“In the second quarter of last year alone, Netflix lost 1.3 million subscribers in the US and Canada, while earning a total of $4.3 billion on the year. Yet even that relatively modest net profit is deceptive, since Netflix amortises its content over a period of four to five years, while spending close to $20 billion each year on new productions. In reality, then, the company is burning cash in the hopes of a future profit while losing subscribers, a business model that is clearly headed for the rocks. When Hollywood writers and actors demand their “fair share of the profits”, they might think twice about what it is they are asking for.” — David Samuels, “America’s Popculture Armageddon” ~ Unherd
I. A Diagnostic Analysis of the Hollywood Strike as an Archetypal Postmodern Event— Reminiscent of Don Delillo’s White Noise (think the barn scene in the beginning of the novel where Murray takes Jack to witness people taking pictures of the “Most Photographed Barn in the World”)— Strike as Stage Production, the Irony of Which Makes it Impossible to Take Seriously
In a word with the Wall Street Journal Fran Drescher—formerly “the Nanny,” now the president of the Screen Actor’s Guild— encapsulates all the vain self-glorification of the Hollywood Writer’s strike, endemic to today’s wokeness-riven entertainment industry, admitting,
“As a star that I am I do get special treatment,”
She is an actress, I am aware. But it’s still galling the sheer immodesty she exhibits effortlessly reconciling her past acclaim with her new star role as the leader of a labor union.
She adds,
“So yes I do have a unique situation. But I am a girl from queens. I am very connected to the provincial world I grew up in.”
You’re a highly successful Hollywood actor pretending to stage a peasant revolt against streaming services—Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Disney Plus— for God’s sake!
Pardon me if I’m a little slow to grasp the connection to “provincial” Queens, New York!
No event like this strike yields more bitter evidence of the hopeless self-absorption and brazen uncouth entitlement of contemporary mass culture.
As Holman Jenkins Jr. says acerbically in his column, “AI is Hollywood’s Fake Villain” in the Journal,
If you suspected celebrities outbid each other in exhibitionist sanctimony, this appears to have been the precise force that propelled them into an ill-advised strike.
Ill-advised is the nice way of putting it. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sean Higgins observes the strikers are only up against an utterly collapsed business model. Unlike with traditional tv networks,
Streaming and cable services get most of their money from viewers signing up rather than from ads. Streaming services therefore don’t need to stretch out the seasons. They can produce a minimum number of episodes needed and pocket what they would otherwise spend to produce additional episodes. That’s why the model is so appealing to the big entertainment companies. Actors and writers usually get paid by the episode, so shorter seasons means less work for them.
And since in lieu of Nielsen ratings, there’s no way to gauge the popularity and therefore to calculate the fungible value of a streaming show, it complicates how to decide a proxy by which to determine how much writers and actors should get paid. Higgins says,
Streamed series provide no reliable source of public data to track how popular they are. Studios usually don’t release the numbers. That puts the actors and writers of those shows in a difficult position when to comes to negotiating pay. Even if the series they’re working on is successful, they won’t necessarily be able to use that as leverage to demand more.
Indeed another thing about the unwisdom (to say nothing of the bad taste) of the strike is the strikers have no leverage! The strike will shut down production for months, meanwhile streaming services have endless options to keep their audience happy, who in my experience in college, only watch the same old unfunny tv shows like “The Office” or “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” over and over and over again anyway. If nothing new gets produced, we’re so content with reruns—also vulgar documentaries on sensational topics—no one would notice. And if the release of new seasons of White Lotus (a show I actually quite enjoy), for example, are delayed, public frustration with the strikers will surely mount, with no one ostensibly to blame but the strikers who struck.
Tv fans are liberal and sympathetic (me excepted) to types who earnestly march around in unions, protesting “greed” to a point… Sooner or later their patience yields to the consumer beasts of they’re worser, although more powerful natures. No one is going to have sympathy for the strikers if it looks like “White Lotus” is never coming back, no matter how sympathetic they might be for poor Hollywood writers, the perverse equivalent of yesterday’s industrial “workers,” or “deplorables,” to suit the incorrigible solipsism of today’s over-educated left.
The Economist in their Schumpeter Business column the other week, “Hollywood’s Blockbuster Strikes May Become a Flop,” wrote,
Yet the stars will struggle more than they did when Reagan was in charge. Strikes are less disruptive to tv schedules now that there is no longer a schedule to disrupt. The on-demand era means viewers face a sea of choice on opening their apps; any gaps are less obvious. Streaming has also made Hollywood less reliant on America, both in terms of its audience and in terms of production. Netflix is the most extreme example: more than two-thirds of its 238m subscribers live overseas, and nearly two-thirds of the shows it commissioned in the past 12 months are being made abroad, according to Ampere Analysis. (It may even be happy to shift its viewers’ consumption away from expensive American productions and towards these lower-cost shows, speculates one sometime rival.)
In a world dominated by franchises, actors also wield less economic clout than they used to. Last month Warner Bros replaced its Superman; Sony has fielded multiple Spider-Men (the most recent is animated). As Anthony Mackie, who plays Captain America, has put it: “The evolution of the superhero has meant the death of the movie star.” And as audiences tire of superheroes, studios are finding new franchises. This year’s highest-earning movie so far is Universal’s animated reboot of “Super Mario Bros”.
