Workers of the World Ignite!
A story about Corporate Greed...
As you might have already heard, Hollywood writers went on strike and were then joined by the actors so I started reading about it and turns out, the issues are kinda complicated and here’s what I have so far:
During the pandemic people were stuck at home and weren’t spending money on restaurants and travel and the occasional visit to a strip club, so they felt OK about spending money on streaming services like Netflix.
Streaming (which the internet describes as a method of receiving data in a “steady, continuous flow” so they clearly haven’t tried watching the Kansas City Royals on the Bally Sports channel because it skips and stops and rewinds on its own and occasionally tells you the content you paid for and want to watch isn’t available and you should check back on the 12th of Never and once in a while the screen goes totally black, but you can still hear the sound, so it has all the professionalism of a community college TV channel in which all the students will get a C-).
Wait, where were we?
Right, explaining streaming.
Because of the pandemic “streaming” became extremely profitable for a short period of time and all the Hollywood executives with no ideas of their own (which seems to be about 97% of them) wanted in. So they copied Netflix, but apparently forgot that a streaming service requires constant entertainment content produced by unionized talent like writers and actors.
According to the following article from The Atlantic, the businessmen who run Hollywood and bet on streaming are under pressure from Wall Street to show profits and keep stock prices high and since that’s how they’ll keep their high-paying jobs (according to the internet, David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers and Discovery, earned $247 million in 2021) they don’t really care all that much about the quality of their product which, having worked in the newspaper business, sounds extraordinarily familiar.
For instance: reality shows are popular with Hollywood not because they’re good, reality shows are popular because they’re cheap to produce.
If you need to watch yet another show about some self-centered and overly-dramatic strangers who meet and fall in love in two days and then break up immediately and throw tantrums in-between so Hollywood producers can afford that second Lamborghini , Hollywood producers are pretty much OK with that.
Anyway…
If their work is going to appear on streaming services, the writers and actors want their residuals (the payment they receive for repeat showing of TV shows and movies) to be based on viewership levels, but the studios don’t want to share the information.
Streaming services make money from subscriptions and the shows and movies are semi-permanently available, so traditional ways of counting how many people watch the shows and movies – like ticket sales or Neilsen ratings – don’t apply and the studios want everybody to trust them when they send out residual checks for amounts like $27.30 which is what one of the actors on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black received for her work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/hollywoods-cruel-strategy/674730/
One of the few benefits of being old (the main one is not being dead) is remembering things that happened in the past and in the past James Garner sued Universal Studios because he starred in The Rockford Files from 1975 to 1980 and believed he didn’t get his fair share from the show’s syndication and accused Universal of deceiving him and suppressing information about his show’s syndication and paying him a fraction of what they actually owed him. Garner sued them in 1983 for $16.5 million which back then was quite a bit of money and these days is almost enough to sign a mediocre shortstop.
They settled out of court, but part of the settlement prevented Garner from telling people just how much they gave him, possibly because Universal Studios didn’t want people to know just how big a bunch of assholes they turned out to be.
And speaking of assholes:
In the current dispute a studio executive told Deadline their strategy was: “to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
So it’s the people at the top who have more money than God and can afford to not work versus the people who actually do the work and have to keep working to pay their rent or mortgages and if you’re having a hard time deciding which side to root for you’re probably reading the wrong blog.
But aren’t actors rich, too?
Corporate America makes sure you know exactly how much their best-paid employees make and you can go on Baseball Reference right now this minute and it will tell you how much the Los Angeles Dodgers are paying Mookie Betts.
Now try to find out how much the owners of the Dodgers make and good luck with that.
It’s not an accident that you know how much well-paid workers make and Corporate America hopes you’ll be unsympathetic to the demands of workers and it’s a strategy that’s worked because if baseball players go on strike, people immediately start complaining about “millionaire” ballplayers, which ignores the fact that the vast majority of ballplayers have short careers and don’t make enough money to retire on which is why you can go to your local batting cage and get hitting lessons from a former Big League player.
They need to pay the rent.
And the same goes for actors.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the average pay for California actors was $27.73 per hour which would be OK, not great, if the actors got paid full-time, but the Bureau of Labor also pointed out they make $27.73 when they work and acting jobs can be few and far between.
So in reality we ought to admire the “millionaire” ballplayers and actors who have nothing to complain about, but still go on strike in support of their co-workers who haven’t been as fortunate.
Artificial Intelligence and Genuine Greed
According to the following article from The Guardian, Artificial Intelligence still isn’t sophisticated enough to replace all the actors, but the studios proposed that “background performers” should be scanned once and get one day’s pay and then the studios would own their likeness and be able to use it in any way they choose on any project they like without consent or compensation.
