Front Burner - Actors, writers shut down Hollywood

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

The union representing almost 160,000 actors, SAG-AFTRA, is striking after negotiations fell through with the group representing most major Hollywood studios. The news comes about two months after 11,000 members of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) announced their strike. Studios say the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Crave and Disney+ has caused financial strain. Meanwhile, actors say the shift to streaming has led to decreasing residuals, meaning they aren’t being paid for repeats of films and television shows. They're also concerned about proposals from studios to use their images and likeness in combination with artificial intelligence to create new content without their involvement. Maureen Ryan, a Vanity Fair contributing editor and author of “Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood,” explains why Hollywood actors are striking and what it could mean for the future of television, film and the labour movement as a whole. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Mr. Sheffield, I can't go in there. My mother had three rules. Never make contact with a public toilet. Never, ever, ever cross a picket line. This is a scene from the 90s show The Nanny, starring Fran Drescher. In it, she's refusing to walk into this really lavish party being thrown by her boss because there's a group of busboys picketing outside. It's fine. You're embarrassing me now. Come along.

I can't. My aunt or blouse would roll over in her grave, which was paid for by her union. The clip has been circulating online the last few days because right now, Fran Drescher is at the head of her own protest as the president of the actors union SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood's biggest shutdown in over 60 years. We are labor and we stand tall and we demand respect. And respect. No further! No peace! No further! No peace!

After failing to reach a deal with an alliance of Hollywood's biggest producers, around 160,000 actors have gone on strike. The union is fighting for better pay and better residuals, as the rise of streaming services have meant actors now make way less money when their movies and shows are watched on repeat. They also want guarantees against artificial intelligence being used to reproduce their voices and bodies. It is a slippery slope. If big business corporations think that they can put human beings out of work

and replace them with artificial intelligence, It's dangerous and it's without thinking. This is all happening as 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America are also on strike, shutting down production of most American films and TV shows and raising a giant question mark around the future of the industry. This strike is really going to shut down every piece of production in Hollywood. Everyone who's involved in catering, makeup and production, every one of these people is going to be out of work right now. Maureen Ryan is on the show today. She's a Vanity Fair contributing editor and the author of Burn It Down,

Power, Complicity and a call for change in Hollywood. Hi, Maureen. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So I just want to start with some of the nuts and bolts first. What can't actors do right now as a result of the strike? They cannot perform acting services for struck companies and struck companies would be any signatories to, you know, with the Screen Actors Guild in America and the Writers Guild of America have with a group called the AMPTP, which is the most awkward acronym of our time, I think. A lot of times we in the media just say the studios.

So the AMPTP covers many dozens, if not hundreds, of organizations. But essentially, if you have a large production employing many Screen Actor Guild individuals and Writers Guild of America individuals, probably that production has been shut down. And by the way, just as a side note, the Screen Actors Guild also incorporates many other kinds of performers. So essentially, folks who do a lot of voiceover work, on-screen work, other kinds of performance work, if they are in the Screen Actors Guild or ever want to be in the Screen Actors Guild, they cannot perform work for the companies against which those unions are on strike. And that's an interesting little side note of itself that influences are now a big deal.

If influencers ever want to be in the Screen Actors Guild, they cannot perform, you know, enter into new work and do work for struck companies because they will be banned from joining SAG down the road if they do. Wow, that's interesting. So this is going to have really far reaching implications. So a lot of the conversation around this has been very heated. There's been clips of actors on the picket lines who sound really angry. There was a video that has now been deleted, but it was Ron Perlman more or less threatening this anonymous studio executive who was quoted saying

that they wanted to see the strikes last long enough that people start losing their homes. You wish that on people. You wish that families starve while you're making $27 million dollars a year for creating nothing be careful motherfucker be really careful i wonder if you could talk about who some of the more notable celebrities are who've been speaking out about this and what they've been saying about why the strike is necessary right i did see that ron perl video. And by the way, he did walk some of that back in a new Instagram live.

