Chapo Trap House - Bonus: WGA/SAG Strike Update

Episode Date: August 19, 2023

We talk to Alex Press about her reporting on the ongoing WGA & SAG-AFTRA strikes, with additional commentary from some of the striking entertainment workers we met on the picket lines in LA and NYC. Special thanks to the following for speaking to us: Bex Taylor-Klaus Catherine Schetina Jess McKenna John Hodgman Max Calder Read Alex's piece on the strikes in Jacobin here: https://jacobin.com/2023/07/hollywood-writers-actors-strike-studios-streaming

Hello everybody and welcome to another bonus chop-o episode in our ongoing series of Strikewatch 2023. Today, we are joined by our good friend Alex Press, who is a staff writer at Jackabin and someone who covers the labor movement and a wide variety of publications. Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So Alex, you've been out on the West Coast for a minute now covering a number of different labor actions, but probably the most high profile of them, being the ongoing WGA and SAG

after strike in Tinseltown, USA. Now this episode will feature some of our men on the street picket line interviews that we've conducted over the last week or so. But let me just start by asking you, what have you been hearing on the picket lines covering this, these ongoing strikes in the entertainment industry? I mean, it's a big question, right? There are a handful of key priorities for both the actors and the writers. They overlap a lot and then there's some distinctions.

So I feel like starting there and then just kind of going to some of the more interesting things people have said, other things people repeat a lot. But first AI, right? And so for that, the writers, as people listening to this know, the AI generated writing for television is awful. You see the post all the time that just are dog shit. And so really it's not a huge threat right now for the TV and film writers.

They just want regulation on it. They want to be able to make sure it's not being used for rewrites or literary value. For the actors and the performers, AI is a totally immediate threat. I spoke to this woman on the picket line outside of Netflix a few weeks ago, her name was Stevie Nelson. She used to host a television show for Nickelodeon that ran for a few seasons. And so there's a ton of footage of her hosting a television show that she does not own that footage.

And she talked about a actual Black Mirror episode where the studio could train an AI on that footage and then have her host shows forever, infinitely, a digital version of Stevie Nelson saying things she'd never said, doing things she'd never done. So that's like the eye opening, kind of like shocking thing, but there are more kind of day-to-day things, such as these background performers and voice performers who are just being without even realizing it, they've already given up their likenesses. And when you don't need background performers, that hits SAG's membership really hard. And then also it hits everybody else.

You don't need costume designers, if you don't need actors, you don't need makeup and hair, all in so on down the line. So that's AI. Hi, my name is Bex Taylor-Claus. I've been in the SAG union for over a decade now. I think I'm at 11 years. No, no, no. I just hit 10 years. Just a 10 and a half years. I did a video game where they wanted to scan my face and we actually worked through negotiations where it couldn't be my face because they wanted in the contract basically to own the ownership of my likeness,

to own my face. And I wasn't willing to do that. And so they used someone else's face for the character. And that's what I think we're at that point where they want to do that with all of us. They want the capacity to own our faces and perpetuity. And we need to keep that from happening. Not all of us know that this is a risk. I was lucky enough to have a lawyer on my team caught it and told me, hey, I know you wanted the deal done,

but I can't in good conscience, let you take this deal with this clause. And not everyone is lucky enough to have that. Not every lawyer knows that this is something that's going on right now. Now everybody does, in the last couple of weeks, it's become like common knowledge. But does in the last couple weeks It's become like common knowledge But before in the last couple years it's been creeping up on us

And so a lot of people have signed up and gotten scammed not realizing that that's what they signed away They're like this forever and so now that we have this knowledge of it It gives us this chance to fight back and own ourselves because. Because that's something Hollywood's always wanted to do is own its people, and so that they don't have to pay us, they own us, they just get to make money off of us. We need to keep that from happening. Well, I'm going to go to the main on the street, and the shadows of 30 rocket-fellars center at the WGA East in solidarity with comedy writers, picket line, here with John Hodgeman.