So the background performers would be put out of a job by their own likeness and also have to explain just how they wound up appearing in Lesbian Bubblebutt Stepsisters which sounds like a movie title I just made up, but isn’t and I know because somehow my 97-year-old mother who can’t see for shit and decided to start randomly pushing buttons on the TV remote in an effort to find an Audie Murphy movie, somehow ordered it on a pay-for-view channel.
Since that movie is not listed among Audie Murphy’s film credits I asked my brother if it actually starred Roy Rogers and he said no, he was pretty sure it was Dale Evans.
According to the Hollywood Reporter and everybody else who heard her say it, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher called bullshit on Disney CEO Bob Iger for saying the actor’s demands were “not realistic” when she pointed out that Iger makes $78,000 a day.
She also said 99% of their union members don’t make a lot of money and ¾ of them can’t make the $26,000 baseline to receive health coverage.
She was joined in her complaints by one of my favorite Grumpy Old Men, Bernie Sanders, and he pointed out that what’s happening in Hollywood is happening everywhere: the people at the top being greedy and willing to screw over the people at the bottom so they can make another million and as far as I know, Bernie did not use the word “fuck” but I’m guessing he really wanted to.
See?
I told you this was complicated and there are more issues involved that I didn’t cover, but it’s time to move on anyway and I’ll try to be more concise, but just as pissed off when I describe the other cartoons.
There’s a transgender “influencer” named Dylan Mulvaney who posted a video with some cans of Bud Light beer the company sent her and it was part of a Bud Light promotion where people could win $15,000 from Bud Light for posting videos of themselves with a lot of beer.
(You’d think Norm from Cheers would win that thing hands down, but unfortunately Norm seems to have retired from professional competition.)
In any case…
Despite their opposition to the idea of “gender fluidity” a bunch of Conservatives got their panties in a twist because apparently watching a trans person dress as Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s will make you want to put on one of those little black dresses, smoke a cigarette while using a holder and swill a can of Bud Light at the same time.
As we’ve discussed before (assuming me writing something and you reading it fits your description of the word “discussion”) a lot of issues are distractions to keep you from thinking about stuff that actually matters and I used the cartoon at the top of this section to point out all the issues Conservatives are ignoring while getting hot and bothered about a trans person holding a can of Bud Light.
For as long as it was feasibly possible (and several decades after that) Republicans denied climate change was happening. Then the polar ice caps started melting and we were setting world records for high temperatures and yet another Spinal Tap drummer spontaneously combusted.
Once telling melting people that they weren’t actually hot stopped working, the Republicans needed a more logical response and they came up with an idea: plant a trillion trees.
Actually, I’m pretty sure they stole the idea because Republicans haven’t come up with an original idea since the “trickle-down theory” which turned out to be what happens when a rich person pisses on your leg.
Someone on the internet who has way more time than me because I’ve got a lot of Kansas City Royals losses to watch if I can get the Bally Sports channel to stop buffering, did the math and said if you planted a trillion trees and it took just one second per tree, it would still take 31,000 years to finish the job. In other words, just about the same time they’ll complete whatever road project they’re working on in your neighborhood and I don’t really need to know where you live because right now they seem to be rebuilding every road in America.
Basically, the trillion trees idea is yet another bullshit distraction so the Republicans can act like they’ve got a plan to do something about climate change, but in the meantime keep supporting oil companies and manufacturers that use fossil fuels and pollute the atmosphere, so it’s pretty much like someone saying in 31,000 years they plan to lose weight, but right now this minute they’re going to eat a half-dozen Dunkin’ Donuts.
Also, apparently we have a hard time understanding huge numbers like a trillion, because according to the internet planting a trillion trees would take up an area the size of the Continental United States and cost $300 billion, neither of which really matters because we’re never going to actually do it.
We’re in trouble right now and the Republicans have offered up a plan that will be complete in the year 33023 and they’re hoping you think that’s logical and will also quit drinking Bud Light.
Donald Trump is looking at a third indictment which would beat the previous World Record for Ex-President Indictments (which before the Donald was zero) and yet somehow still doesn’t seem like nearly enough.
Trump also faces charges for falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up his marital affairs, he’s in trouble for hoarding documents he wasn’t supposed to have, prosecutors in Georgia are investigating whether he broke the law while trying to overturn the state election results in 2020 and the PGA has a few questions about some of his golf scores.
Anyway…
The Kansas City Star had a story about 19 consecutive days at or above 110 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona and through the miracle of not really having a better idea, I combined the two stories and pointed out that it’s really fucking hot in Phoenix and Donald Trump has been indicted an unusual number of times for a guy who wants to return to the White House.
OK, once again that’s it for the day and I really hope you have a nice weekend unless you’re the over-paid CEO of some company, which as far as I know describes all of them.
Anybody remember the summer of 1980? Kansas City had Temps in the triple digits for like 17 days in a row. That's where we'll be every summer and then some.
Great writing as usual. Gave me lots of laughs. But ... it is all so sad ...