TIMING
As of this writing, the strike against the motion picture studios and networks by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild goes on. There is talk of a settlement by Labor Day, though I have personally predicted this could go on through year end. The strike could be over before you read this. So, at the risk of irrelevancy, I make the following presentation:
Barbie aside, we have been told by the major motion picture and television networks that business is not good; that the strain on the industry of competition from streamers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime has produced an economic model that is simply unsustainable.
Actors and writers are pissed that a series such as Suits can become a streaming success, years after its initial run on the USA Network, and they are not being compensated. Understandable. World War II was nearing an end when the musicians union established the principle of payment for the reuse of recorded material. Reimbursement (known as royalties and/or residuals in the entertainment business) for having one’s performance recorded, then repeated, has been established for writers and actors in the industry for more than a half century, albeit never with the clarity and consistency the Guilds would have liked. Now, with streaming… well, suffice to say, things have changed… again.
There are other factors at work here. As in the past, this is seen by management as a terrific opportunity for the major companies to reassess, to clean away so-called “dead wood,” and to take enough time in doing so that labor will “come to its senses,” reduce its demands, and give management the kind of proposal it will approve.
There is little pressure on management to do otherwise. True, you are missing Stephen Colbert’s nightly take down of Donald Trump, but there is plenty else to watch and enjoy on your television. There is, simply put, little motivation to write to your “friendly” corporate executives to pressure them to end this labor dispute.
I mean, have you seen the Korean entry, Extraordinary Attorney Woo on Netflix? Talk about something to do…sixteen episodes of one of the most charming performances you are likely to see in this, or any other season. Ms. Park Eun-bin is simply brilliant as the fledgling lawyer. View this series before Netflix decides to dub it into English. The subtitles more than suffice, although the way these Korean legal eagles go at each other you might wish you had taken that course in speed reading.
And while on the subject of female lawyers, FISK is also a must watch. Sort of the Australian version of my own The Trials of Rosie O’Neill–only funnier. My show, starring Sharon Gless, is now on Amazon Prime while the Kitty Flanagan Aussie comedy may be found on Netflix.
Apple TV’s Silo is a well mounted semi-Sci-Fi dystopian view of the future of planet earth. I have seen enough episodes to make this recommendation. Simply put, it is a good show with a good cast who only require a few episodes to win their audience over.
I am a bit disappointed over the FX reboot of Justified: City Primeval, but that is mostly because of how long I have waited to see Timothy Olyphant recreate his fabulous characterization of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. It is probably unrealistic to expect that this new incarnation could match the old but get Givens back to Harlan County (producers Andron and Dinner) and I promise faithfully to be there with him.
If you want a stand-alone film, some are praising Holy Spider on Prime Video. I am not one of them, although I concede it is well made and that it has some solid suspenseful moments. The film has a powerful feminist theme with a strong female lead and should be right up my street, but I found the piece less than emotionally satisfying and I would not be surprised if you felt the same.
Painkiller is a Netflix mini-series revolving around Big Pharma and America’s opioid crisis. It is fiction, largely based on fact, and is well worth your time, unless you are addicted to dramas with happy endings.
The point of all this is that there is plenty left to watch. International fare, golden oldies (both of the series and motion picture variety) and… if you insist… even reality TV. The strike by actors and writers, already months along, has failed to touch, let alone impact, an audience of any size… which brings me to the thesis that the Guilds have seriously miscalculated their decision to stage a walk-out. No one in management is going to take the hit that the members of these two unions are going to have to (continue to) endure. Bob Iger will not have to shutter a single one of his homes.
FDR New Deal Democrats raised me. My parents, like their immigrant parents before them, were working class folks. My maternal Grandmother was Shop Steward at a sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles where my Dad’s Mother was employed as well.
I “get” the labor movement. I am an advocate for the working men and women of this country, and I have been known to unmercifully tease my capitalist friends (particularly those in the restaurant business) for not properly compensating their workforce.
I have gone out on strike as a teamster and have changed direction more than once to avoid crossing a picket line. All that said, I think labor has gone out on a very unstable limb with this strike; not for why they are striking, but when. People are about to lose their homes (in addition to potentially damaging their careers) over a strike that, at best, is ill-timed and, at worst, should never have happened at all.
Let me hasten to add that over my half century in the business I have been lied to, stolen from, cheated, and betrayed multiple times by those in charge at multiple corporations. I have no recollections of any of that ever coming from the labor force. Believe me, I am no stooge for management.
But now? At a time when the business is in the throes of apocalyptic change? When theatres are closing all over the country and the streaming of international TV series and independent motion pictures on Netflix and the like have created an unsustainable model for what was… at least for a time… a significant business? Now is not the time for the industry to turn on itself in the form of a strike.
