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Thoughts on the line : week 2 (a diary of an actors strike) [1]

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Date: 2023-07-30

I’m grumpy this Wednesday morning. I can list the reason, but they don’t justify my bad attitude. I’m just grumpy. The wait for the bus is hot. The sidewalk outside the studio is hot. The shade under the SAG awning is hot. The world is hot.

When I get to Paramount around 9am, there are about twenty SAG members picketing. I’m here early, and the writers haven’t gotten organized for the day. They are the ones with the plans. Actors just cross the street and walk in a circle in front of the main entrance for a few hours. They don’t seem to understand the need to picket at the other four gates. I walk down a block to the Bronson Gate, and no one is there. It annoys me to watch the picket-line-crossing studio workers turn into the lot without a reminder of our cause. I make my own little picket line, or should I say dot, picket dot, and like a well played game of pong, I bounce back-and forth across the curb cut.

I even manage to make a car wait a whole light cycle before they can turn right into work. I could have just stopped in the middle of the entrance, but that seems overly dramatic and confrontational, so I take a page out Tim Conway’s playbook and slowly shuffle across the entrance lane for two minutes.

Ha. Screw you nameless faceless studio person who is sitting in your air conditioned car listening to “Under the Bridge” with sunglasses on and thumbing through emails. Only realizing you aren’t actually stuck in normal rush hour traffic on the 101 when your peripheral vision catches the light changing, so you pull into work and see the lone picketer with a “Treat Actors Fair” sign. “Nice cowboy hat,” you think.

I now wear a cowboy hat when picketing. I think I pull it off. Plus it keeps the sun off my face.

After about 15 minutes, the WGA strike captain rolls down the sidewalk pulling a wagon with a couple of cases of water and a folded canopy laid precariously on top. Five writers follow her. With a presence now established at the Bronson Gate for the day, I start my normal routine. Never one for laps, I walk the whole perimeter of Paramount studios, getting caught in the small whirl pools at each gate for a few cycles before breaking free toward the next picket line. It takes about an hour to complete one of these big circles.

I head toward Van Ness hoping to improve my attitude, but nothing can break me out of my funk. The world just seems ready to burn. There are no talks scheduled between studios and actors or studios and writers. What scares me is the incompetence of the studio heads. Are any of them equipped with the ability needed to grow a current media business? The Bob Iger glory days of buying an empire are over. Disney snatched up Marvel, Lucas Films, Pixar and 21st Century Fox under Iger’s first reign. Now he has to switch gears and develop something and grow it organically. Zaslav is another jackass who doesn’t know shit about the movie or the narrative streaming business. The fact Discovery (the company that bought Warner Brothers) made all its billions on reality TV doesn’t bode well. Right now both see a profit in cutting costs. They seem to have no intention of building a better product to win customers. They hope to undercut the competition and survive through the attrition.

But what really scares me is maybe the market is on their side. Maybe we’re at a point in history where people’s tastes have changed, They just want cheap streaming services with new content daily and the movie and TV industry professionals will go the way of cab drivers and newspaper reporters.

If your looking for a deeper understanding of the challenges the entertainment industry faces, here’s a couple of articles to read.

Mark Kreidler for Capital and Main posted an article here at Daily Kos titled How striking Hollywood creators and hotel housekeepers face the same obstacles.

And Brian Merchant an LATimes columnist wrote a good piece titled Hollywood is on strike because CEO’s fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking.

I turn down Van Ness and head for the next gate. It faces east, and there is no shade in the morning. I’ve nicknamed it hell.

IT’S FRIDAY. Everything is better on Fridays. I trek over to Warner Brothers Studios in the valley. The rumor of more shade draws me. I see a crowd, and, man, is there crowd. IATSE has joined the actors and writers for a day of picketing. IATSE stands for The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, Its Territories and Canada.

As their slogan goes, they are the union behind entertainment. They include costumers, make-up artists, hair stylists, lighting techs and other jobs I don’t quite understand. Like, I think gaffers are in there, but I don’t exactly now what a gaffer does on set. My bad.

IATSE is not on strike, but they are showing their support for SAG-AFTRA and the WGA. The picket line stretches about a half a mile between gate 3 and gate 4. Most of the route is shaded. There are ice cream sandwiches to be had. This picketing thing is pretty great.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/30/2184185/-Thoughts-on-the-line-week-2-a-dairy-of-an-actors-strike

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