John. You know, a lot of the conversation is around AI. And that's very sexy because technology, and it's creepy and interesting and scary. And if you mess around with any of the AI, you can see that why executives and studios have dollar signs in their eyes. Because it's the perfect combination

of like we can save cost by getting computers to act in right and also we get to finally tell them you don't count and you don't and and it's a perfect blend of cost savings and contempt for creatives right like Tim Robbins and Robert Alvin's the player you know they only figured out how to do it yeah directors and the actors and the writer and look I understand we understand we are unreliable pieces of shit. We are unreliable, we're temperamental, we're difficult, but you know, I don't think that AI is ever gonna write comedy particularly.

Yeah, you know. And I don't think that AI is ever gonna act particularly well. But when you talk about the younger generation, you start replacing actors with eternal recreations of existing stars. People are going to get exhausted of seeing, I love Morgan Freeman, but it's time for new actors.

You know what I mean? But in particular, if you start assigning, and it'll happen faster than acting, because I think writing AI is closer now to writing basic dumb scripts. But you start assigning those scripts to AI. AI doesn't have life experience. AI doesn't have first person life.

Comedy especially is so like culturally context specific. Like it's hard to imagine a computer program would ever have I don't know the self-loathing necessarily to be a good comedy or absolutely never mind the fact that all the life Experience AI has to scrape from his the existing internet. Yeah, and a vast majority of what's on the internet Has been put on the internet since its invention more or less in the mid-70s has been put there primarily by cis white straight guys Yeah, so you are losing so many stories if you just assign more or less in the mid-70s has been put there primarily by cis white straight guys. Yeah. So you are losing so many stories if you just assign story writing to the internet. You know?

For the reality of what it's like to be a WGA or SAG member, what do you find is the reality of what it's like to be a writer and actor in Hollywood today versus what people think is the reality of it based on the lives of people it's like to be a writer and actor in Hollywood today like versus what people think is the reality of it based on like the lives of people whose names they know. Sure, I mean the statistic you hear a lot on the picket lines from the actor's side and to be clear is sag after a of the members that are striking right now it's 160,000 people. So that is not celebrities right there is I mean we do have select inflation right now in America it's a pressing issue but that is a very small percentage of Sagafters membership. They're

not all Tom Cruise. So they'll say, they'll point out that 87% of the membership in Sagafters does not qualify for its healthcare plan. And that bar, the threshold, is around, I think, 26 or $28,000 a year in earnings from acting. So the fundamental kind of answer is that these are people who have other jobs, right? They're waiters, they're flight attendants. Some of them are also on strike as hotel workers, as members of Unite here, local 11 in Southern California. So I would say that's the primary thing is that people think, you know, they are theater kids.

They're not just like us, but that said they basically are working class people, right? There are just, there are some rich people and it's kind of impressive that these unions get them on their side and defend their poor members, but mostly they're just regular people. Yeah, my name is Katherine Chautina. I'm a writer in the WGA and a WGA captain at Netflix. I think that a lot of people see, they see the celebrities or the A-listers. They see Tom Cruise making millions of dollars

and they assume that that's what everyone is making. And that's simply not the case. For the vast majority of people who are working in this industry, especially people who are trying to break in, this is a working class industry. And I think that it's a real misconception of what people are actually making. The for SAG that cut off to get health care is $27,000 a year or excuse me $26,000 a year and most members of SAG don't make that. So obviously this is a broader labor issue.

I would say that about 1% of SAG after members are that elite level that the Hollywood industry has done such a good job of convincing the public. All of us are. That's only about 1% of our union. The majority of our union is actually background performers. 86% of union members cannot make the requirements for getting healthcare, for getting sack health care. And this is something that's been going on for a long time.

And I think the industry, there's a lot of infighting of like, oh, the actors are spoiled on set. But we get treated as badly as the rest of the crew does behind the scenes. We get the better treatment on set, which is totally abysmal, by the way. All the rest of the crew needs better working conditions. This is something that I want to go to bat for IOTSY when it's their turn to negotiate. I guess like the big thing hanging over all of this is this cataclysmic shift that's occurred in the entertainment industry that's being called the streaming model. And the rush from all of these, the studios and now these monopolistic tech companies

to basically blur the lines between production and distribution. And but like are now doing this in the context of a familiar story to the economy overall, as interest rates get raised, the shareholders of these companies don't just want infinite growth. They want profits. And where is that money going to come from? Well, it's going to come from Xing out labor costs as much as possible, so that hence you get things like AI replacing actors or even writers. How have the people you've talked to, how is streaming affected their bottom line?