We all must try to get along and we all must try to understand you have your value in giving us the resources we need to make content. And we have our value as storytellers because of the effect that we have when we tell our stories beautifully and properly on the people that come to see them. He said people are very, he was very agitated and, you know, basically was responding as many people did to a trade magazine piece in which, you know, executives for these large companies that fund and make a lot of the entertainment content, executives were quoted as saying they were waiting out people so that they would lose their houses or be unable to make rent. And so if you're just an average working Joe, which most people in these unions are, for someone to say, I'm going to wait for you to crawl back to the bargaining table

after you're homeless. That gets people very, very angry. At one point, admittedly, I got quite heated. I don't wish anybody any harm. I hope the asshole who made that comment also doesn't wish anybody any harm. And, you know, Sean Gunn is the brother of James Gunn, who's now the head of Everything DC. But, you know, Sean Gunn is just a working actor, has been on Gilmore Girls, has been in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. He's among the many people saying, we used to meaningfully share a little bit in the financial health of the industry. Residuals that used to be in the hundreds or the thousands are now pennies. You know, Garrett Wong was an actor who was a series regular on Star Trek Voyager for six

seasons. He was on that show. He recently got a residual check that was for 34 cents. And I have seen across social media, a number of actors showing residuals that you know are again pennies or dollars and if you're living in Los Angeles or Vancouver or New York you cannot pay your rent with a $30 residual check you know that's just not a realistic thing a lot of high profile actors the actors for Oppenheimer one of the biggest releases of the year left that premiere once it was clear that there was going to be a strike. So what's interesting to me is that someone on the level of a Florence Pugh or any of those other high level actors, Matt Damon, came out at an Oppenheimer event before the strike occurred and said he fully supported the Screen Actor Guild demands. These people in the guilds have seen their income fall for years, and it was never that great to begin with. So every A-list actor that you can think of

did not start out as an A-list actor. So they understand what it's like to work as a background actor. Right. Yeah. When you see A-list actors like Margot Robbie and Florence Pugh and Matt Damon supporting this union, people might be left with the impression that this is about a bunch of millionaires whining about not being paid enough. But that's not really the bulk of these unions memberships, is it? Absolutely, yeah. A really talented writer, performer, producer, Ashley Nicole Black, made this point that I think is an important one to reinforce. What these guilds are negotiating at the moment are the minimums, the floor. Most people in the entertainment industry in North America are possibly middle class, but oftentimes working class and living paycheck to paycheck. When I started out, there was a lot more compensation. There was a lot more residuals. And now with streaming, the residuals aren't the same as they used to be. I actually make less money working in film than I did in the year 1990. Streaming came along and the contracts have not adjusted according to the newest business models. They're operating under antiquated models that don't

account for the way people consume entertainment now. So the Actors Union has joined the Writers Union, which walked out in May. What are they asking for? The problem that's going on right now really dates back to, I would say, around a decade ago. You know, streamers began dipping their toe in the water with Amazon and so forth and Netflix. A decade ago this month is when Orange is the New Black premiered. And that is kind of like patient zero for the streaming revolution, which did bring in a lot of good changes. You know, we saw a difference in the people who were allowed to create shows, you know, the commercial entertainment industry, certainly in North America has been,

there's been many gatekeepers that have kind of kept out people from historically marginalized communities. And that began to change. But what also changed, and this is what we're seeing now, is the pent up frustration over the fact that residuals fell off a cliff. And that's something that I write about in my new book. Residuals were what helped people weather the dry spells of not working. So if you were, you know, a series regular on a show, if you created a show, you shared a little bit or sometimes a lot in the wealth of that show, you know, very famously, the actors on Friends banded together for equal compensation. And they also benefited from Friends long term success, you know, Part of the reason that they are millionaires is because they made a lot of money every time Friends was sold into syndication or hit some

new window. It never really was for most actors a lucrative job, but it became even less sustainable over the past decade because seasons were short. The overall run of a show, even if you were the star of a show, even if you created a show, how much money are you really going to make if it only runs for 18 episodes? So all of these different factors pressed down on income, pressed down on people's ability to make it in these jobs during a time when the amount of productions actually went up. So the number of scripted shows aimed at North American consumers about a decade ago, those scripted shows numbered about 200. Now it's about 600 as of last year. Let's say that you get, for the sake of argument, $100 per episode of TV

that you're in. If the season is only six episodes, that's very different from a season that's 22 episodes. This is a very large drop in income. So they want to have an adjustment around compensation because of shorter seasons, shorter runs, and all of that. So that's the direct compensation. Okay, for today's work, here's how much you're going to get. They want that to go up, but they also want residuals to go up. Because residuals, if you were on CSI Miami, you would be getting a healthy check from that show. If you were a creator, a writer of a script, an actor, even a guest actor, you would get fairly healthy checks from that. Maybe you had a a guest actor, you would get fairly healthy checks from that.

