For the first time since 1960, the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America are on strike at the same time. I don’t know how this will all shake out and I think it’s smart to prepare for a long shutdown. (Knowing my track record, everything will probably be resolved in three weeks.) But I was curious to see how Hollywood’s current predicament might resemble the action from six decades ago.
What jumps out is how familiar so much of the fight feels. A new technology arises, allowing studios and distributors to make more money from a wider variety of venues. Actors want to be paid for the exploitation of their images on this new technology. But the studios and distributors say they are all losing money as it is, so this new technology is, at best, a way for them to get back to even; as such, they can’t afford to share any of that new revenue with the actors.
This is the broad state of play when it comes to the current strike by the WGA and SAG. Studios have shifted heavily to streaming, where they are generating billions in revenue, but aside from Netflix, none of the streamers are making any profit. And Netflix argues that they are paying people extra specifically so they don’t have to pay out residuals. If that feels familiar, well, it’s because that was almost precisely the state of play in 1960.
“Briefly, the issue at stake was whether actors and writers (and by inference directors, composers, technicians of all kinds) should receive additional, so-called residual, payments if and when films on which they had worked were sold to television,” wrote Penelope Houston, the editor of Sight and Sound, back in 1960. “The showing of features on television, it should be remembered, may in a few years mean something much more extensive than it does now: experiments with Telemeter, or Pay-As-You-View television, are still being carried on, and if this or a similar system comes into operation the actors clearly want firmly to have established their own position and bargaining power.”
The terminology has changed but the point is basically the same: movies generate revenue in places other than the theater and artists would like a cut of that revenue. The studios, then as now, claim that such a move would be financially ruinous:
One trade paper editorial, too, disclosed a disagreeable truth of the kind which only comes to light in times of trouble. ‘Some few pictures,’ said The Hollywood Reporter, ‘have made big money; the rest, estimated at better than 70 percent. of the total product, ended up in the red.’ This is a daunting figure which helps to explain one of the issues in which the negotiations reportedly became bogged down. The producers, it was alleged, were sticking at the demand that the actors should receive a percentage on all sales to TV, irrespective of how the balance sheet stood on a particular film. If it is true that 70 percent of the total Hollywood product is made at a loss, it would seem difficult to blame them.
If you asked a Hollywood executive today what percentage of movies and TV shows “made money,” I guarantee you they would put the figure well below 30 percent. And the sad part is, they’re probably right: gutting theatrical and overspending on streaming has been disastrous for the balance sheets of the studios writ large and individual films writ small. But if the future of film finance is streaming-based, one can understand why the unions want to get a bigger and better cut of that pie.
As Wayne Federman noted in a piece for the Atlantic published near Ronald Reagan’s centennial—Reagan being the president of SAG at the time of the 1960 strike—that the strike ended in a compromise that more or less laid the financial groundwork for Hollywood until the advent of DVD:
After five acrimonious weeks of intense back-and-forth, the two sides reached a compromise. It contained three parts:
1. Actor residuals for all studio films made starting in 1960.
2. No residuals for any studio films produced before 1948.
3. In lieu of residuals for films made between 1948 and 1959, the producers agreed to a one-time payout of $2.25 million, a contribution SAG would use as seed money for a new union health insurance plan and a pension plan.
One imagines we’ll eventually see something similar for streaming—SAG is reportedly asking for two percent of subscription revenue to be distributed as residuals to artists—though it might take longer to settle on a method of determining how, precisely, those residuals get distributed. (Intriguingly, Matt Belloni reported in his newsletter that SAG had suggested using Parrot Analytics as a method of auditing the popularity of shows since Netflix et al. are loath to give up their data; apparently, the AMPTP balked at that. But any form of residuals is going to require some method of ratings-style measurement, so it’ll be interesting to see what everyone agrees to use.)
Of course, there are other issues at play here, questions of AI, digital compositing, etc. (One could make the argument that the idea of showing an actor in perpetuity on the small screen is an early iteration of the idea of compositing them digitally until the heat death of the universe, but that’s a debate for another day.) I am … well, curious to see if the studios actually asked for the ability to scan an extra once, pay them a single day’s work, and have the rights to use their likeness in perpetuity, as has been reported. These are complicated problems without easy solutions, which is one reason I think we’re looking at a strike that extends much longer than the five weeks of Reagan’s stoppage.
On this Friday’s Across the Movie Aisle, Alyssa, Peter, and I looked at the best movies from the first half of 2023. I feel like it’s been a pretty strong first half, all told!
Links!
Tom Cruise is the living manifestation of Cinema. And he has made getting you to the theaters his mission. (This essay is both a review of Dead Reckoning: Part One and of the idea of “Tom Cruise,” as a concept.)
Excited to have Jake Tapper on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood this week (it’ll come to your inbox but you can also subscribe/leave a review at iTunes here, if you’re so inclined). To prep, you should buy his new book All the Demons Are Here. It’s good! A great summer beach read.
Steven Soderbergh has a new show debuting this week on Max and has a new … something … cooking over at his personal website, Extension 765. He’s also selling framed Polaroid exposure tests taken on his sets, and if someone could wire me $750 immediately I’d really appreciate it.
Assigned Viewing: The Player (Max, Criterion Channel)
At one point in The Player, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) muses out loud “I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is, to eliminate the writer from the artistic process.” His only mistake was thinking too small: what if you could eliminate the writers and replace the actors with digital recreations? Then you’d be cooking with gas!
The Player is one of my all time favorites. "Can you guarantee me that ending?"
No one is rushing to get out of the entertainment biz - someone's making $ somewhere. iIn hindsight - everyone rushing to a streaming model seem so dumb/ chaotic. So our strike continues... I'm tired. But I'm also not going to grind (the job is rewarding but DIFFICULT) for meager wages.