They're like, they're month to month budget and just like the job and profession of being an actor or writer. Yeah, so there's a couple things. Some good examples I got from the picket line from people dealing with this. But first I'll say that a big part of streaming and it leads to another of the key kind of proposals

for both the actors and writers, is that while you still get a residual, you get an annual residual, it is nothing compared to what people used to get in linear television. A residual is every time there was your show reran, you would get half of what you were paid for that episode for the first rerun.

Then you would get half that for the next. So it actually could add up to quite a lot. Say you made 20 grand for doing an episode of SNL. It reruns in a few weeks or something. You get another 10 grand check in the mail. Similarly, you would get... Like the 12th guy in the writer's room on Quincy ME has a house in Malibu today because of residuals.

Yeah, it's nuts. I mean, I've been working on a piece for another publication and just a guy mentioned a SNL writer that he got a check recently. You know, those substantial is for 25 years ago a sketchy wrote. So this was really a substantial part of people's income. And it kept them through because Hollywood, you have droughts, right? You're not always working. There's slow seasons, whatever. Now obviously, I won't try to get too technical here, but people know that Netflix is not, you pay as a subscriber, you get unlimited views.

There's no such thing as reruns. It's also about global self-distribution, so there's no licensing for syndication. These residuals are basically nothing. Both the actors and the writers are proposing a viewership-based residual. That would require that the studios, the streamers, actually let them see how many people are watching their shows, which is fundamentally not what they want to do. The streamers keep this locked up and secretive. You know, I've talked to former Netflix employees, even they didn't know the numbers.

I've talked to Mike Schur, creator of the good place in Parks and Rec. He doesn't know how many people watches his shows on streaming. Tony Gilroy, who just did the Andorre Star Wars shows, says like, I don't know what my show is worth. And like, that's the fundamental problem, like whether you are a bit actor on a TV show or the show runner of the show, is that on these streaming platforms,

like it is all kept intentionally in a black box, so that like, I mean, they overpay up front, like that was the Netflix model, well they'll give like, Martin Scorsese $300 million to make a movie, but it's so that they can preserve everything on the backend and the method by which they do that is very intentionally keeping it completely vague

about how many people actually watch or participate in the consumption of the product that they're selling. Right, and that's both because, you know, there's a lot of speculation. Are they just totally lying and they're terrified that if they showed their numbers open the books, all investors would realize they've completely overvalued these companies.

Yes, probably. That's the case. And then there's also what you said, the labor side. Nobody knows how much they're worth. Nobody knows how much they can ask for in a production budget or their own contract. So it's laborer people call it information asymmetry, right? Like the boss knows everything, the worker knows nothing. It's really hard to negotiate for you or anybody else in that context.

Hi, I'm Jess McKenna, I'm a double striker. I'm striking with the WJ Anne Sagan and I'm a WJ captain. And I'm from Southern California. Yeah, I think like on the actor side, it's like watching more and more roles get reduced to reoccurring to save money from those minimum quotes. And the residual thing is huge. I'm sure residuals have been explained already, but that's basically the exchange we've made. Different than a copyright. It's the tiny piece of our work that we get as it's shown. I will, a lot of my work on set for SAG is in voice acting.

And I can say like, I can do a small one day part on a show, but if it airs on Cartoon Network, that residual is massive compared to being a lead of a streaming show. My voice is in the entire episode. It's in every single episode. And if it's on streaming, I'll see a fraction of those residuals. So that should all operate the same. All that content gets viewed by viewers in the same way, so we should be paid in the same way at this point. I just want to say, to give a concrete example

of something else here about people are talking about, the slashing of the budget for writers, mini rooms is what they're another big issue, where instead of having, say, six staff writers for 22 episodes of a show. Now you just have one show runner who then has these part time contracted other writers for a few weeks. The show runner basically is charged with doing the whole show. You know, I talked to somebody who who had joined WGA in like 2016. She was in her 20s.

