Today, Explained - Inside the Actors Strike

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

The actors are officially on strike. Vox senior correspondent and critic Alissa Wilkinson breaks down what SAG-AFTRA is afta, and the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman explains how one of Netflix’s first original shows was an early warning sign. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The actor Kimiko Glenn got a statement in the mail. Kimiko is one of the stars of Orange is the New Black. I always thought women's prison would be more about community and girl power and stuff. Some of these women just seem crazy. The show had just started airing overseas, and now Netflix was paying her residuals for dozens of episodes. Oh my God, I'm about to be so rich. And you've got to...

What? $27.30. When we next find Kimiko Glenn, she's on strike, along with every other actor who's unionized with SAG-AFTRA. Coming up on Today Explained, inside the actors' strike. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Alyssa Wilkinson is a correspondent and a critic for Vox, and of late,

her beat has been the actor's strike. So this double strike is historic. It's the first time in 63 years that it's happened. I, as an observer of the industry, agree with the people in the industry who say that this is kind of a do-or-die moment. Seeing what's going on right now and seeing kind of the stories that are coming out of the strike about how people have had to make a living, you start to understand that this is existential for the business to remain relevant, and it's also existential for the business to kind of keep existing at all. This is a long time coming, and the story is really a story of technology. In Hollywood, every big change, every labor movement, everything is always tied to advances in technology. In Hollywood, every big change, every labor movement, everything is always tied to advances in technology. If we start with streaming, that's really where the genesis of this particular

strike comes from. When streaming technology was developed, the idea was kind of like, who's going to want to watch TV on their computer, right? This is going to be a small part of our business. It's maybe, you know, where we put a show after it's run its course on broadcast TV. So the residuals for streaming, and that's sort of like royalties that writers or actors or directors or whoever get every time their work makes money for the studio or the distributor. The residuals are quite low on streaming compared to like if you watch the show on cable or you watch it on network TV. I actually make less money working in film than I did in the year 1990. This also means that there have been, I guess we can call them innovations in the industry that have changed how much people even get paid for a show. Shows are shorter now, right?

Our typical show is like 8 to 10 episodes instead of 26 that you might have gotten in the past. So there's less work. It lasts for less time. There's longer gaps between jobs. At a certain point, you have to just say, who's going to determine what our value is? Well, look at these thousands of people. We're determining what our value is. And then we have the other side of the coin, which is AI. And of course, this has been a big part of the writer's strike.

For SAG-AFTRA, this is actually a bigger deal. And sometimes people are surprised when I say that. But if you're an actor, your likeness now digitally exists somewhere. And it is somewhat easy for a studio to generate a new performance with your image, your voice. We've already seen this happen, right, where sometimes we resurrect an actor who's died to have a bit part in a Star Wars movie or something like that. So we know it's very possible. Rey, be patient.

I'm starting to think it is impossible to hear the voices of the Jedi who came before. Nothing's impossible. This is not necessarily going to be an issue for, you know, Meryl Streep or Tom Cruise, but it will be an issue for the mid-level actor or the extra who kind of makes their living by going and being an extra in different scenes. And if you're a voice actor, which is what SAG-AFTRA also covers, maybe you read audiobooks or you do a lot of voiceover work, your voice is pretty easy to replicate with AI as well. And I have one thing to say, if you want this voice, you gotta pay for it. So with all of those considerations in mind, the big issue is that the AMPTP, which is an organization that represents all of the big studios and production companies in Hollywood, they have a contract with SAG-AFTRA and with the other unions. It was coming up for renewal, and SAG brought forth its demands and said,

we need better pay because we're not able to feed our children and pay our mortgages, and we need to make some rules about how AI can be used and how it can't be used to take away our livelihoods. And the AMPTP has not budged from their position, which is basically lower than what SAG-AFTRA would like. I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things, how they plead poverty that they're losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. And what are the studios saying to these demands? Is there any common ground? Well, you know, it's hard to tell because nobody's releasing exactly what they said. But according to Bob Iger, who's the CEO of Disney, he went on TV the morning that the contract was supposed to expire and basically said.

There's a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic. And they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive. So they're not being realistic? No, they're not. This came on the heels of a Deadline article that some people have speculated was planted to scare SAG-AFTRA that said something like, we plan to make sure that the writers are losing their houses and their apartments before we will go back to the bargaining table with them.

Now, people freaked out about this and said, why would you even say this? You know, this is inhumane. Someone called it a necessary evil. So those two things came kind of in a one-two punch. And that's the message I think a lot of people heard from the studios. The moment that SAG-AFTRA went to a press conference on Thursday and announced that they had ordered the strike, the AMPTP released a statement saying, we offered historic and groundbreaking concessions. You know, we offered this much raise. We offered this percentage change in residuals. And we offered, and I believe they just said groundbreaking AI proposals. And from everything I've heard from SAG-AFTRA, those groundbreaking AI proposals were basically

that all performances of extras, and in fact, historical performances could be used to feed an AI machine. And then those likenesses would be able to be used without actor's consent in perpetuity throughout the universe. So they're not thrilled about that for obvious reasons, but they also clearly don't think that the amount of money that's being offered to them is equivalent with what it costs to live a middle-class lifestyle. We work really hard for our money. We're not these elitist people who are running around in yachts and stuff.