Maybe you had a three arc appearance. You would get checks from that for a while and they would be decent. Now you're getting pennies for that. And this has been going on for years and actors are really angry about that. I mean, this entire industry has changed so dramatically with the advent of streaming that to try and think that by just making incremental changes on a contract that was forged since 1960, before there was internet, before there was digital, before there was anything that's threatening us today is crazy. And then the final thing that's really getting people wound up, it's disturbing people in the extreme, is one of the proposals that Fran Drescher and her negotiating team fielded from the producer's side of the negotiating table before the strike, just before

the strike happened, was we want to be able to scan every background artist the day that they start work and own the image and the scan in perpetuity without paying any additional money. Like essentially the person would just get a flat rate. They proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day's pay, and company should own that scan their image their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation in 60 of the screen actor guild 60 of its membership is if they're earning income as as actors or performers 60 are getting it from that particular stream from being a background

artist or an extra. So that felt like a very much an existential shot across the bow because many, many actors, they're very protective of their images and rightly so because they can be used to sell things or to be used, they can be used in ways that they don't agree with and so forth. What the studios would like to do is to be able to use AI and use other kinds of digital and computer enhancement methods to have people's images on file in an image bank. They pay once for that imagery, and then you essentially don't own your own likeness, your own body, your own face on screen anymore. This is kind of an actor's nightmare because someone else is giving the performance for you. You've essentially, you know, if you give away your image, then essentially you're becoming a digital puppet, and you're not controlling that work.

You're not controlling that performance, and you have no say over how it transpires. You know, actors, so many people in the industry are already are so disempowered around many issues around issues of abuse, treatment, all kinds of exploitation. And then the next level nightmare is, oh, and by the way, your face is going to be doing things on screen that you had nothing to do with. That's just, it's dystopian in the extreme. You know, I can't think of anything that they could have proposed that would have gotten people more up in arms, quite literally. They are on the picket lines and were very energized to hit those picket lines because to many actors that I've spoken to and that have been giving interviews on this,

this feels like the end of their profession if this is what happens. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years.

I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. How much money are we talking about here? Like, what would it cost for these studios to meet the demands of the Actors Union?

I haven't seen a dollar amount for that myself personally, but what they're asking for is around 2% of the profits of these studios, which, you know, apparently that's a non, you know, David Zaslav, the head of Warner Brothers Discovery made $250 million in 2021. Many other executives make over $20 million, if not all the top executives make over 20 million, if not 30 or 40 or $50 million a year. Those people have nothing to sell if actors and writers are not willing to work. So it's just odd to me that they would think that they cannot share even a bit of this wealth. And again, I've been doing a fair number of interviews based on my book, and some people will come back with the question, understandably, oh, well, some of these firms are in trouble financially. Right. Well, the grip on set, the actor on set, the writer well, you know, some of these firms are in trouble financially, right? Well, the grip on set, the actor on set, the writer who created that show,

they didn't make the decision to saddle those firms with debt. And by the way, even though that's happened, these dudes are making hundreds of millions of dollars over the last few years. So there is money. I wonder if we can spend a bit of time on what the AMPTP has been saying in response to the actors' demands. So the debt, I wonder if you can talk a bit about the financial situation of these studios and why they claim they can't pay these actors more money. Like I saw that Disney CEO Bob Iger, he talked about how this action is very disruptive and that it's come at the worst time. What is he talking about? Well, yeah, he also called actors and writers demands unrealistic, which is interesting, given that, you know, I think that what's unrealistic is expecting people to make poverty wages indefinitely and not have anything to say about that, you know. There are headwinds facing the industry, but frankly, again,

and this was taken at the highest executive levels, these decisions that were taken were to expand, expand, expand, spend a ton of money on content without a clear path to making profit from that content because we switched over from essentially an advertiser-driven model to a subscription-driven model. So all of these economic factors led to an arms race of spending, which you as a consumer, if you load up 10 credit cards with debt, you're going to eventually have to pay that piper. That's something we all can understand. But the problem is now they are retrenching

and they are trying to make that retrenchment on the backs of people who were already earning wages for, you know, in Los Angeles and New York were essentially barely working class wages in many instances. So to hear them say, oh, well, we can't pay you X because of these economic forces. We overexpanded. We got too big for our britches. But I'm still going to be paid $50 million this year. You know, that's hard to take. And also, here's an interesting fact.