She'd only had many rooms. And the consequence of that was she'd barely, if ever, been to a set, right? They aren't paying for the writers to stay once the production has started. So she has no idea how the business actually works. And there's no money for mentorship or anything like that. And I mentioned that because I also talked, I mentioned Mike Scher and he gave a really good illustration

of the consequences of this. So he's on the negotiating committee, he's a wildly successful writer and yet he's become this kind of union militant in this strike. And he was saying the reason he did it is that he realized he could never have had the career he had if the system that exists now existed then. So when he was hired onto the office, Greg Daniels, who was the creator and adapter, taught him the ropes. Mike had never written long form. He showed him how to draft, how to give up on drafts,

how to figure out what grips and art decorators and set designers all do. And that is why he went on to be so successful. He figured out how to work the business. Now these are deskilled workers. They're just working a couple of weeks here and there and that's that. So it's a big deal.

It turns them into an assembly line kind of workers. I'm sure people are aware that what streaming shows have done in certain industries for doing is getting rid of writers rooms. Are really going to be many rooms? A mini room. So instead of having a writers room of like, say, 68 people are doing is getting rid of writers rooms, really to be in the many rooms. To be in the many rooms, yeah. So instead of having a writers room of like, say, 68 people working on a show throughout the season,

you'd hire three or four writers to write all the scripts and then fire them. And that's saving money, I suppose. But it's a kind of false economy, because this is an apprenticeship system. People learn how to write drama and comedy and other by doing. And they learn how to be effective showrunners on set by being on set as writers. And that's really what I've heard from a lot of WGA members is that this is about like

paying it forward to the next generation. Because like you can't have the talent to know how, not like how to create a TV show, unless you have people who have been there and done it. Absolutely. And like now there's not just not the money to pay the people of the next generation of TV writers. But there's just like not gonna be the know how if you just, if you just,

if you just, if people is disposable. And you know, yeah, it's moving. The studio should recognize that they're setting a time bomb for this, it is. Because if you don't have a generation of new writers who are trained and don't have to do it, you're going to get into all kinds of cost overruns and delays on set as people freak out as they're learning on the job. So that's no good either. So I think that's

really important. And obviously, I'm 52 years old, straight up Gen X. I remember complaining about the generation ahead of me not getting out of the fucking way so that we could live and now truly like the wealth, the jobs, everything is so accumulated to an older generation and a very small percentage of 12-folders. People are scrambling, I wouldn't want to be a young person today. I mean, it's really, really challenging. And we owe it to them to fight now to make sure that there are, and this is across all industries, right?

Yeah. And this is why there are all these, you know, EPS striking and all the other industries that are about to strike, go on strike. That's why it's important. Because the young people are fucked. I wanted to ask you about that phrase that comes up in one of the articles you wrote of D-skilling.

And you're like, can you talk about what D-skilling means and how it's been broadly applied to labor everywhere, but how particularly it's being applied here in the entertainment industry in terms of things like mini-rooms. Yeah, so D-skilling is the classic example historically that people use is the Fordism assembly line, auto workers that once were very skilled and could leverage that skill into higher wages and

decent treatment. Ford was a genius and he figured out how to break down their movements so that one guy was doing one wrench turn. The next guy was doing the next wrench turn and anybody could do that job, right? It didn't take training, it didn't take money. Rather than a highly valued employee, like one guy who does a hundred jobs, you have one guy doing, no,

a hundred guys doing one job. Exactly, and it's totally replaceable, right? If that guy is trouble, you can fire him and go out in the street and find someone new. And that's basically what they're doing to TV writing. You know, I brought up the Mike Sher example because he went through kind of what the before the descaling, what the job looked like.

And he was describing, you know, it's not just sitting at a laptop, a computer, and typing. It is also working with people, having mentorship like he had from the office's creator. It's bringing the script to set and talking to actors and directors, learning how electricians do their jobs. If a camera operator teaches you what a camera can do, you can write that into your script. You can make use of actually a movie magic, as you might call it well. But without, you know, now you just have kids who are sitting in a room for on a two week contract typing, and that's it. And anybody could do that. And they're paid so much less. The studios are there zealously guarding the movie magic. And anybody could do that, and they're paid so much less.

