The streamers are trying to cut writers pay
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Actors quite possibly going to go on strike soon, and Deadline reports this bit of where the studios are coming from:
https://deadline.com/2023/07/writers...rs-1235434335/
David Roth has a typically good piece about David Zaslav and other titans of business:Receiving positive feedback from Wall Street since the WGA went on strike May 2, Warner Bros Discovery, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Paramount and others have become determined to “break the WGA,” as one studio exec blatantly put it.
To do so, the studios and the AMPTP believe that by October most writers will be running out of money after five months on the picket lines and no work.
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”
The studios and streamers’ next think financially strapped writers would go to WGA leadership and demand they restart talks before what could be a very cold Christmas. In that context, the studios and streamers feel they would be in a position to dictate most of the terms of any possible deal.
https://defector.com/they-dont-want-...dont-need-them
There is the abstract sense of a lot of big ideas dying or being abandoned at once, but there's also the more urgent feeling of being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed by the people in charge, who have decided either that they do not in fact require any actual people anymore—and this is a pretty fucking bold thing in its own right, the idea that for instance Reddit somehow doesn't necessarily need Redditors, or that you can as a viable business model have editorial bots writing posts meant to be consumed by ad bots—or just that they would like to extract more money from those people, and right away.
That there is always some business justification for this—that the things that people have used and loved despite their better judgment were often pretty unremarkable businesses in terms of their profits—does not necessarily make that justification more convincing. If it weren't for the attention and affection of the people that use them, these businesses wouldn't exist as such; they can grow, and can live a long time in that way, but they can never really become something other than that. This is the problem for people like Zaslav, who has become the face of a very powerful and lucrative industry that, given its relationship to creative people and their ideas, is inherently much less predictable from one moment to the next than investors prefer. The faceless capital that rules all this wants to see things get bigger and watch numbers go up; the people that support it, on the other hand, mostly just want to go on using the things they enjoy. That fundamental disconnect only becomes an existential threat—that is, only gets to the point we're at now—when capital decides, out of spite or impatience or greed, that it is sick of it all and tries to see whether there isn't some way to do this without having to deal with all those people and their bullshit.
This is one of the oldest and most fundamental capitalist fantasies, and one that this moment's reigning titans have kept themselves busy chasing—the one true disruption that would unlock to the elect the alchemist's secret of Free Real Estate. That it has always proven false, for the rich people whose wealth and distance and incuriosity have given them the idea that they are somehow outside and above history, would only make it seem more appealing. The idea that all those riches can somehow be won on vision alone, and that all those other people were always and only in the way, is alluring to the people that have appointed themselves the protagonists of reality and the heroes of the free market. If the clock is clearly ticking—if these people haven't really invented anything valuable or good in a long while, and seem increasingly out of ideas—they don't understand it in a way that will matter to anyone else. -
It is really grim
Another studio tactic via David Simon
https://twitter.com/AoDespair/status/1679230230647431169?s=20
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These people are such awful humans, there's no need to make up stories about them keeping children imprisoned in cavesComment
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Cancel your streamers in solidarityComment
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A lot better than Greta Gerwig, who went to the Barbie premiere despite co-writing it.Comment
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The SAG cliam the studios want to scan background artists for one day's pay and be used for eternityComment
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IIRC, WGA changed their guidance on promotion. I know that because Bill Hader wasn't doing his Ringer podcast on Barry, and then he came back later and did it, because there was a shift.Originally posted by Incandenza View Post
But that was all before the SAG strike.Comment
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Gerwig is attending while her co-writer and partner is not. I have to wonder if Gerwig suspects that not promoting would be used against her having had to claw her way to the opportunities she gets.Comment
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As well as occupying a position that has historically been the most precarious in the businessComment
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She's also a producer, I assume, and the director. The directors signed a deal, did they not?Originally posted by caja-dglh View Post
Andy Greenwald on The Ringer said he thought those comments about crushing the union will actually help strengthen their resolve. Lots of writers are already losing their homes and moving away because they can't make a living in Hollywood with the current system.
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She is a producer, director, writer and actor. It is a very complicated web of solidarity where there is no right move.Comment
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True, the actors in Oppenheimer probably have a lot more reputation in the bank with studios than a woman doing her first major studio film does.
Michael Schur was on The Distraction podcast in March, before the WGA strike, and talked about the issues that were involved. It's worth listening to. They've clipped the relevant parts and put it up on their feed:
https://the-distraction-a-defector-p...ure-making-artLast edited by Incandenza; 14-07-2023, 16:05.Comment
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Some great images here
Union Strong: Billy Crystal, Alison Brie Adam Sandler ,Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux, Jane Fonda, Rosanna Arquette, Paul Giamatti and many more
Also Brian Cox speaks to TribuneComment
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