So they went to this all subscription model and then realized that the old model by which advertising fed into their revenue source streams was a good model. And now they're trying to go back to it. They're trying to recreate 2007 through science or magic to paraphrase Jack Donahue from 30 Rock. They're trying to reintegrate advertising into the stream of revenue. But when television especially was an advertising-driven medium, creators shared in that wealth much more meaningfully. Now they're trying to go back to an advertising-driven model or partly driven model, and they're not prepared to compensate people for the way people were compensated,

you know, 10 to 15 years ago when that was the norm. Right now, we're at the height of the summer blockbuster season, and Barbie and Oppenheimer are possibly the two most hyped movies of the year. And they're being released on Friday. What does a strike mean for the summer blockbuster season? The promotional machinery is definitely going to be harder. There's not going to be red carpets for the most part. There was a waiver for the Tony Awards a couple of months ago when the Writers Guild was on strike. So there will be exceptions, but the norm that you see of people giving big interviews,

going on camera, doing appearances, doing promotional work of any kind, that will be greatly diminished, if not reduced. And that is really going to hurt the award season. And these are ways that people keep their products, their their films, their TV shows in the public eye. We don't even know right now when the Emmy Awards will air. It's not up in the air. It might be this fall. It might be early next year, by which point are we going to really care about the Emmys in February? I mean, I guess so. But, you know, it's a very weird time. So when you have all these productions shut down, what kind of impact does that have on the economy of places like LA and Atlanta and other cities that have big film industries?

It's a massive impact. You know, I just heard a stat this morning from a journalist who was interviewing me that 6.5% of the New York City economy has links to the entertainment industry and the film and TV shows and all kinds of productions, including Unscripted that are shot there. So that is a really massive for LA, I would say it's probably for LA, Atlanta, Toronto, Vancouver, I would say that probably the ballpark is similar. And so what you're already seeing and hearing about in Hollywood is restaurants, florists, prop houses, costumers, car services, you know, there's a million different professions that touch this. But again, I think people are feeling incredibly existentially afraid of not having the strike as well, because as one person from the costume design department of The Marvelous Mrsings and hours that that department spent on that and pay the people in that department took home and paid their rent with. So I do definitely know

that there has been already an impact. And I just have to give a nice shout out. I don't know Drew Carey personally, but if you show a WGA card, and I don't know if it extends to SAG, but it might, at a couple of different diners in LA, Drew Carey has pledged to pick up people's meals and pay for them. And he has, according to those restaurants, at least one of those restaurants, he has been paying $10,000 a month for people to get a meal um which i think is just like that's cool like if you're a rich celebrity do that you know what i mean there's a lot of pain going around so people in the directors guilds and other guilds are putting together fundraisers to help iatsy members who have lost their jobs because these productions shut down to help them with with groceries and bills. So there's a lot of collective actions happening right now. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that they're going to make up for a normal paycheck

that somebody gets because they probably aren't. But there's a lot of effort to try to ease at least some of this pain. So both sides sound pretty dug in here and emotions are running high on the union side. Meanwhile, there's that deadline piece I mentioned where the studio exec implied that the goal was to wait this out until it becomes financially unsustainable for the unions. How long do you think this could potentially go for? not just the million dollar question. I think now it's got to be the billion dollar question. And I've covered the industry a long time. What I have learned during the 30 years I've been covering it is that literally anything can happen, good or bad. The wild card in all of this is for Amazon, for Apple, what they spend, the billions that they spend on entertainment product is a rounding error. It's not a big deal to them. They and I think to some degree Netflix, because Netflix is picking up content from all over the world. I think if some of these newer players in the game, if you will, think that they can wait things out. But I

do think within the AMPTP, there are differing factions. And I think that that's what we might see. Some of the factions that's what we might see. Some of the factions that want everyone to get back to work sooner rather than later may prevail. And maybe everyone goes back to the bargaining table and everyone works out a deal within the next few months, two months, whatever, something like that. If that's not successful, then we might be in for an incredibly long strike. I've been saying from the start, I think that this is going to be one of the longer strikes in Hollywood history.