These studios, they're zealously guarding the movie magic. They're just doling out a little drop of it, each of their drones. This is the thing is, my fundamental view here is that if you think the movies and TV shows we get now suck, this is only going to get worse, because now you're basically having, if not algorithms writing them, then people who are like working a day job and then going out and doing, you know, uber driving, like those people cannot produce grand, great shows or other films. Yeah, I mean, actually, our friend Alina Smith, who is the creator and showrunner of Dickinson on Apple TV, wrote a really fantastic piece today that I'm going to link to. It's called

the, sorry, the, the Des the despiral of Hollywood monopolies. And what she says there is that in the mad rush off the digital cliff, these companies transformed Hollywood from a high wage, high profit, hits driven industry into a low wage, low profit subscription driven one. Unregulated platform capitalism has already chewed up and spat out most of the 20th century's once profitable cultural industry From music to journalism to books people often blame the internet for this rampant destruction of livelihood as if technology itself were some kind of demon um

Like I think it's a it's a really concise summary of the forces at play here in this strike But like I think it get about AI and like the invocation of AI and the threat of it is real, but is this just another way in which a technological innovation arrives? And then it just arrives, but at the same time, it's just becomes a name that employers and owners of capital will just use as the excuse for what they were going to do

already, which is zero out labor cost as much as possible. I mean, yeah, definitely. That's what so many technologies have been used for, whether in film and television or elsewhere, right? Well, we'll pretend that we had no choice. This is just technical, logical advancement. It just gives them one more kind of structural thing to point to so they can say, well, look,

the competition was going to do it too. I mean, it's a very clear decades-long trend here to undermining labor. And previous technological developments did that too, right? I mean, writers have struck, especially in Hollywood, over the past, you know, century, over largely technological advancements. You know, they had to go out and strike to win any residuals. They had to win, you know, they had to go out and strike to win any residuals. They had to win you know money from VHS and DVD. Like this is always any technology in the hands of the employer is used as a wedge to kind of hurt the worker.

And I think AI is just that. I mean, it's ridiculous to imagine that AI is going to write a TV show. But what if the boss can say that, well, I'll hire, I'll use AI unless you accept lower pay? Then you might accept lower pay. Yeah, absolutely. I think that what's at stake here, honestly, is this as a real livable career. I think the way that things are going, it's increasingly pushing into something that's much more like a gig economy, where you work maybe seven weeks out of the year, which is obviously unsustainable and impossible

to make a living wage. And this used to be something that was a real job in a real career. And I think the way that they have been pushing things forward, especially since the dawn of the streaming era, is to kind of increasingly diminish the role and the rights of the writers. And essentially remove us from the process as much as possible.

So we are no longer able to make a living doing this. Another thing that you mentioned in your article, because you've returned to the idea of like how nobody is, nobody knows what anything is worth anymore because there is no like objective metric of like a box office or Nielsen ratings. Now it's just based on subscriptions and if like, if the account is getting debited every month

or it's growing, it doesn't really matter if people are actually watching what's on any of these platforms. You talked about something called Parrot Analytics. Is this something that's being suggested as part of these negotiations? Is this like, is Parrot Analytics like a third party that does the measure things like viewership?

Yeah, paradigm analytics is very confusing. Nami, I would say I'm suspicious of it, but SAG mentioned it in their proposal about a new viewership based residual because the studios won't share their numbers, right? And so the writer's guild's proposal for one of these for this viewer based residual is just you need to give us the

numbers and we're going to calculate the residuals that we can enforce it. SAG sort of said we'd never expect you to give up these numbers and so we propose using this third party company. And this company is sort of you know has Hollywood type people involved in it. And it's not that it's illegitimate, it like does approximate a show's success based on all sorts of metrics. But there are two different approaches here that I think are just the only reason parent analytics has even mentioned is because the studios just won't share their numbers. And like it's really, I'm not kidding when I say that you can be the most successful TV

writer or show creator in the world. You will sit down with Netflix and they won't write anything down. If you prod and you force them, they might say, like, this number of eyes watched one episode of your show, they won't tell you if that's good or bad. So you have no idea what's a hit and what's not. And you have no idea, you know, what kind of money you might deserve to share in. There's just no idea that if you're successful in the field, you get a cut of the profit. That's not happening.

