The Stage is Set for the New New Hollywood

The Stage is Set for the New New Hollywood

Andy Marken December 6, 2023

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It doesn't matter whether they are tall, short, ugly, good-looking It turns me on that they talk to me about things I don't know. - Tokio, Money Heist (La Casa de Papel), Vancouver Media, 2017 2011

With the SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) strike coming to an end - still waiting for the agreement to be formally signed, the entertainment industry is going to be changed forever.

Neither side totally likes the agreement but that means it's a good agreement because there was give/take on both sides.

The industry (companies and people) has been anxious and needing to get back to work since the writers' strike went on back in May.

With the directors and writers' agreements wrapped, most folks didn't think the agreement would take long since insiders and outsiders thought they had a partially written script - at least the plotline - to follow.

The directors and writers were satisfied with having the negotiators negotiate but the actors wanted to adlib and said nope we need to talk with the bosses.

All went well until it didn't.

There was supposedly a soft agreement on both sides until the SAG-AFTRA negotiators discovered the agreement was missing a page.

It added a new wrinkle borrowed from John L. Lewis when he told the declining mining industry his folks needed to be paid for each ton his boys (they were obviously mostly male) mined.

SAG/AFTRA edited his script so that actors would be paid for each streaming subscriber they helped dig up.

The actors' negotiators referred to it as a tiny portion of the action, while studios/streamers called it a levy.

To say the studio/streamer bosses didn't like the idea of revenue sharing would be putting it mildly especially since all of the streamers (except for Netflix) were already leaking profits and were struggling to figure out how to make money in the new entertainment arena other than simply firing folks left n' right.

Of course, the bosses also knew that once they broke from tradition, all of the rest of the entertainment unions were going to expect/demand their cut.

Sure, there's some question of the value of a subscriber who is in this quarter and gone the next. Or why Hollywood content was more valuable to the streamers' audience when refreshingly different/exciting shows/movies were coming from creators in other countries.

Those questions didn't get addressed because once the writers' negotiator, Crabtree-Ireland, said they wanted 57 cents per subscriber, the studio/streamer bosses left the room.

As the door was slamming shut, he added it was only a starting point. But the studio/streamer heads described it as an ultimatum too wide to cross.

A cooler head, not involved in the negotiations, suggested maybe 10-20 cents per subscriber would be a more palatable change in the whole revenue sharing idea.

He was sorta right because the Hollywood entertainment industry is different from any business model you want to look at since everyone is a contract worker building her/his portfolio rep moving from project to project.

Range - Superhero, western and rom-com shows may have faded from popularity, but there are still a wide range of video stories ready to be told and watched.

But writers are all back in their rooms coming up with, editing, polishing and finishing scripts that will hopefully meet the constantly changing entertainment tastes of folks for films/shows in every possible genre.

The industry won't come close to the 2023 $26.7B value that it was originally projected to produce.

That shortfall has, and will, continue to impact the thousands of professionals who don't get a magical front-end and back-end payment but will only get paid for the days they work.

Broader, Deeper - The directors, writers and actors gained all of the headlines during the strike, but a growing number of people were idled during the break and they were the ones most affected.

Film industry researcher, Stephen Follows, noted that film and show crews have grown steadily over the past two decades with 48 percent of the individuals working on-set while others are involved in the pre- and post-production work.

As films/shows have improved and gotten more complex, the number of crew members have increased over 51 percent, according to film analyst Stephen Follows.

Unseen Numbers - The majority of the people involved in creating a show/movie are never shown on the credits, not listed on IMDb and never considered for one of the statues.But their numbers grow.

Unfortunately, if you stick around and watch the credits - as we do - you won't see most of these people listed.

Flatline - Shutting down video content production projects in the US dramatically affected thousands of professionals and many had to drop out to make ends meet. The rest have to try and recover lost income.

The revenue sharing proposal/agreement won't affect these folks, other than the fact that they'll be able to get back to work and begin digging themselves out of the financial holes they've been forced into over the past 200 days that they were forced to sit by and watch the parody parade pass them by.

Somehow, they're supposed to be fortunate because the joint strikes cost the industry an estimated 45K jobs.

Milken Institute's analysts estimate that the strikes cost Southern California and studio centers across the country more than $6B.

While SAG-AFTRA's head, Fran Drescher, spoke eloquently about changing the world for actors, their settlement will be of little consolation to the thousands of service people and professionals who lost paychecks, retirement funds and more.

It bothered us just a little that the AMPTP

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