How Hollywood’s Businessmen Got It So Wrong
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Last week, the roughly 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA went on strike, joining the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since May. As my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez put it, “The Hollywood machine … has officially ground to a halt.” I chatted with Xochitl about who really broke Hollywood.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
C-Suite Ignorance
Writing yesterday about the Hollywood strikes, my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez—herself a screenwriter on strike—coined the term C-suite ignorance to explain what’s happening in the entertainment world. “Hollywood CEOs saw the success of Netflix and raced to copy a model without knowing whether it was sustainable, a model that relied on the constant production of new (and costly) entertainment content created by unionized talent,” she explained. “They were wrong about the business, but they were even more wrong to presume that labor would comply.” I called Xochitl to chat about how entertainment executives got it so wrong, and whether she and her fellow strikers feel hopeful right now.
Isabel Fattal: What was the big mistake C-suite executives made when they went all in on streaming?
Xochitl Gonzalez: I remember during COVID times in particular, obviously these things had been in the works, but suddenly everybody was in an arms race to rush out a streaming platform. At that point, I was working on a pilot adaptation of my debut novel. My first thought was, How is this sustainable? It didn’t seem like a model that could work, let alone be matched again and again and again.
Now executives are realizing that this model isn’t making money, which I’m not denying. I think it’s hard to say that you’re going broke and going under when you’re seeing executives get so well compensated, and it’s even more hilarious that even laypeople could see that this would be a difficult model to keep up with. Now executives say that they can’t afford to pay the talent. But they designed a model that exploited a contract—essentially, it was a workaround for the way that actors and writers had always been paid, through residuals.
Isabel: Explain that workaround.
Xochitl: The actors on Friends, for example, are so wealthy because of all the different places that Friends has been licensed and has been watched on cable and broadcast TV. Now that Friends is streaming on Max, the actors make much, much less from that platform. In the past, no one had a substantial issue with the idea that if a show is well viewed, writers and actors should see a piece of that, because we created it. This is not a new idea that we’re introducing. We’re attempting to merely correct the way in which the new system has exploited a loophole.
Isabel: Do you feel hopeful about the strike?
Xochitl: I do. A lot of the concerns of SAG and WGA overlap. I think a lot of people don’t always realize this—and it might be especially true for SAG—but a lot of people that are able to make a living as an actor or a screenwriter are middle-class people. The lion’s share of people are not raking in the dough. The fact that these issues are so existential is making people more resolved. The last time we were on strike together, we got absolutely historic gains. So I am feeling hopeful, but I’m worried in the short term. There’s a food bank in L.A. that’s doing free groceries worth more than $300 for members of SAG. There are people that need those free groceries; it’s a challenge.
I think the people on the ground are going to hold strong, because it’s about more than just being valued for your work. It’s about, are we ensuring that this is a sustainable profession going forward? I think it will get bloody. It’s going to hurt people on the ground a lot. But at the end of the day, I feel we’re going to win. Mainly because, as I said when I wrote about the WGA, without us and the stories and performances, what is there?
Related:
Today’s News
- Former President Trump said that he had received a letter informing him that he is a target in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, creating the possibility of another indictment.
- A U.S. soldier broke away from a border-tour group and ran into North Korea; he is believed to be in custody.
- According to an email obtained by news outlets, Texas trooper-medics from the state’s Department of Public Safety were told to push people attempting to cross the southern border into the Rio Grande River and to deny them water amid extreme heat.
Dispatches
- Work in Progress: Researchers at UC San Francisco have released the largest representative survey of homeless people in more than 25 years, Jerusalem Demsas writes. It hints at the root cause of homelessness.
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Evening Read
A Voicebot Just Left Me Speechless
By Saahil Desai
It’s not that hard to say my name, Saahil Desai. Saahil: rhymes with sawmill, or at least that gets you 90 percent there. Desai: like decide with the last bit chopped off. That’s really it.
More often than not, however, my name gets butchered into a menagerie of gaffes and blunders. The most common one, Sa-heel, is at least an honest attempt—unlike its mutant twin, a monosyllabic mess that comes out sounding like seal. Others defy all possible logic. Once, a college classmate read my name, paused, and then confidently said, “Hi, Seattle.”
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. August Blue, the novelist Deborah Levy’s latest, continues a career-long search for the authentic self.
Watch. The mockumentary Theater Camp (in theaters now) is an endearing ode to creativity, and a reminder of the importance of artistic community.
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.