It's probably going to go past the 100-day strike that the Writers Guild of America had in 2007, 2008. That was exactly 100 days. But I do think that SAG going on strike did change the game. And they understand that, yeah, we might have a lot of stuff banked, we might have a lot of content for our subscribers banked. By early next year, they don't have that much anymore. I got to tell you, most people are going to be the pipes will be running dry. Some factions of the AMPTP could break off and settle a separate deal, separate deals with people,

that is certainly something that's possible. I think it's the worst case scenario is that everybody digs in their heels. And the producers are not willing to give on AI, especially, or on some of these residual issues. And then we might be reconvening to have this conversation again in four months right before Christmas. And that's not a scenario that anybody in any guild that I talked to wants, but they all are prepared for the fact that this might happen. You know, I find this really interesting as a labor story, You know, I find this really interesting as a labor story because you have these really recognizable faces using language like wealth redistribution and means of production. Fran Drescher, who we mentioned in the intro, said in her speech, what happens here is important because what's happening to us is happening across all fields of labor by means of when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority. So what kind of impact do you think this might have on the broader labor movement?

I think that's such a great question. And by the way, a fellow Chicagoan of mine, John Cusack, is putting on social media exactly these thoughts. And I think that it's funny to me that they are taking now with SAG being on strike, some of the most charismatic people on earth and having them serve as spokespersons for collective labor. You know, it's like this is going to be a massive educational project, which actually I think will be good. And I think, you know, one thing I say a lot is Hollywood is both an aspiration and a cautionary tale. It's a cautionary tale because all of these guilds were formed almost 100 years ago because people realized that they were viewed as disposable and replaceable and just widgets that the studios could burn through. could burn through. And I do think that the all of this language that we're seeing around the strike, you know, James Ponowozik is a critic from New York Times, and he just wrote a piece that came out this past couple of days. We are all background actors was essentially the thesis of the piece, because if AI comes for their jobs, and there is no regulation around how it's used, this could be any of us. If you write code, if you are a technical writer, if you are anyone who does any kind of storytelling or many, many tasks, if there's no regulation around how AI is used, these trends that Hollywood is facing are coming for all of us. And by the way, I would also say that the wealth inequality talk,

it's certainly been going around for some time. You know, I really think that the COVID pandemic kicked a lot of labor issues into the forefront because there were wildcat strikes. Amazon had, in terms of workers organizing, that happened during the pandemic, the sort of the birth of the Amazon labor union, I make the point in my book, that someone working on the crew of an Amazon show and an Amazon warehouse worker, their plights are not different. They're working

short term gigs often without benefits, they can be injured on the job, they're not making a lot of money. And they are often quite often, and this is not just applied to Amazon, it applies to many places, they are viewed as disposable. And so a lot of workers, I think, are realizing that we might be talking about a Hollywood strike, there may be an initial reaction among some folks of like, oh, it's just a bunch of spoiled, pampered babies wanting to make even more millions. I do think that this is a large scale education for folks about what working conditions are really like, what compensation and falling compensation has really been like in Hollywood, and how similar that is to many other professions. You know, the same year that 98% of IATSE workers authorized a potential strike, John Deere workers were on strike.

You know, I do think there's much more solidarity and awareness across guilds. You know, Writers Guild of America striking workers were picketing last week with hotel workers in Los Angeles that are on strike. They were picketing last week with people at a UPS plant. So all of these things are much bigger issues within the systems, the economic systems in which we're living. And the links are being made in people's heads. And what the producers and what the studios have done is give the most charismatic people on the planet literal bullhorns they can use to talk about these issues. And that may backfire on these studios. You never know.

This is all really, really interesting. Mo, thank you so much. It was great to talk to you. It's wonderful to talk to you. Thank you very, very much. It was great to talk to you. It's wonderful to talk to you. Thank you very, very much. All right, that's allbc.ca slash podcasts.