As Readers of this Blog know, this Blogger’s Father was a Union Organizer, a Trotskyite.
As Readers of this Blog know; there is a strike in the Entertainment Industry, writers have been on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, since May 2, 2023. The Alliance represents studios, film companies, television producers and streamers that produce entertainment.
Actors have been on strike since July 14, 2023.
As this Blog is being written, economists are estimating the strikes will cost the American economy, in excess of 5 Billion Dollars.
As this Blog is being written, Drew Barrymore has turned scab.
The strike has been rancorous; with the strikers thinking they are Red Neck West Virginia miners on the way to the Battle of Blair Mountain; and the Alliance chiefs thinking they are the mine owners, ordering the slaughter of miners during the Colorado Coalfield War, the Ludlow Massacre.
The Alliance has openly wished that the actors and writers would lose their homes; and Los Angeles is preparing for the most evictions since the Depression, of writers and actors, who can no longer pay their rents.
It is a poisonous strike.
The strike is about money, but also the future; not merely the future of entertainment, but the future of the culture. The Alliance wants to propagate entertainment created by ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Creatives are opposed to a culture dominated by AI entertainment.
The unions and Alliance are engaging in fratricide, in an unmoored world; which desperately needs substantive entertainment.
There may be a way out of the impasse; a path which saves the livelihoods of the creatives and the self - importance of the Alliance.
SHARED GOVERNANCE
Germany recovered from its devastating defeat in World War II , by shared governance; corporations allocated one third of their board seats to workers, implementing teamwork to insure the future.
Companies, including hi-tech companies, which form the Alliance, should allocate one third of its board seats to writers and actors; for entertainment is a collaborative partnership, not a zero-sum civil war.
Entertainment, the culture and society itself, faces a fraught, perhaps existential future. The only way to navigate this treacherous, deadly and dystopian future is SHARED GOVERNANCE.
On July 21, 2023, this Blogger published the following: "The actors’ union, guild, SAG/AFTRA, under the leadership of its President Fran Drescher, and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA's national executive director and chief negotiator, went on strike against the film studios, producers and streaming entities; represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).
…..This Blogger likes actors, and appreciates their self-destruction in search of the foibles of humanity; some form of self-destruction must be inherent, in anyone, who goes searching for the sources of the White Nile, or Blue Nile, or EL DORADO. This Blogger also likes unions. His Father was a Trotskyite union organizer.
SAG/AFTRA gave a news conference with their whole negotiating team to announce the strike.
Naturally, the strike is about money; inflation is killing the ability of working actors to survive as working actors.
Streaming has destroyed Hollywood’s old business model, in which everyone got a taste of the profits, through residuals. The Streaming business model does not pay residuals.
The actors are going out on strike because they are downwind from the carcasses of their artistic futures; which means they can smell the carrion which will be their futures; if the Producers continue to play by the new Streaming Rules.
The strike is justified because as Fran and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland stated; it is an existential crisis for the profession.
How existential?
The Producers floated a proposal, that background players, extras, could be taped by the Producers, paid for one day's work; then, that captured image would be used and OWNED by the Producers for infinity, without residuals or further permission.
That is image slavery, a precursor of talent slavery.
This Blogger does have some quibbles about the union’s presentation of their theory of the case.
1) Ms. Drescher should stop luxuriating in MSNBC nomenclature; she made the point, that if the Producers and Streamers opposed the Union, they would be on the wrong side of history. That is MSNBC drivel; losing is the wrong side of History. This Blogger has been on teams which broke Unions and clawed back benefits…..Management has no MSNBC morality when it comes to union negotiations.
2) Ms. Drescher should abandon her revolutionary vernacular. The only revolutionary jargon she omitted was: ON TO THE WINTER PALACE. She is not Rosa Luxemburg, and Versailles will not be stormed, because of an actor’s strike. The American public no longer has any clue as to how to attach a name to an actor's face, except for a few aging icons. Actors are no longer beloved by the American public; which is why their replacement by AI may work.
During the Announcement Conference, the 1960 SAG strike was referenced. Two of the key players in that strike, on the Union side, were Jimmy Cagney, known to every grandparent in America and Charlton Heston (fresh from seeing the face of God in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and the face of Jesus in BEN HUR). More on that strike later.
