s a strike right now is that you, Bob, and your fellow studio bosses, said “No.”
I’m gonna stop directly addressing Bob now. I’m only picking on him because
he decided to go to the media the day before the strike started and open his fucking mouth
and blame the strike on the “unreasonable” actors — the unreasonable working actors,
many of whom make less per year than I do as a shithead with a moderately successful
YouTube channel, which is a travesty — the fact that they make less than I do is a travesty,
not my YouTube channel — although, I guess that’s a matter of opinion.
The point is, Bob’s not the only studio boss who thinks this is all the fault
of the actors and the writers. Bob’s not the only one who thinks the counteroffer
they’ve made to the unions is completely fair and they should just accept it.
The AMPTP has insisted from the start of negotiations that they’ve made generous,
good faith offers to the writers and the actors. We don’t know everything that’s in these offers,
but a few telling details have leaked out. For example, last week DiscussingFilm tweeted this:
“The studio’s A.I. proposal to SAG-AFTRA included scanning a background actor’s likeness for one
day’s worth of pay and using their likeness forever in any form without any pay or consent.”
You get one day’s wages, and they get to use your likeness in perpetuity, however they want,
and you get no input and no money from any project that includes your likeness, ever.
“We get to make money off of you, but you don’t get to make money off of you.” That’s part of
the good deal the studios are offering the actors. That’s reasonable to them.
Why are they like this?
You ever find yourself asking that question about another person, or a group of people? It’s the
kind of question you ask rhetorically, because the person or people you’re talking to are behaving
in a way that is beyond your understanding. It doesn’t speak of empathy. It speaks of
frustration. You and the other party have been talking and talking, arguing back and forth,
and you’re farther apart now than you were when you started, and you reach a point where you
just have to stop and ask, “How did you get so far over there? What are you doing over there?”
“Why are you like this?”
I don’t claim to know why the Bob Igers of the world are the way they are. I don’t know
their hearts, I don’t know what goes on in their minds. Their experience in the
world is so warped by wealth and privilege that it would probably be unfathomable to
me. But I do know a few things, and I have guesses about a few others.
I know that to them the emphasis in the entertainment business goes on the business.
And that’s fair enough, all things being equal. It is a business. People pay for movie tickets.
People pay for DVDs and Blu-rays. People pay for streaming services. Advertisers pay
for commercial time. The American movie and TV business generates billions and
billions of dollars in revenue every year. Viewing it as a business isn’t a problem.
The problem is how the bosses in that business view the people who make the products that
generate all that revenue. Because when I say “product” in this context, I just mean the end
result of a production. A movie is a product because it was produced by somebody — a lot
of somebodies — writers, directors, actors, crew, even producers, go figure. But when a
studio boss talks about the movies and TV shows their company produces in terms of product — and
I don’t know this for a fact, I can’t read their minds, this is just an educated guess based on
how the Bobs of the world talk and act regarding the products of their business — when they talk
in terms of product, they mean the thing they’re selling. And it might be a movie or a TV show,
but it might just as well be a TV set. Or a pair of shoes. Or a chicken sandwich.
They don’t think in creative terms. They don’t see the world that way. And,
they aren’t curious about people who do — they just want their money. And selling a movie or a
TV series is no different to them than selling any other product. It’s all about convincing
the consumer that they need it, that they’ll be missing out if they don’t pay to see it.
The idea that people actually care about the product itself is alien to them. The idea that
the artists who make those products would actually be invested in their work, and expect to be fairly
compensated for that work — not just because their labor has value and generates revenue
and they should have the right to share in that revenue, but because the work itself has meaning
to them — that idea never seems to occur to studio bosses. Why would the girl working
in the kitchen at Popeyes feel any emotional attachment to the chicken sandwich she just made?
They don’t understand pride in work, pride in craft, because most of them don’t work,
and don’t care about craft — they don’t even really care about the
product. They only care about the money the product brings their way.
And it’s not just the writers and actors and other artists who the studio bosses don’t
understand. It’s the audience, too. It’s you and me. They don’t understand why a writer or an actor
would care about the work they do — they don’t understand why we would care about it, either.
Like I said, it’s all advertising to them. We’re consumers. We’re supposed to go see movies not
because we are looking for stories and characters to invest in, but because we’ve seen them being
promoted and, hey, that looks like the next big thing, I’d better watch that so I don’t miss out.
They don’t even want movie stars anymore. And, they think we don’t want them,
either. They’d replace every movie star with a CGI replica tomorrow if they could get away with it,
and when the box office grosses tanked even lower than during COVID, they’d all scratch their heads
and wonder why — why does it matter? Because art doesn’t exist for them. Not really. Just product.
A movie is something you sell tickets to. It doesn’t mean anything. A painting is something
you buy, or sell, or hang on your wall to impress people — it doesn’t really mean anything.
Years ago, I saw an interview on YouTube with Leonard Goldberg, who was a legendary Hollywood
producer — and executive. He was president of 20th Century Fox for a couple of years in the 1980s.
He was one of the good ones, relatively speaking — I offer him as an exception that
proves the rule. In the 1960s, Leonard Goldberg was an executive at the ABC television network,
and one of the shows that aired on ABC during his tenure was The Fugitive,
which was ending its four-year run in 1967. And — well, I’ll let Leonard Goldberg tell you:
“I went to the president of the network and I said to him,
we can’t just end the series with another episode. . . . We have to resolve the series. And he and
the other senior members of management looked at me like I was crazy. He said, what are you talking
about? You mean the people actually — I said, yeah, they watch and they care. They actually
believe, even though they know it’s fiction, they’re into that character and his story.”
I think about that interview all the time, and I’ve thought about it a
lot these last few months as the writers have been on strike, and now the actors.
That’s really the heart of this conflict. Because what was true in 1967 is still true today. The
people in charge of the entertainment industry — for the most part — have no comprehension
of what that industry produces other than as product to be marketed and sold to consumers.
Imagine Leonard Goldberg, a grown-up, meeting with the network bosses,
also grown-ups, and having to talk to them as though they were children
in order to explain the concept of an audience becoming invested in a story.
How sad is that? And how much sadder that those people had the power to decide which
stories got told in 1967, and people with the same mindset still have that power today.
Saddest of all is the punchline to Leonard Goldberg’s story. Eventually he persuaded
the bosses at ABC to let the producers of The Fugitive to go ahead with that final episode,
to resolve the story, and that episode — the one the head of ABC didn’t think
was even worth making — was watched by seventy-eight million viewers — forty
percent of the population of the United States at the time.
They’re so focused on doing business, they have no idea what business they’re even in.