I get that the writers and actors believe their cause to be righteous. I get the concept that a person should not be put out of work by their own work and that artificial intelligence technology just might make that very possible in the future; but try explaining the concept of residuals to a house painter, or a waitress at Denny’s.
I am more than willing to buy the writers’ and actors’ arguments for more… and better… but (trust me) there is no substitute in show business for … wait for it…
Timing.
WHY IT MATTERS
I do not often write about the business of the business of making shows. I prefer the end result: the opening night on Broadway, the streaming of new and old television series, the Academy screenings of the work of the best filmmakers of Hollywood and the world. It is fun for me… writing about those things, sitting back, and picking nits as to just how much more wonderful something might have been… if only.
I journeyed a bit out of that comfort zone with my last article and there are readers of mine, members of either the Writers Guild of America or the Screen Actors Guild, who took umbrage with what they viewed as me siding with their opposition, i.e., the motion picture and network studio heads against whom they are striking.
Fact is, I am an erstwhile member of both of those striking unions but membership aside, my views are complicated by my own experience with the so called “industry.”
The business is tough, and it can be arbitrary. Today, every movie executive knows that if they says “no” to every pitch they get for a motion picture, that they will be right 90% of the time. Every one of them knows that they will rarely get into trouble for turning something down but can easily lose a job by saying “yes” to the wrong performer or project.
And yet…
Pictures do get made. Bad as the Hollywood system can be, it beats any alternative I know about. I have tried breaking away, to attempt making that once in a lifetime hit as an independent filmmaker. Painful.
Out there, in LA-LA Land, there are folks a filmmaker can talk to who have some sense of what it is that the artist is trying to accomplish. People who speak the language, and whose mandate it is to finance at least a limited number of film and television projects.
There are abuses, there is unfairness, and there is (to put it mildly) inappropriate behavior, but bad as those things (and more) may be, no network or studio executive ever imposed on me the harsh restrictions I inflicted on myself as an independent producer. They never had me go out in the field on location with inferior equipment, or insufficient photographic stock. They never sent me into a town without advance preparation… or follow‑through… or back‑up. These were things that, due to the lack of proper capitalization, I foisted on myself.
It is so difficult to succeed. So near the impossible to make a profit. It is a wonder anyone makes movies. But they do. The entire process gives me a profound sense of gratitude for the people who actually do put up money for the arts.
I will concede that some of that was bound to come through in my piece about the on-going labor strike in Hollywood. Still, it doesn’t alter the fact that the potentially lethal combination of the COVID pandemic, along with the synergy of streaming, coupled with the advent of innovative technologies, has created a landscape that is unfavorable to reasonable discussions or conclusions about the future of labor and management in show business.
There is a real question whether this grand tradition of making movies, as we have come to know it, will continue in America.
Why does it matter? If what has gone before could be termed “the American Century,” then in no small way it is due to the entertainment industry. Berlin and Paris were once the center of the cinematic arts, but since the advent of World War I… and the subsequent need in Europe to use nitrate for explosives rather than film stock for motion pictures… the film capital has been my old hometown… Hollywood, California.
And it was not so long ago that French was the language of diplomacy and the means for international communication. Today it is English. Trust me, that is not thanks to Boris Johnson, or any American President or politician. It is Hollywood that has spread the English language and the American Dream all over the globe.
America may no longer make the best automobiles, steel, or even computers, but for over one hundred years it has manufactured the best filmed entertainment in the world. That is not a birthright; only Europe’s past mistakes made it possible in the first place.
It is in all of our interests to not underestimate the value of exporting the American Dream. I fear we are in the process of doing just that. I think it still matters, and that is why I write about it.
PART III
This is the final part of my trilogy on show business which began with a view on a current event of some import in California… the first time in over 60 years that the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America simultaneously went on strike. That strike in 1960 had a major impact on my fledgling career while this current dispute is one I view from the distance of my warm Island off the coast of Miami, Florida.
I have written that I do not often write about the business of the business of making shows. Well, here I go again, and this time not just about Hollywood, streaming and striking, but a look at East side/West side comparisons: show business on stage AND screen. A look (more of a glance, really) at Broadway and Hollywood.
I have tried producing on Broadway… seemed simple enough: I loved the idea that it was one theatre in one town. No need to traipse all over the country in a vain attempt at counting the money. There, on Broadway, it seemed all one had to do was come up with a good show, put it together in something approximating a professional manner, promote it, count the empty seats, subtract that number from the total in that theatre, then multiply the remainder by the price of the tickets. Do that for eight shows a week for the run of the engagement, subtract your costs from your gross and, like the man wrote… “everything about it is appealing…”
Not really.