The Union Negotiating team looked like summer stock custodians; the Union should put them into business suits. Powerful people do not like to accede power to people who look like they are dressed to wash your wind shield at a stop light. Image matters.
During the announcement conference, the 1960 Strike was referenced. That strike ended in a great victory for the Union. However, neither Fran nor Duncan mentioned the man who led the Union to VICTORY in that strike, Ronald Reagan….yes, that Ronald Reagan. That is another example of MSNBC fuzzy thinking; it does the current strike no good, not to give credit to the right-wing union man, Ronald Reagan; who won the biggest strike of all.
Until now.
“…… Paramount, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers….(plus MGM and Columbia) ..... were engaged in a contentious high-stakes negotiation with Ronald Reagan. The outcome of that bitter 1960 showdown altered the economic fortunes of tens of thousands of film actors.
….In the fall of 2000 I was hired to act in the film Legally Blonde. I portrayed a member of the admissions board that voted to admit Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) into Harvard Law School. I had four lines and my lone scene took just a few hours to shoot.
Eleven years later, in October 2011, I received a check from the Residuals Department of the Screen Actors Guild for the amount of $48.40. This was just the latest in a series of "Legally Blonde" residual checks that I and the other cast members have regularly received since the film's theatrical release in 2001.
It is now accepted orthodoxy that union film actors get residuals. But it wasn't always that way. For decades, residual payments for actors did not exist; film actors were paid for their work, and that was it. The studio owned the film and could release it again and again, anytime and anywhere, with no thought of further compensation for actors.
….. ten years after arriving from Des Moines, Reagan led the union representing the biggest movie stars in the world. He was subsequently re-elected for five consecutive one-year terms.
During his first tenure as SAG president (1947-1952) Reagan, then a liberal Democrat, was instrumental in securing residuals for television actors when their episodes were re-run. However, motion picture actors were still shut out of residuals and did not receive any compensation when their studio films aired on TV.
As more and more movies were telecast (The Wizard of Oz was first shown on TV in 1956), film actors felt they were being deprived of a significant source of income. With every new contract the issue was tabled until, in 1959, the actors had had enough. They demanded residual payments for future telecasts and retroactive residuals for films shown on TV between 1948 and 1959.
The producers had a short answer: no. In fact, they were desperately looking for ways to cut production costs, not increase them. Between 1946 and 1959, domestic movie attendance plummeted over 65 percent as more and more Americans chose to stay home and watch television. As a result, the movie industry was in a tailspin and hemorrhaging money.
So the producers dug in. Any talk of residuals, past or future, was simply a nonstarter. The producers took a hard line because they knew that if they acquiesced to actors, they would probably have to make similar deals with both screenwriters and directors.
But the actors were firmly committed to their cause and, in the fall of 1959, they voted to return Ronald Reagan to the SAG presidency to spearhead the negotiations.
The talks began in January 1960 with the two sides a great distance apart. The producers refused to even talk about residuals. They put forth a simple and compelling question: Why should any employee be paid more than once for the same job?
Reagan could not get them to budge. He joked that he was simply "trying to negotiate for the right to negotiate."
In February, Reagan upped the ante. He asked the SAG membership for a strike authorization. The actors agreed and a work-stop date was set: Monday, March 7th. The producers were convinced the actors were bluffing. In the 50-year history of Hollywood, there had never been an industry-wide strike.
The producers underestimated the resolve of Reagan and his negotiating team. On March 7th, 1960 the actors did what they said they would: They walked off their respective jobs and production at all the major studios ground to a halt.
In the tense days following the walkout it was the studios,… who first blinked. Universal Pictures agreed, in principle, to the concept of film residuals. Eventually the other majors (Paramount, Disney, Warner Brothers, MGM, Columbia, and 20th Century Fox) fell in line and finally began negotiating the "non-negotiable" issue.
After five acrimonious weeks of intense back-and-forth, the two sides reached a compromise. It contained three parts:
- Actor residuals for all studio films made starting in 1960.
- No residuals for any studio films produced before 1948.
- 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….THE ATLANTIC."......THE MAXEY CHRONCILES."
SHARED GOVERNANCE is the logical next step in the Ronald Reagan playbook.
And finally, only SHARED GOVERNANCE has a chance of controlling Artificial Intelligence; because only SHARED GOVERNANCE will be capable of vetting human concerns during the implementation of AI.
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