Attribution: Eden, Janine and Jim from New York City, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Geoff Carter
The summer movie blockbuster season is underway. Ads and promotions for Warner Brother’s Barbie, Disney’s Indiana Jones: The Dial of Destiny, and Universal’s Oppenheimer have been saturating television, the internet, and all other social media. These traditional studio films boast all-star casts, A-list directors, and huge budgets. The Dial of Destiny cost a reported three to four hundred million dollars to film, making it one of the most expensive movies ever made. Unfortunately, the film has grossed only a fraction of that at the box office.
Barbie and Oppenheimer, both with budgets of about one hundred million dollars, are set to open this weekend, but the anticipation for these films has been dampened by the writers’ strike, which began earlier this year, and which has now been augmented by the actors’ strike, which started only this week.
Hollywood. Glamour, action, and intense drama of these productions are the fantasy factory nectar on which the audience imagination thrives. This world of beautiful actresses, hunky actors, brilliant writers and directors, glamorous red-carpet events, and celluloid wish-fulfillment creations seems surreal and almost impossibly distant to the average viewer—like Neverland. Not that that would prevent Joe Audience from connecting with that world. Just visit the local comic con event. But there are storm clouds brewing over this Hollywood Neverland. It seems as if the creative talent behind these movies is frustrated, unhappy, underpaid, and underinsured. And they’re not going to take it anymore.
The Writers Guild of American and the Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists are demanding that residual payments (money received from syndication or reuse of material) be restructured to reflect the changing nature of the entertainment industry. While most writers make good money while working on a project, once it finishes, they are forced to live on savings and residuals until the next project comes along. In years past, when TV series filmed twenty or more episodes per season, residuals were a reliable—though truncated—income. Cast members of Friends reportedly have topped out with tens of millions of residual earnings. Another issue of concern for writers is the advent of AI. The union is demanding guarantees that AI will not be used to help write treatments or scripts.
Actors are also demanding higher pay and guaranteed protections from AI and technology. According to Acting Magazine, ninety-five percent of SAG-AFTRA members earn less than $25,000 per year. The union provides health insurance only if the actors work a minimum number of hours during a certain time period. If their hours fall below those levels, they are out of luck. According to Vulture, another complaint of actors is that studios want to scan and use images of their faces and bodies in perpetuity, a practice that would substitute an actor’s image for their presence—and their pay. It also severely affects satellite industries around the actors, artists like make-up artists, property artists, and others.
In Michael Schulman’s New Yorker article, ‘”Orange is the New Black” Signals the Rot Inside the Streaming Economy”, he outlines how some of the actresses on one of Netflix’s hottest shows ever barely earned enough to survive. Many had to work second jobs. In the article Emma Myles, who played Leanne Taylor on the show, says her yearly residuals from “Orange” come out to only about twenty bucks. Fame she has, fortune not so much.
Of course, as most management does, AMPTP, The Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers is saying they just can’t afford to pay their actors more. They maintain losses and lowered revenue due to streaming and audiences still reluctant to return to theaters after the pandemic have left them with staggering losses. While this may be partly true, CEOs and upper management for many production companies are earning seven or eight figure incomes. It’s an oft-told story. We’ve heard it from the coal industry, the meatpacking industry, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. And it seems as if the workers, not only the film actors and the screenwriters of this country, have heard enough of the same old crap.
According to the Marketplace website, the toatal number of striking workers in the U.S. increased by 50% from 2021-2022. Besides the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, workers at UPS and United Airlines pilots have also just recently voted to strike. A recent Gallup poll has shown that 70% of Americans approve of unions, the highest in years. According to Paul Clark, a professor of labor and employment at Penn State, union support is strongest among Gen Z.
According to a CNBC article by Jennifer Liu, “average pay for studio executives climbed up to twenty-eight million dollars in 2021, up 53% from 2018.” The top-paid studio boss, David Zaslav, CEO for Warner Bros. Discovery, made nearly $500 million—half a billion—last year, 384 times what the average writer makes. No one should be surprised at this disparity. We see it everywhere. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk make enough money to build their own rocket fleets while Amazon drivers, now affiliated with the Teamsters, have threatened to strike over unsafe working conditions when drivers were expected to work in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
But despite these efforts by united workers, the rich keep getting richer—and more powerful—and refuse to acknowledge the unfairness of the labor practices they inflict on their employees. According to The Guardian, “In 2018 the richest 400 families in the US paid an average effective tax rate of 23% while the bottom half of American households paid a rate of 24.2% (TheGuardian). Taxes on the rich have been falling for decades. “In 1960 the 400 richest families paid as much as 56% in taxes, by 1980 the rate had fallen to 40%.” (The Guardian)
Working as an actor in the film industry does not make you rich. In fact, for most it is more of a struggle to survive. Writers are also striking for minimum wage agreement that would apply to streaming as well as broadcast TV. They are also demanding shows have a designated number of writers who would be paid for a required amount of time. And, like the actors, they wanted protection from AI writing programs.
It’s hard to believe that in one of the most lucrative industries in the world employing one of the most skilled and talented workforces on the planet, AMPTP would be so short-sighted and cheap, but it could be argued that they are the victims of a culture of corporate greed and avarice, blindly kneeling at the altar of the golden calf, grabbing more money than they could ever spend and for what? To prove that they can? The whole premise seems sordid, unbelievable, and—at its heart–sad.
Somebody should make a movie about it.
I love movies, but I will not be seeing Barbie or Oppenheimer in the near future. Support the workers. Boycott theaters and new releases until the strike is resolved.