You think you are producing that fabulous show that you have sweat blood developing for all those years before being ready for the Big Time in the Big Apple, but it is not you who rents the theatre, makes the deals with the unions, rents the hammers, and buys the nails. It is not you who sets the price of the tickets, and it is not you who counts the money. The company manager does all those things, and he does it while simultaneously doing the same for up to a half dozen other companies.
This last thing is where it gets dicey, for when the theatre owner, who has known your company manager a lot longer than you have ever thought of being on Broadway, asks this functionary “how’s it going?” — a very large keg of undesirable things are revealed.
This is especially true, when the company manager responds with that infamous comme ci, comme ca gesture, then follows it with a “not to worry wink” since he has another show he is managing that will be ready to fill the owner’s theatre with less than a month’s notice.
The very guy you employ, who counts the money, who dictates the price of the tickets, and when to release them to the discount booths, has (it turns out) little or no interest in the success of your show. He does not have a piece of it. No pride of authorship or ownership. He does, however, have a personal stake in keeping the theatre owner happy, ensuring the probability of always having a venue for that next show, whatever it is.
Finally, if you are not a known commodity, with a track record of hit shows in the past and the promise of more in the very near future, if you are not part of that elite Broadway “community,” well… the word for what you are comes from the early circus days: RUBE. A country bumpkin whose bones deserve to be picked dry just for having the audacity of coming into the big tent with a dream.
All that, and there’s no popcorn. Seems the rustling bags distract the live actors on stage. Hard to make the big bucks without popcorn.
The other side of all this is out West in Hollywood, California.
Turns out, it, too, is a rough racket.
The American movie business began in the arcades of New Jersey and New York. The nickels and dimes that were charged made this all-cash business easy prey for those who specialized in extortion and/or tough guys offering “protection.”
That was the precursor for the business that made its home in California. It was not a game for sissies. Hollywood was born in a tradition of flaunting the rules, if not the law. Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, Hal Roach, and others like them came to Southern California to make films, not because of the weather but because of the proximity to the Mexican border… allowing them to sidestep the goons hired by Thomas Edison attempting to enforce Edison’s copyrights regarding the making and projecting of motion pictures.
Samuel Goldwyn, the Brothers Warner, and the rest of that crowd were not exactly college educated philosophers or dealers in the dramatic arts. They were rag merchants, tough guys who learned to make a buck any way they could. They are the ones who became the purveyors of just what it was little boys and little girls should look like, and how they should dress, and maybe even how folks should vote.
In the more than a century since The Squaw Man, movies have become the common denominator between generations. It is where young boys begin to learn how to kiss a girl, and where we (at least we used to) learn how to smoke. Everyone knows (even though it is wrong) that martinis are to be shaken and not stirred. (Sorry, James, it bruises the gin… but then, what do you know? You order “Vodka martinis.”) It is a fair bet that most Americans have never seen the Taj Mahal in India, but almost everyone knows it when they see it… most likely because they have seen it before… in a darkened room, with a flickering light behind them and a silver screen in front of them.
If, as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, I had read every book in the famed Doheny Library… that record of excellence would be severely diminished if I returned to the campus today. I would soon discover that all those books read in the mid-1950s would only account for 10% of the total in that library today.
Many, if not most of the things that were important all those years ago are all too often relegated to footnote status for today’s undergraduates. Yet these young scholars go to school for the same number of years as we did and accumulate the identical number of class credits over those four years that it still takes to graduate. How, you may ask, do they ingest all that additional material?
The answer is they don’t. It is not possible. How then will they communicate with the people of another generation who have the power to employ them? It is not exactly the Tower of Babel, but it is close.
The new student bodies don’t attend football games the same way their elders did, that is assuming they go at all. Attendance is down, and not just in the Ivy League. There is competition in the stands from smart phones and streaming, plus the class work is so demanding, who has four hours to “waste” in a stadium for a game of questionable merit (at least for this new generation)?
What will these soon-to-be graduates have in common with the rest of the populace who outrank them in age and likely in status? If you guessed the movies, we are on a similar wavelength.
There may be fewer bodies in the student body section of today’s football stadiums, but there are more students than ever attending cinema classes… and not only in universities but in high schools and middle schools all over America.
Filmmakers in South Korea, Australia, Israel, Ireland, and India are linking up with those in the European capitals and Hollywood. It may just be the thing that brings us all together again.
Hooray for Hollywood…
or wherever.
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