Megan Mcardle in her Washington Post column, “The Real Threat to Hollywood Worker’s Livelihoods? You and Me,” insightfully compares the disruptive effects of streaming to what Spotify did to music,
Adjusted for inflation, recording revenue has fallen by about one-third since it peaked in 1999. And that’s actually good news, because before streaming services like Spotify came along, piracy had the industry teetering on the brink of extinction. In 2015, total recording revenue was not quite one-third of what it had been in 1999.
Streaming stopped the bleeding by making music so cheap that piracy wasn’t worth the risk of legal complaints or virus-infected downloads. Unfortunately, it wasn’t such a good deal for many musicians, who complain that they can’t afford to live on the paltry payouts from streaming. It isn’t even a good deal for Spotify, which still hasn’t turned an annual profit since the company was founded in 2006.
So who got the money that used to support musicians? You. And I. And everyone else who no longer buys cassettes or CDs. All that value got transferred back to the pockets of consumers who pay peanuts for downloads or a streaming subscription, and have fiercely resisted all attempts to get them to pay more. With piracy always lurking as an alternative, there’s no real way for music sellers to make them.
Movies and television are vulnerable to the same forces. The internet clearly wants to compress the old distribution channels into a maximum of two: theatrical release and streaming. And as the Entertainment Strategy Guy told me, “There’s no way that is going to make as much money as the old system.”
II. Iger to the Striking Writers ~ Macron to the Striking Pensioners: a Neoliberal Philosopher King
It gratified me immensely that Disney Chief exec Bob Iger called the strikers “unrealistic,” in a fashion that recalled Macron talking down to the millions of French absurdly protesting his raising the retirement age by 2 years (something I wrote two posts about months ago you might want to go back to). The Financial Times’ Christopher Grimes reports, “Lights Camera Industrial Action,”
Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, told CNBC on Thursday that it was the “worst time in the world” for work stoppages, given the industry’s nascent recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. “There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic.”
Iger made the comments while he was at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, which has been dubbed “billionaires’ summer camp”. Earlier in the week, Disney had announced that Iger’s tenure would be extended by two years and that his annual bonus scheme had been increased by five times.
But it gets worse. One thing the strikers are demanding, besides an arbitrary 2% cut of diminishing residuals, is guarantees that generative AI doesn’t use actors’ digital likenesses to make films without compensation, and that Chat GPT doesn’t render writers’ jobs obsolete, when while they’re on strike, they only accelerate the process by which Wall Street and studios might be more incentivized to replace them with AI anyway.
Writers don’t wanna write? Well we should get going on that ChatGPT all the more quickly, full steam ahead.
And on the face of it, AI probably should make better movies than people, if it’s possible, and in some respects it probably is. I’m thinking about Marvel superhero movies and reheated now wokeified franchises like Star Wars and Little Mermaid, which rely tremendously on special effects and CGI not to mention shitty fucking writing for which a ten year old could write the script as it already is. If AI can produce junk superhero movies, without human writers or human actors, then god damn it, it should. You know what? Those movies are so dumb, I don’t like the idea that anyone makes money from it at all, let alone a striking writer who wants a middle class wage out of it. Give me a break.
But the actors protesting AI replicating their likeness are ten times more ridiculous. Of course they will be compensated handsomely. This is what we have copyright for. And you would think that actors, in love with themselves already, would be thrilled to have their faces simulated by AI, especially from beyond the grave. Is AI not an actor’s golden opportunity perhaps to be famous for eternity? It’s noteworthy that Tom Cruise hasn’t taken part in the strike. He gets it.
III. The Strike is an Insult to Creative Work
Now I want to make a personal statement— as an artist myself, a novelist and short-story writer, I submit: This strike offends me. What kind of writer strikes for higher wages? Perhaps I have a romantic view of art and artists, and I suppose my scorn for the strikers as mediocre writers evinced above biases my opinion, but I thought that for any genuine artist worth the description, it was beneath their self-regard to expect, let alone to demand, a middle class living from their creative work. What artist identifies as “middle class?” I’ve listened to these people in interviews explicitly say the strike is about their “middle class” livelihood. What in the fuck…
Aren’t the middle class supposed to be “bourgeois” losers to lofty creative artists with more high-minded cares? What artist presumes to command the attention of the whole world revolting against Netflix and AI—not even the captains of industry like Bob Iger but the inanimate business model?— by shutting down Los Angeles, losing the city billions, picketing? I thought artists were supposed to toil in a dingy garret alone to die loveless, friendless, broke, alone, unappreciated, without recognition.
For me that’s half the fun of being a creative soul, the challenge of committing oneself to the creation of beauty as an end in itself, the glory of which rises in variation to the loneliness of the task one is compelled to endure to produce something immortal. For a sense of the scale of the sacrilege of the strike, I try to imagine some of the creative minds for whose originality I have the most admiration whining on a picket line. Now at the risk of conjuring a Monty Python level of absurdity and neutering my argument with polemical overkill, I ask you to imagine Ludwig Van Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Bronte, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, or Bob Dylan striking for a middle class wage.
IV. Give ‘em Hell, Bob
I suppose it goes without saying, the hero of this production so to speak for me, is Bob Iger. Between weathering the storm of Ron Desantis’s farcical attack on Disney’s woke posturing compounded now by the pressure of Hollywood burning his effigy, as he navigates the irrevocable disruption of the new business environment, Iger is infinitely more the creative artist than these pathetic writers and actors. And as he pushes back on everybody purely for the sake of pursuing his own commercial self-interest and rewarding his shareholders, it shows great neoliberal grit. I wish him luck. I’m rooting for you Bob Iger. The Neoliberal Standard is on your side.
Kevin Dietsch Getty Images
— Jay