THE HOLLYWOOD ARMAGEDDON: BIGGEST STRIKE IN 63 YEARS

July 15, 2023 -Durt Fibo

This week ended like a Hollywood apocalypse as the SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), after a unanimous vote, immediately left the industry with a strike that began at midnight, Friday, thus uniting with the 75-day-old WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike. This marks the second time America’s actors and writers have joined forces against major studios, and it was precipitated by similar grievances which caused the first joint strike in 1960: abuses of new technology threatening their livelihoods.

The 1960 joint action arose primarily from the reselling of films to the nascent media of television. The present stampede is mainly about studios selling and reselling their output via streaming media, which gives the artists smaller, often delayed residuals based on revenue and viewership numbers well hidden by the corporate structuring. In 1960, the unions eventually won some security by establishing new rules compensating them for televised movies, reruns of television broadcasts, and created the artists’ first real pension plan.

Today’s actors and writers are squaring off against not just technological expansion, but the reincarnation of the Big Studio era, with CEO’s and other whizzers earning tens of billions of dollars in base “salaries” combined with with other valuable forms of tribute wrapped in the same euphemisms used in the rest of the Pantagruelian corporate world. That all comes, of course from the pockets of the actors and writers. Additionally, the ill-timed studio suggestion that extras be paid only once while conceding the right to have their beings recycled in AI formats, provoked an eruption of disgust from all actors, stars or standbys.

The studios’ mindset was bluntly expressed just days before SAG-AFTRA voted to strike. The trade paper Deadline had quoted, under promise of anonymity, one studio executive as saying: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

The artists’ response was best expressed by the towering Ron Perlman, who, in his best Hellboy persona, said: “The motherfucker who said we’re gonna keep this thing going until people start losing their houses and apartments – listen to me motherfucker, there’s a lot of ways to lose your house. Some of it is financial. Some of it is karma. And some of it is just figuring out who the fuck said that – and we know who said that – and where he fucking lives.” In that now excised social media post, Perlman stomped the ‘anonymous’ executive for hoping writers end up homeless and starved while “making 27 fucking million dollars a year for creating nothing. Be careful motherfucker. Be really careful. Because that’s the kinda shit that stirs shit up.”