We're literally looking for the next job to pay for our rent, to pay for our dinners. You know, the heads of studios make a lot of money. There is a lot here that has been successful. Why don't the heads of studios take a pay cut, for example? They'd still make a ton of money and everyone gets a little bit more. Yeah, well, that's a great question that I think we could ask in many industries, right? That, you know, one answer is just they don't want to, which I on some level understand is kind of a human thing. So sort of because of Netflix, movie studios and TV production companies have been moving towards acting more like tech companies. Some of them literally are tech companies, right?

Amazon, Apple, Netflix. These are tech companies that also make some content and put it on their platforms. And the more traditional studios like Disney, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, which is now Warner Brothers Discovery, they have to pivot to being tech companies in order to keep up. That just is a kind of company that works under a totally different business model. And they also are large companies that are more beholden to their investors than anything else. And investors tend to want to see a rate of return that keeps growing. So you end up in a position where you need to make more and more profit all the time. And there is kind of a ceiling on how much content the world can consume, right? And people are buying fewer movie tickets now than they used to. And people don't want to subscribe to a going to work in this economic climate, or to cut out costs.

And a really good way to cut costs is to pay people less, shorten seasons, and also remove people from the equation as much as possible. And if you can eliminate, say, 40 background actors or extras from your production, well, suddenly you don't have to pay any of those people, and you don't have to worry about working around the kind of working conditions that unions actually have won for people, which is like you can only work a certain number of hours a day and you have to get lunch. And if you have a scene where it's needed, we have an intimacy coordinator and, you know, all of those kinds of things. Computers don't need those. So by cutting down

how much the cost of making something is, you raise the profit and on the balance sheet that looks better and that's what you want. So there's just sort of a confluence of factors here. And it seems like the thing they're not willing to do is say, well, you know, I'll take a pay cut and then we'll sort of fix this. But, you know, we don't see a lot of examples of that happening in the real world. So I'm not so surprised about that. I love that there's the real world and there's Hollywood. Alyssa, as long as the strike goes on, what do we expect for actors and for writers and for people who like movies and TV? So there's a couple of things that are different right now than when we had our last major strike, which was in 2007. The writers went on strike. And back then, there was less stuff sitting around on people's streaming platforms. And even though a lot of companies have been pulling stuff off

their streaming platforms for tax write-off reasons, there's still a lot out there. If the strike continues into late fall, it really is going to cause a pretty big ripple. There will be major franchise movies that are delayed because they can't shoot them. We're already in a position where most productions in the U.S. have been shut down for a while because crews won't cross the writers' picket lines in solidarity. Your favorite show has already been delayed, but you're going to really start to notice it if this leaks into awards season and not only the Emmys get pushed, but the Oscars, the Golden Globes, that kind of stuff. And we may see release schedules getting

moved around like they did in the early days of the pandemic, too. Coming up, life as a non-A-list actor. Orange is the new broke. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.

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Mrs. 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. What was the third one? Oh, yeah. Never wear a mask while to the zoo. Today Explained, we're back with Michael Schulman.

He's a staff writer at The New Yorker. He recently wrote about the cast of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. It first aired a decade ago in 2013. It was very, very, very popular. And I asked Michael, why is he writing about this show in the context of the actor's strike? Well, actually, one of the cast members came to me. This was Kimiko Glenn, who played Brooke Soso, one of the inmates. And she had been talking with her castmates in the years since the show, and while the show was on, about how some of them felt they had never been properly compensated for being on this show in a way that was commensurate to the gigantic success that it was for Netflix. You know, So-So came in on season two.

She was a sort of idealistic, wouldn't stop chit-chatting about environmental causes. My parents named me Brooke after Brooke Shields, the actress, but except without the E because they thought it'd be a bit more original. But sometime around my 10th birthday, they started saying I was named after a brook instead. Um, like the babbling kind.

Like many characters in the show, she was not one of the series regulars, the kind of core cast, but she was on tons of episodes. You seem so calm. Are you a murderer? You know, a lot of the people in that category started out getting paid SAG scale, which is the minimum you can pay someone.

So some of the actors told me at the very beginning it was less than $900 a day, which is, it sounds like, you know, a lot for a day, but it's really not that much when you factor in the commissions and taxes and dues and all the stuff that they have to pay, they actually go home with very little. And they're not working every single day. It's very spread out. So a lot of these recurring guest stars had to keep other gigs while they were on the show.

They were waitressing. They were tending bar. One of them was working in a soap store. And their customers would recognize them from the show. So there was this kind of cognitive dissonance where they had this overnight fame, a lot of them, where they would be chased down the street by fans wanting pictures. And then they'd also have to do other jobs to pay their rent. Let's go back to the streaming ecosystem at the time that that show began airing.

