The Disruption Series Coda: One Year Later, Was It All Worth It?

 

 

I realize that over the last several months the national attention has been understandably focused on more pressing matters. But I wanted to give an update about how Hollywood is doing after the labor stoppage that took up so much of 2023. I wrote what I called the Disruption Series in which I laid out many of the basic flaws behind the strike, the flawed reasoning behind and the stupidity that I thought was being used by the strikers.

Well I just want to let my readers know that after nearly a year, the rewards are finally starting to be seen by those hard working, salt of the earth people who did so much for so little. Mandy Moore told the media that she received her most recent residual check for This is Us from Hulu.

For 3 cents.

There are many questions that arise from this –  many of which have to do with whether someone actually spent money on postage for a check like this – but I have to say a large part of me thinks, and I say this with no irony at all, that all the people who spent the summer of 2023 on the pickets line are getting exactly what they deserved.

When the WGA went on a walkout last May and SAG-AFTRA about a month later, it was framed by some in the media, some progressive websites and most of all those on the picket line as a battle of David Vs. Goliath, the powerless against the powerful, the working man versus the one percent. I could never view it as anything other than how so many would describe the MLB strike that disrupted first the 1994 season and then made sure there was no World Series: as a battle of millionaires versus billionaires. I’ll be honest when I saw a headline in Daily Kos calling Fran Drescher, the President of SAG-AFTRA as ‘the new face of organized labor’, it said more about the left’s perception of the world than what was actually happening. Their idea of someone representing the blue-collar union was a millionaire actress from Hollywood who’d been born in New York City. Fran Drescher never was a blue collar worker, she just played one on TV – and it made her a millionaire.

I’ve often thought that certain parts of our society only have the influence they have over the political world because of the disproportionate amount of energy it is given by it. This is true of Hollywood more than any part of our society, and has been the case before social media, cable news and even the polarization of politics beginning. In nearly a century there has never been any sign that any single celebrity much less Hollywood as a whole has the ability to sway even the state of California into voting one way or the other, much less swinging an election. And I believe at some level everyone in the political world knows this is a reality but is making too much money using it for fundraising to end the illusion now.

The alternative is that both political parties have no true perception of Hollywood, which I can’t entirely rule out. The Republican belief that Hollywood is chasing a ‘woke ideology’ in order to corrupt the next generation is as wrong as the Democratic belief that the values of Hollywood products are reflective of America. Hollywood is a business like any other and whatever casting or writing decisions it has done is only done for the benefit of the bottom line.

You needn’t worry: this isn’t going to be another political article. I’m merely using the fact that both sides of the political spectrum have made Hollywood so much the focus of their own agendas – however diametrically opposite they are – that the people who work in it genuinely believe that they have more power and influence than they actually do. They have been persuaded by this by so many of the other industries that have sprung up to support Hollywood over the years: the publicity industry, the media that covers Hollywood and of course the criticism industry of which I am a part of. Because so many spheres of influence have been built around the people who work behind the screen and perform in front of it, they naturally have come to assume that they are more important to America (and to an extent the world) then they actually are.

And because of that self-importance they believe they should receive appropriate compensation. But their idea of appropriate compensation is completely out of context with everyone else’s. I have little doubt that one of the major factors that led so many of the creative forces to go out on strike was so much of Covid and how that did much to financially alter an industry that was already becoming shaky. In this they were fundamentally the victims of their own press – and much of our selfishness.

As I wrote in an article last year at the height of the strike:

Like everyone else I was bored and kept finding ways to fill my time and watched a lot of television. However, I chose not to spend these months in relative isolation catching up on all of the series I had spent much of the past years ignoring.

There was no reason I couldn’t have watched all of Schitt’s Creek or The Handmaid’s Tale; seen all of Ozark or looked at Peaky Blinders; watched all of The Morning Show or even both seasons of Succession. But I did not want too. I wanted the series I liked to come back.

Perhaps it speaks to both my privilege and a certain defect in my character that while so many people were suffering and dying and my family managed to get away untouched by Covid until well after we all had been vaccinated that during this period of lockdown, my greatest source of frustration was that so many series I liked or wanted to see were being postponed. I was upset that the fourth season of Fargo, The Undoing and The Good Lord Bird were all pushed back until the fall rather than debuting in the spring and summer when they had been promised. I was aggravated that because of Covid I was likely going to have to wait at least a year for the final season of Better Call Saul. And I was incredibly pissed that the broadcast season of 2020 was so piecemeal because no one was able to film back then.

I mention my inherent selfishness to demonstrate that, even in the midst of what was essentially a watershed moment in global history, my greatest concerns were whether the fifth season of This is Us was going to air. I don’t pretend to be remotely proud of this fact; I mention only to demonstrate that, at a certain level, I’m willing to bet that more than a few of my readers were at a similar level of impatience and selfishness and like me, never gave the respect to so many of the actors and creative forces who, in the summer of 2020, would begin to reopen Hollywood so that the rest of America and the world would have something to entertain themselves with. I don’t know if I ever asked myself once during that period whether I should be grateful that so many people were putting their lives in danger so I could watch Big Sky  or Ted Lasso. Did any of us think to do that? I grant you the world was exploding well beyond that and there were far bigger problems to deal with, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. We spent a lot of time taking for granted what a lot of actors were doing back then. Did we just think that they were all so wealthy that they didn’t deserve our gratitude?