And the truth is, I didn't understand. I haven't been on television a lot lately. Mostly I do my little podcast and keep my head down. Because people listen to my voice more than they like looking at my face. You know the work that I've done I've you know I've noticed my own residual checks to menacing and diminishing and finding it a little bit hard to make ends meet as that you know that's the money that was negotiated in 1960 to last time the WGA and the SAG went out on strike together

to create residuals that would carry people over from gig to gig. This is one of the original gig companies. And you need it, residuals, not just to build a life for yourself and keep food on the table between shows or between gigs. But also, writers and actors, they create wealth out of nothing. Like their imaginations and their lived experiences create shows that make a lot of money for a lot of people. And, you know, everyone's got their role in this industry, even the non-creatives.

But it is a little obscene how much money people who don't make things are making in a creative enterprise. You talked about how much money they save on having just a second person there to read a script during an audition. I'm wondering if you've heard any reactions to or just in general what people on the picket line make about some of the public statements made by some of these people like David Zazlov, who are others, who I think I forget who set up recently, they were bragging or at least in public statements about how much money this strike has saved them. And it's actually up to their bonuses because it keeps them, you know, according to their contracts, they get like X amount of money if they save this Y amount of money. You know what I mean?

That is, I think it's just bluster, right? Like, if they didn't need shows or actors or TV writers, they absolutely wouldn't have them, right? If they could have done this without having these people involved in their business, they'd just, you know, they would have already been firing these people long ago, right? And so I think it's bluster, just like they say,

when they're saying we're gonna sit them out until they lose their houses. You know, they are desperately trying to get people back to work. And I think, they also say things like, there's no money for these demands, like this would cost us too much money. This is tough times for everybody. But you look at them, like Bob Eiger is one of these guys

that said something like this. He said the writers were being unrealistic in the actors with their demands. And he did this from, you know, this Sun Valley conference in Idaho that is known as billionaire summer camp. He's paid like, I think he only made 15 million last year, which was a tough one for him,

because he'd been making almost 50 the year before. You know, David Zazlov, the hated guy, the Warner Brothers Discovery CEO, he only made 39 million last year, which is way down from 250 million the year before. Like, there is no real sense that they can continue with what they're doing forever. You know, there is a couple months here where the writers had a pipeline that they knew they were going to have to keep being on strike to have an effect. But when you don't have the actors, you can't do anything.

You can't have premieres, you can't have movies, you can't have shows. So I think it's affecting them a lot more severely now. You get a sense, when you think about guys like Bob Eiger or Zazlove or any of these guys, you get this sense, what do they regard of their job as producing value for the entertainment industry? What do they do? That's that's important. Or that's worth $39 million a year

as opposed to like an actor on a successful TV show. I mean, I have this question about the executives of a lot of companies across all kinds of industries. Like there is, I wish I had it in front of me. There was some story reported in a David Zaslav like profile long ago or a few years ago where on his yacht yacht he had a bunch of celebrities, I don't know, Oprah, whoever was various famous rich people were on his

yacht and they decided to watch an episode of Fleabag. And there was some sort of scene that was like obscene, you know, some kind of sex was going on. I can't remember what exactly. And he was, he paused it and said, said we can't watch this and then the group said The group was like no, let's watch it and he had them a hold of vote about whether they would skip the scene or they would watch it But they can't talk to each other or something like this guy hates Film and tell me it doesn't like movies

Like movies and so his job is just to be like sitting around in the mountains and on the yacht and knowing everybody and whining and dining people and also being a punching bag right now. And so that's what these guys do. And also it's what they've always done. These are and often these guys, I mean, Zas loves a little different, but the comparison from the past is like everybody knows the big studio heads in Hollywood were always evil. Yeah. Louis Bimayard, Darryl Zinnick, but they love the pictures. They love the pictures. And these guys clearly hate pictures. So what that means, I don't, I couldn't tell you, but it obviously concerns the people who really love what they do and that's why they went

to work in film and TV. So that's what's going on here. I think the what's at stake for the industry is the entire industry right now. We are not being run by creatives. We're being run by people who only care about numbers and they only care about those numbers if those numbers mean money. They don't care about the human beings creating the content,

they don't care about the art that we are creating, they only care about whatever money they can get from whatever art we're creating. And we need to change that, we need to put power back in the hands of the creatives, we need to have creativity be at the forefront of our media. We need to have you know industry and and quantity take a back seat in the name of quality. And right now it's then it's the complete opposite. We have people in charge who want to fill their own pockets. And they don't care about the art that's being created and they care even less about the artists who are creating that art.