What did it look like back then? Well, so you really have to rewind your mind 10 years when streaming TV really wasn't a thing at all. It wasn't a way people watched TV, and Netflix was primarily known as the company that would send you DVDs in little red envelopes. Netflix. All the movies you want, 20 bucks a month and no late fees. But around 2012, 2013, Netflix started changing into a place that would offer exclusive, pardon the word, content.

The first two huge pieces of that content were these two TV shows that premiered in 2013, First House of Cards, and then a few months later, Orange is the New Black. New Black Time So at the time, some of the cast members told me when they were cast on the show, people were like, oh, Netflix? like the place with the envelopes? You know, people really didn't know what this was going to be. And of course, since then, streaming TV just is TV.

Orange is the New Black helped make the Netflix brand in a major way. And that Netflix model of how TV is consumed, including binge watching where they drop a whole season at once and you stay up all day and all night and watch it all. That was a huge building block in the streaming economy that we're now in. How did it become such a big building block? What did that look like? Well, so House of Cards, people remember, was the show with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, and it had a lot of star power. The fact that movie stars were in a Netflix show and that it was this sort of serious political drama thrust Netflix into the prestige TV realm. But Orange is the New Black was a kind of ground-up hit. For one thing, it was revolutionary in this gigantic ensemble that was overwhelmingly female, that was very diverse racially and in terms of body types and had a lot of LGBTQ characters. You know, it was a phenomenon. It was a phenomenon

that was not built on stardom. It was built on this very big and expanding ensemble of sort of character actors from New York City. And for some of them, the show was a real launchpad. I mean, when you think of Laverne Cox being on the cover of Time magazine, she was the face of this transgender people in popular culture. And that was such a moment. Danielle Brooks, Uzo Aduba. It kind of brought us back Natasha Lyonne after, you know, years of drug problems and a kind of career slop.

Now she's like the queen of TV. Thank you. It's my bad attitude that keeps me young. When you're on a hit show that is this big, Awards ceremonies that they were going to and invited the cast. And he gave a toast where they said he bragged about second, if more people are watching our show than Game of Thrones, why aren't we getting paid like the actors on Game of Thrones? We all just looked at each other and of course, give me the money. Where's the money? I'm still living in my Bushwick apartment. And part of that has to do with Netflix's secrecy. They don't share their viewing numbers. We've traditionally known about box office numbers,

Nielsen ratings. Those are the metrics that the entertainment industry has worked off of, whether it's advertising rates, actors and other creative people being able to negotiate off of the popularity of what they're doing. But in this model, it doesn't really translate and you can be on a major hit show and not reap the rewards. Why were they not paid like they had leapt into the public imagination in the way that they did?

What was actually happening behind the scenes? Well, so there's kind of two parts of this and it's the two ways that actors are paid. One is your upfront fee, you know, what you get paid to show up to work. And that was, from what I have been told by all these actors I've talked to, very low at the beginning and kind of remained low. Like, you know, they were not making millions of dollars. I'm sure some of the people who were established names like Jason Biggs was on the show. I mean, who knew you could rock orange?

Tasha Leon, Laura Prepon. You know, people who were established probably made a bit more money. But the vast ensemble that was kind of the fiber of the show, they were being paid the SAG minimum rate. The other way that actors get paid is through residuals, which is like the money that you make through syndication, reruns, you know, packaging for other forms of consumption like DVDs, stuff like that. And traditionally, actors who are on big hit shows on, you know, networks, cable, what we can now call linear TV, they make a lot of money through that. It's a real important part of how working actors sustain themselves.

And because Netflix wasn't the traditional TV model, it was working off of a different arrangement. SAG had negotiated a new media agreement that calculated the residuals in a different way. And what these actors found over time was that it was basically bupkis. You know, one of the actors I talked to, Emma Miles, who played one of the meth heads on the show, Leanne, she told me about how, you know, she makes residuals from a handful of guest spots on Law & Order SVU going back to 2004.

She still makes hundreds of dollars from that. Because every time they show SVU or, you know, it's just playing constantly on TV, whatever, she gets money. For her many seasons on lots of episodes of Orange is the New Black, she's getting $20 a year. Why do you think it took the industry so long to address this? Why did it take a decade to have a strike? Well, I think, again, to put your mind back 10 years, it was all really experimental. That's a word that a lot of people use, experiment.

One of the producers and writers called it outlaw country. And there were upsides to that. They didn't have to censor the show to appeal to advertisers, sponsors. They had a real level of creative freedom. I mean, it's hard to imagine Orange is the New Black happening on primetime NBC. But at the same time, people were unhappy at the time with what they were getting paid, for sure. I think it's difficult for actors to speak out about the money they're making. Actors are in a very vulnerable profession where they

have to be chosen. They have to audition for things. They have to get offers. There were a lot of actors in the show who were very, very nervous about speaking up. I really asked a lot of people. I talked to 10 people in the end, but I could sense the fear.

And I think the only reason that a lot of them were willing to speak up now is because of the solidarity of the strike and the fact that everyone in the profession is taking this moment to talk about this systemic problem. Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn. Amina El-Sadi is our editor. Patrick Boyd, our engineer.

Laura Bullard is our senior fact checker. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. The sun is out, the day is new, and everyone is waiting, waiting on you.