Tuesday, September 28, 2021

ANS -- Brad Hicks on Hollywood on strike

Here's a piece by Brad Hicks.  Did you know that Hollywood is about to go on strike?  I hadn't heard about it before this.  I have included some of the comments.
--Kim


I've been following this story through social media, and only just today, a few days away from the strike authorization vote, did I realize that I am ONLY seeing ANY coverage of this story through social media posts. So I checked myself, went to ALL of my usual news sources, ran searches on each of their web pages. WaPo, NYT, USA Today, MSNBC, nothing. Deadline and the LA Times are covering it, of course, but national news editors just don't seem to think it's a story. (Ironically, the UK Guardian did cover it, but only once, very recently, and I missed it.)
Basically everybody in Hollywood who works on live-action TV or movies (except for a few cable studios whose contracts haven't expired yet, but everybody else) "below the line" (everybody but on-screen talent, producers, and directors) are probably going to go on strike, shutting down nearly every live-action TV series and movie production for who knows how long.
Blast Jacobin for being a far-left rag if you want, but I linked their story because it's the only one that includes a history of past strikes AND a link to the IATSE's Instagram page full of first-hand horror stories about abuses that the studios have gotten away with for so long that they consider it unthinkable to stop. It really boils down to three things:
REFUSAL TO PAY THE SAME FOR STREAMING WORK. Back when streaming was a tiny percentage of revenue and nobody knew if it would ever be big, crew (and even most actors) waived profit sharing. Now streaming contracts make up a huge percentage of the studios' profits, and they want to keep not sharing those profits. More importantly ...
FAILURE TO PAY A LIVING WAGE TO ENTRY-LEVEL WORKERS. Low-level workers have to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, get paid $15/hr or less, AND are expected to pick up their own travel and meal expenses when sent on location. And even more importantly ...
ABSOLUTELY ROUTINE LIFE-THREATENINGLY LOW WORKPLACE SAFETY STANDARDS. Production staff are routinely threatened with termination if they have to call an ambulance for a serious medical emergency, or if they have to take any sick leave. And those emergencies happen routinely, because studios keep shortening production timelines and insisting everybody, whether creative or crew, make it up with 17 hour days and 6 day weeks. What started as rare short-term emergency requests have become, they document, entirely routine. Crew in particular are expected to work at least four months at a stretch, and frequently for several years at a stretch, for 17 hours a day with a 2 hour commute before and after each work day, a total of 5 hours' time off per day including sleep.
- - - - -
Some of this is that same damned thing you always see: do someone a favor twice, and from now on it's your job.
But a thread emerges from these stories that just disgusts me, and that is just how much our world hates you for wanting to make art. The urge to make art is nearly universal, part of being human. The urge to make art that lots of people will see and and enjoy is an urge that leaves people vulnerable to brutal exploitation. And the money people are all too willing to take full advantage of that vulnerability. And when they've burned you out, used you up, left you (as many of these stories document) a physical and emotional cripple and you ask for any consideration at all? They feel entirely comfortable with throwing you away. For one, they hate you for wanting to make art. But also, they know that there are a million people right behind you, as starved as you were to make art, who'll follow you right into that meat grinder.
Enough is enough. This needs to stop.
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5 Comments
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    • Andrew Jensen
      But Brad Hicks, if we paid artists a living wage, then the *poors* would be able to make art, instead of it being a career path only available to the families of the wealthy.
      1
    • Yeah. Yeah, I suspect of you exaggerating for effect, but if you're not -- you're not wrong. My dad was a working artist, I grew up around artists, many of my friends are artists (you included, at times), some of them professionally, and I've even had a couple of acquaintances make it "below the line" after heading out to Hollywood.
      And I always encouraged my artist friends who were doing work that to my extremely experienced eye was as good as or better than anybody out there making good money at it. And in my old age, I wonder if I was doing them any favors, because Jesus Fucking Christ if you aren't (a) a trust fund kid AND (b) a well-liked family member of or college buddy of the people who can afford to pay top-dollar for art, maybe they might have had happier lives if they'd given up.
      But Jesus fuck a monkey, making art made most of them so much *happier.* And their art enriched me, if nobody else. Was I supposed to not care about that, like a good *homo economicus?*
      1
    • If there's one thing I've learned bouncing around my industry, it's that there are careers and businesses which aren't intended to make money, they're intended to lose money that was made in an actually profitable endeavor. Like a "loss leader" in retail, except it's the whole business. Maybe 1 in 10 of these businesses ever turn a profit. There are whole industries that rely on their workers having parents or spouses who support them so that their jobs don't have to. Putting aside the typical "jobs for teenagers" which justify not paying a living wage because they assume their workers aren't self-supporting, we have:
      Anything that pays completely on commission, like Real Estate. There's a reason real estate agent is a very popular career among upper middle class housewives. I'm not even talking about MLMs, which are scams and not careers, but there are plenty of real career paths that work this way.
      Anything where only the upper class can *afford* the product of your labor. If you don't casually move in the networks containing the sort of people who buy, say, yachts, you aren't going to drum up a lot of customers for your yachtmaking business.
      And of course there's the whole "unpaid internship" thing that was invented to make sure that the only people who could get work experience in a field were people who could afford to support themselves without an income for a couple of years.
      All of this Calumniating in my *own* industry, Architecture.
      I kinda wish, as a culture, it was acceptable to admit out loud that some jobs have class prerequisites, so that more people like me wouldn't waste their fucking time.
      2


  • Elizabeth Osborne Fischer
    I only know because I have friends in the industry. This isn't just about 'sacrifice', this is about abuse. 28 hour days, no meals/breaks, then 1+hours to the hotel is one example of what this strike vote is about.
    2


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