They make money off our art, and we get paid absolutely nothing for it. We often feel like we are making incredible art in spite of the conditions that they're pushing. Not necessarily that those conditions are conducive to making great art. I think fortunately artists are always going to want to tell stories, and we're going to find our own ways to do that. And if it's going to become hostile to be working under this system, I think artists will move on and we'll find different ways to do this because we always will make art. That's just what we do.

So speaking of the old movie moguls and studio titans of your as compared to like the tech moguls who own and run everything today. Early in like the old studio days, the entertainment, the studio monopolies were broken up by the government at one point because the studios of all, they were vertically integrated with the theaters in which the movies they produced played. And that was broken up as a monopoly back in the day, was vertical integration.

Outside of labor and like this and this current labor action and negotiations, do you find among the people on the picket line or just in general, is there a don't unconsciousness about the need for perhaps state action to break up entertainment and these tech monopoly so that they cannot basically shade the difference between the production and distribution of entertainment? Yeah, I mean, that's definitely being discussed, right? I mentioned when I was talking about streamers, not giving residual money, that's the same as linear broadcast television was. It's because they're doing global self-distribution, right?

So it is the digital era version of a studio also owning the theater chain and just ensuring that it was blocking out its own movies there and selling the theater chain. You know, they would sell them their hit, but they also had to buy their eight flops. And that is Netflix, right? That's exactly what Netflix is. It's like one thing people want to see and 10,000 just drivel. Yes. The sewage, just nonstop slop. And also because Netflix had such a head start on these other companies as

far as developing a streaming platform, it bought a lot of their old material for cheating. Like the office and friends, that's how Netflix got became worth a trillion dollars was like a billion people watching the office. Exactly. And so I think it's totally legitimate to say that, well, my look very different, the same concerns apply and the same concerns hit back then as far as labor issues and inequality and kind of what's called like a mnopsony employer where the if you're a worker, you only have the option of one or two people and so you can't really negotiate a fair wage. You kind of are it's up to you whether you're going to take it or leave it.

I feel like one could argue that is now starting to happen in Hollywood. And so I think I don't know what where that'll go, but I think the strike has kind of heightened this sense that it's, if these studios have been gang away with cheapening the price of labor, it may be because they have too much power as a coordinated kind of group. Yeah, my name is Max Calder. I'm a stuntman in actor 14 years. So we're right in front of the Netflix building here. Have you worked for Netflix at all? I have, yeah. How'd you find the experience? I mean, on the day it was great. Like, you know, they pay a good and up front

wage, but the problem is the residuals, you know, we don't get nearly as many residuals as we did with other studios. Like, you know, we're not really allowed to promote what we worked on, but I've worked on some of their major movies and television shows. And for the amount of value that those shows brought to the company, the residuals don't reflect at all. But some people we rely on residuals just as much as actors, especially if you get hurt, we might not be working for a while. Yeah, and then, you And then actors and stunt performers

where it's kind of like the life of an athlete where you have a certain lifespan. And as you get older, you try to reinvigorate your career and it kind of evolves and changes. So it's uphill, downhill battle for everybody. So it's important to have that steady stream of reliable income that makes our lives easier. This has been a summer of labor in a lot of respects.

We see the kindling of a nascent rejuvenation of strikes as a collective bargaining, as a labor practice in this country. Now, I know that the WGA and SAG people on strike would probably very likely to say that they regard themselves as being in solidarity with and part of like the same struggle against, you know, like the exploitation by the owners of everything.

But like, is that sentiment shared by striking hotel workers or Amazon warehouse workers? I mean, like, is there a kind of cross union cross-trade solidarity here, or is this kind of, I don't know, wishful thinking? I mean, it's not going to be the entire membership. I mean, most membership is not going to be super paying attention to other labor struggles all the time, but it totally is. I mean, I, just to give one concrete example, I went to this rally in downtown LA one morning a few weeks ago, outside of a UPS hub. This was before the UPS teamsters, the 340,000 of them reached a tenant of agreement

with the company. So they were preparing a strike. And Sean O'Brien, their new president, was there speaking. And there were a ton of actors and writers present. There were hotel workers. I met up with a bunch of these newly unionized Palmdale drivers who then, you know, we, I hitched a ride with them out to Amazon Studios to join the Pickett line and Sean O'Brien was there. Like there really is coordination going on. I talked to these, these delivery drivers.