 

Now is the time where I mention that so much of what the strike was built on was the perception that because these streaming services are multi-billion dollar corporations, the creative forces made the assumption that there were billions that they were being cheated out of by these corporations. This showed a naivete that didn’t bare out what was going on well before that: by 2020 Netflix was suffering huge financial losses mainly because it had been inflated its numbers for years.

In the decade since streaming became an industry there is no evidence that any of the five major services or any others doing so have made a profit or even broken even at it. Hulu has not merged with FX and then Disney because the former two companies were doing so well. And it’s telling that two of the richest industries in the world are among the biggest makers in streaming TV: Amazon and Apple are probably two of the few businesses in the world that can afford to lose a fortune on movies and TV. If you really think their stock went up even a hundredth of a point when Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or Ted Lasso won Emmys you really don’t understand how businesses work – and it’s conceivable the people who went on strike last year didn’t either.

And its worth remembering none of the people who were on the pickets line were exactly starving for income or had been cheated when they made their deals with Netflix or Amazon. Shawn Ryan didn’t get zero dollars for writing The Night Agent and he certainly wasn’t stupid enough to do it for nothing. Nor was he in danger of going broke the way so many of the other people on the picket line were. Most of the people who were the loudest voices were rich already. They just wanted to be richer.

As for those writers who wanted more job security, is there any job in the world that guarantees you that? Most of us live from paycheck to paycheck and have many jobs in our lifetime. Most of us don’t have fallback positions the way that the writers in this industry do. I think the average observer would kill to work for a show in Hollywood even for one season. That these people didn’t think that was good enough shows their privilege, not the businesses they work for.

And much as they might want to argue otherwise, the writers and actors were not the victims of the system of Hollywood. I will save my sympathy for all the hundreds of thousands of people who had jobs in the film and television industry but didn’t have the benefit of being part of a union or having the luxury of going on strike the way say Bryan Cranston or David Simon did. The hairdressers, the caterer, the makeup artists, the gaffers, the best boys, all the people who work for very little money and depending on Hollywood sets being active for them to survive. Did anyone who was striking give a thought to all of the thousands of people they were causing to go into poverty or unemployment while they were marching demanding residuals for the checks they are now getting (for three cents, remember?)

The question was rhetorical. Because as you might remember Drew Barrymore in September said she was beginning her talk show again without guild approval. She said she couldn’t think of the union, she had to think of the people who worked for her and who were depending on her to make ends meet. You know, the real working people.

And both Hollywood and the left crucified her on social media until she relented and agreed not to make her show. That showed the hypocrisy of both the strikers and their political allies, particularly how selfish they really were. They would make multiple demonstrations of it before the strike came to an end but this showed their true colors better than anything. It demonstrated that they were not the Joe Hills of the world but the John Galt’s, the job creators who believed selfishness and self-interest were virtues. This was, I should mention, another sign that so many people who claim leftist politics in Hollywood only wear it on their sleeves: in truth they viewed themselves as indispensable.

If nothing else the residual checks that they thought for being just three cents should tell them one more lesson that clearly didn’t learn. For all the argument they will make about Hollywood being about art and the industry being more about content, the fact remains that to the consumer everything you do is only content. You might be willing to spill your life’s blood into something and be enraged that the company you produce it for doesn’t appreciate it, but at the end of the day, that’s how the rest of the world sees it. You spend your life into something that the rest of us only watch or enjoy if we have the time to see it and if we are willing to pay for it. The fact that you are receiving so little for it in residuals isn’t because the company is cheating you; it’s because in reality, that’s how many people are watching it. The bubble you live in makes you think are essential and vital to the world. The reality has always been much more different than that.

So the question I ask it: was it worth it? You went on strike for months, hurting an industry that was already financially shaky. In doing so, you hurt the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of lower—paid workers who depending on your shows their income and no doubt did damage to their families. And for all of that effort, you’re literally only getting pennies more. You can try to blame this on the corporate CEO or the executives but it’s not really their fault. It’s because you believed your own media, stayed in your own bubble and truly thought that what you created mattered. The villain of this story was always going to be a public that wants to be entertained but wants to pay as little as possible. The public that is cutting its cord to cable, doesn’t want to subscribe to streaming services and doesn’t even want to buy televisions any more. I realize that you couldn’t blame them in public because without them, you’re just a bunch of people who emote in front of cameras or write words for those people and you can’t afford to lose them. But I think you have to accept that what they think and do and pay for matters a lot more to your wellbeing than what you do will ever truly matter to them. They survived when you went on strike this time. The next time you chose to do so, your industry might not.