Robber Barons and the End of Art
The writers' strike.
Our lovely Canadian summer has just turned hot. It’s a change from living under a dome of northern fire smoke, but it’s not great. Canadians don’t do well in hot weather. They react like feral cats. Their instinct is to find a cool spot under the porch, dig in, and stay there with a drink.
A hot, humid summer day seems like a good time to write about a potentially boring subject, the writers’ strike. The strike has been reported on the major news channels, but not consistently or in any depth. It’s possible I hear less about it because I am in Canada.
Here’s everything I knew about the writers’ strike a month ago:
I knew I couldn't watch Jimmy Kimmel.
I knew there was a writers’ strike.
That’s it. After several weeks of no Jimmy Kimmel and no Saturday Night Live, I finally became curious. My wife and I had questions. Who, exactly, is striking, and who are they striking against? What are they striking for?
Here’s a breakdown.
Who is striking? The Writers! The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is on strike. Who or what is the WGA? As stated on their website: “We are the Writers Guild of America (WGA), a labor union composed of the thousands of writers who write the content for television shows, movies, news programs, documentaries, animation, and Internet and mobile phones (new media) that keep audiences constantly entertained and informed.”
Who are they striking against? The Producers! The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is, according to their own website, “the entertainment industry's official collective bargaining representative, (and) negotiates 58 industry-wide collective bargaining agreements on behalf of hundreds of motion picture and television producers.” So the AMPTA is the collective face of the industry producers. The Writers Guild is one of the groups under their umbrella. So are the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), and a number of other guilds.
What are the writers striking for? Their rights! “The guild’s core issues include significant increases in compensation, minimum staffing, duration of employment, the establishment of viewer-based streaming residuals, and curbs on the use of artificial intelligence to create scripts.” (DEADLINE, July 5, 2023, David Robb. Italics mine.)
Compensation for writers has fallen over time. Cutbacks on staff mean more work for shrinking money.
Duration of employment refers to writers being able to stick with the project for the life of the project. It is more popular now to just pay for the script and be done with the writers. They may be expected to continue to contribute to rewrites and more for no extra money.
Residuals are another issue. There are currently formulas in place for residual payments which writers feel are unfair. If it were viewer-based, their compensation would increase.
The last point is about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate scripts. Nobody wants to lose their job to AI. This is also a major issue for the Actor’s Guild, SAG-AFTRA.
Another big issue is the way streaming companies, such as Netflix and others, pay for content. The streamers handle it the same way streaming music services handle it. They pay almost nothing.
So what’s going on here? To me, an outsider, it seems all too familiar. In the same way that musicians have been pushed toward a low-paying, unstable, gig economy with little to no remuneration from streaming services, the same thing is happening to the thousands of writers who provide our entertainment and contribute to our national theater, which consists of movies and television shows. The owners, in this as in all other fields of endeavor, seek to take advantage of the talents of the writers while denying them the ability to make a decent living from their work.
What is the purpose of this? It seems like a wedge strategy. Writers in the movie and television business are seen as having little leverage and fewer friends. I doubt that is actually true, but it is a comedy trope that has been around for decades. In the best of times, their salaries are not comparable with movie-star levels of compensation. If the writers can be marginalized then the owners can move on to a really expensive group of providers next: the actors!
SAG-AFTRA, the actors guild, is on the verge of striking over similar issues, and will probably call a strike before you read this. (UPDATE: SAG_AFTRA announced their strike today, July 13.) The one issue that stands out is that of using AI programs to usurp the likenesses and work of actors. Does this seem like a good idea? Is this the way we want the arts to go? Do Hollywood producers really want to digitize the entire industry, so that AI is providing stories, dialogue, and character arcs, while digitized versions of living actors portray the characters? If the producers get their way with AI, they may not be stuck with using living actors at all. They could re-animate the dead actors who are currently resting in peace.
This is not too different from the current state of affairs. Writers stick to plotlines and outlines that were codified years ago because these are the outlines that result in hit movies. Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) has taken over the appearance of most films to produce amazing scenes and delicious backgrounds. Actors are often reduced to facing the camera and uttering one or two lines in a digitized world. Would a completely digitized product, from scripts to actors, be so different? Would audiences around the world accept this as a form of entertainment, built as it is on the old forms?
I am not a Hollywood insider. I read up on the WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike and the impending strike of the actors in SAG_AFTRA. I use my experiences of movie-watching in the world of actors posing against green screens. I also use my experience of witnessing the decline of the music industry and the snatching of profits away from the musicians and into the pockets of the streamers. Statements I make in this article are made from my own observations and from online sources. I am not predicting the future or trying to lead people into thinking I know what’s going on. The things I point out are observable and the information I present is easily found.
And yet, the writers’ strike is in progress and the actors’ strike is imminent. Remember, these bodies have participated in strikes before. The current WGA strike is not the longest on record. During every such strike in the past there were dire warnings about damage to the industry, the end of the way things are done. This time it may actually be true.
Today a piece of news came out on the website DEADLINE, about the strategy of the producers against the writers. They are going to wait for the writers to go broke. They don’t plan to meet for negotiations until the autumn. “Not Halloween specifically,” according to one source, but, you know, around then. They want to wait until writers are losing their homes and apartments before returning to the negotiating table. (Dominic Patten, website DEADLINE, July 11, 2023).
In the meantime, there is news that the writers are turning to stand-up comedy gigs to, hopefully, make ends meet.
So now, with my head full of dire predictions, robber barons, and the end of art as a way to make a living, I gather my drink and head back to the cool spot under the porch. I ponder the day when all movies are special-effects movies. No actors, no genuine scenery, no writers, no plausible plots, simply sound and fury signifying nothing.
Illustration by author.