The Talent Strikes Back

I’m neither an entertainment reporter nor an industry veteran, but I watch the business and culture of Hollywood pretty closely, and I have a bad feeling about this strike. I hope I’m wrong, but the struggle between the writers and actors unions and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers looks to me as if it will go long and be epic. We may look back on it as one of the consequential labor actions of the 21st century.

The industry said in 2021 that film and television directly create 336,000 jobs and support 2.4 million. Yearly wages total an estimated $186 billion. They constitute a major American export. So the strike matters economically but also culturally. Whatever your just criticism of its products, we want this story-telling industry to continue. You want it employing people who are trying and reaching, you want its art and the arts in general to flourish, because without them we’d be less human, less whole.

Last week smart people were thinking that the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists joining the Writers Guild of America on strike would add heft and force things toward resolution. I thought the opposite. SAG-Aftra’s going in raises all stakes, heightens passions and puts sharper emphasis on the existential aspects of the struggle. Barry Diller, an authentic wise man of the industry, shared his alarm last Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “Of course, who cares about Hollywood?” he said. “But these conditions will potentially produce an absolute collapse of an entire industry.” If the strike continues through the fall, people will cancel their streaming subscriptions because “there will be no programs.” No new broadcast dramas or comedies either. The longer the strike, the greater the damage to a major American industry.

My fear is that the conflict isn’t between competent owners of companies operating profitably and union members who want a larger share. It’s not Ford in 1960 vs. the guys on the assembly line or, still going back in time, prosperous newspaper owners vs. reporters. It’s not the secure vs. the hungry. It looks more like Lost People without vision vs. Aggrieved People feeling genuine grief.

The Lost People are the corporate CEOs and studio and streaming bosses who were concussed when the world shifted under everyone’s feet in 2020. The pandemic turbocharged existing trends, and they scrambled in response. Theatrical releases were impossible; streaming was everything; they followed and fell over each other mounting new services and spending billions on content, though it turns out no one so far knows how to make money reliably on streaming. (And, as Mr. Diller said in 2021, during the spending spree, “ Netflix won this several years ago.”) They did high-price megamergers, leaving their companies with tens of billions in debt. Wall Street didn’t like it, and stocks wobbled.

They’re now trying to dig themselves out of the hole. Charitable gloss: They did their best as a historic plague collided with a technological revolution. Less charitable read: They made blunder after blunder and will now cut to reduce costs as uncreatively as they spent. When we think of Hollywood we can’t help think of the old pirates, the Sam Goldwyns and Jack Warners, who in their own bandit way loved movies. Their successors are more like some sort of detached abstract financialist mergerist persons who move around corporate pieces while intuitively understanding none of them. And somehow, succeed or fail, their astronomical pay keeps going up.

Against them are the Aggrieved People, the actors and writers. In the rise of streaming they were denied, against tradition and history, full residual payment for their work. And they see artificial intelligence for what it is: I am become death, destroyer of jobs. And worlds. And words.

The old writers’ rooms, with a dozen people with benefits, will be replaced by AI that will be told by producers to create a murder-mystery based in Chicago in 1970 and will do it. A single human writer without health insurance will then be called in to “make it a little more ragged and human.” You can say, “Oh, that will never happen, no machine can do what a writer does—the nuance, the subtlety, the sensitivity that comes with being human.” But AI’s capability is growing daily.

It will make worse the biggest creative deficit of the past 40 years or so. Long ago writers and actors learned their trades from life—from living in the thick of it, having pre-Hollywood jobs, often knowing low status. They brought that experience to Hollywood. They arrived knowing how real and average humans expressed themselves with words, how they moved and thought. It made for vitality, was democratic, and accounts in part for the great Hollywood acting and writing circa 1930-90. (Ronald Reagan, who served two stints as president of SAG, thought the Hollywood golden age was the 1930s, when the talkies settled in and the sound of words seemed like a miracle, and was thus treated with respect.) But by some point all the new writers and actors came from media, not some true America or true world. They learned how to think and express themselves through the TV shows and movies they’d watched all their lives; they acted and wrote based on what they’d absorbed in not-real life. It made everything less real, and with each generation authenticity thinned out a little more.

AI won’t relieve that problem, it will make it worse. It will feed on the artificialness and replicate it.

No formal negotiations are under way, and there is little discernible trust. When SAG-Aftra president Fran Drescher led the actors out last Thursday her speech was fiery. “We are the victims here,” she said. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us.” Earlier, Deadline quoted an unnamed studio executive: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

We aren’t labor mediators, but general advice would be to bring down the temperature. Both sides share a goal: perpetuation of the industry. It’s only a three-year contract. Neither side has to reach Nirvana; while reality sorts itself out, solid steps in the right direction are progress. Talks should begin. Being at the table and saying nothing is better than not being at the table. (Reagan, who presided over SAG in 1960, the last time SAG and the WGA went out together, once observed that more breakthroughs than you’d think happen during bathroom breaks.) Actors at the table should play against type, refrain from long emotion-laden speeches and be coldly factual. Producers, don’t be fat and imperious. Are those high cards you’re holding against your sweater vest? You don’t even know. Modesty is all.

In the end, producers will have to take a more generous share-the-eventual-wealth approach to talent, and put it on paper. A prediction: If they continue to stiff them, they won’t succeed in breaking the unions but they will embitter the industry for a generation—if it lasts that long—and put a cloud over their own names.