It's not in the piece I wrote about them, but they were like, yeah, writers have been coming to our Pickett line and like they're shocked that we do real Pickett lines. Like they're excited. They want to like get into fights, which is not, you know, with the, you know, the theater kids generally do on their picket lines, not to make fun of them. I mean, they do snap fighting, like dance fighting, like West Side Story.

Yes, there was karaoke on the one of the picket lines that Paramount that I went to. And so of course, it's not going to be everybody, but like, you don't need everybody, right? If you have the need everybody, right? If you have the key people, the people who kind of are keeping the tickets alive, are ensuring the strike stays alive, are actually getting to know each other and build trust, that is very important. And also, it's really different than how it used to be. You know, the biggest example in Hollywood right now is what the Hollywood teamsters have

been doing. You know, they shut down the production of film and television by respecting the WGA's lines. They did not do that when the writers struck in 2007, right? So there's been some serious organization and building of ties between different types of workers. Yeah, hard to want to film set without teamsters. And we're pickingeting WGA.

We were actually shutting down productions. And that was really intense and cool and good because it was a show, a force and power and union solidarity. Obviously, Aiyatsi and their teamsters and all the other unions that are being affected by the swerks' stoppage, having them stand in solidarity and refuse to cross our picket lines really reminded us and I think frankly up to our game that this is a part one part of a major labor movement in the United States. It's long overdue across all industries.

First of all, I think it's a engendered sense of solidarity with the entertainment industry that now we've seen the teams stand with us. We want to stand with them. A lot of us were at those rallies. So I think there's just the reality of it's made a lot more people aware of how much we can get done when we organize and how important it is to keep an eye out on other industries that are about to go on strike in ways that you can support them and stand with them. So in one way, they've actually ignited maybe 150,000 people to understand the power of striking and what that has meant. And yeah, I think I'm the first person

to get defensive about like, I know what we do. It seems like it's all like fun and dreams. But reality, like even if you're a champagne tester, you should be paid fairly for the work that you do. Like, it shouldn't matter that the job is fun, or that it's dreamy, or parts of it are really glamorous. It really shouldn't matter. If your labor creates wealth, you should have a share of that wealth.

You know, what we always say is, if you have a boss, you are a worker. So we are part of the labor movement. And when labor stands up like this, it's a win for labor everywhere. Because we are setting a precedent that you deserve to be paid fairly, you deserve to be compensated. If the work you're making is profitable, you deserve to share in the profits. And that goes for everybody in every single industry.

So I think that, you know, we are in a time where the wealth gap between the 1% and the 99% are increasing rapidly. And it seems like, you know, CEO pay has gone up 1,000% in the past 70 years or so, and Worker Pay has gone up 18%. So that will divide is unacceptable, and that's in our industry, and that's in every industry.

So it's the same fight. I guess the last thing I have to say on this is I wanna return to something, I think it's an important point made by Alina Smith and the P.C. Road. And speaking of like, specifically about the kind of like how the streaming monopoly platform model has been a disaster at every level from the people who own these streaming platforms to the people who work for them and to the people who just like movies and television to be on TV or having something good to watch is that it sucks for everybody. And I guess like I would just apply that like not just to the your stories

and the cinema or on TV, but like basically like when it comes to things like I don't know having something delivered to your house when you wanted to or having a hotel room, it really does pay to go with the union card. That's right, Will. I don't really know. That's a poor comment than a question. Any final thoughts, Alex? No, I think you asked me quite a bit.

I wish I was still in LA. There's a whole new strike that has started today of the city workers, 11,000 of them, but there was only so many days I could be writing beside a pool before I felt like I had to go back to New York and sit in my tiny apartment. I will be taking your place tomorrow. Nice. Well, safe travels. Alex Press, if people would like to find some more of your coverage or writings, where should they go? Well, I guess the best way to do it is you could follow me on Twitter or Instagram at Alex N. Press. Most of my writings at Jackman Magazine, but some of it is elsewhere, so I'd follow me on social media.

We will include the links to the articles I mentioned in this episode in the show description. So once again, Alex Press, thank you for your time. Yeah, thanks thanks Will. We a top girl if she pieces the tired business man.