Chris Pizzello/AP Photo
Striking writers and actors picket outside Paramount studios in Los Angeles, July 14, 2023.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody walks in L.A. Well, acknowledged up until this summer, when 11,000 striking screenwriters, 15,000 striking hotel workers, and now 160,000 striking actors have all been pounding the pavement in a season of record (meteorological and labor-relational) heat—perhaps soon to be joined by the roughly 20,000 L.A.-based UPS drivers and warehouse workers who’ll walk if the Teamsters and UPS don’t reach an accord by August 1st.
OK, not all the actors and writers actually live in and around L.A., but most do, as do all those hotel workers and Teamsters. And, yes, they won’t all be picketing, and certainly not all at the same time. But taken together, I suspect they will constitute the largest number of striking Angelenos at any one time in the city’s history. And the current wave follows strikes over the past year among L.A. school employees and the teaching and research assistants at UCLA, not to mention the unionization of the TAs and RAs at the once-Republican bastion of USC. All of which has prompted Nelson Lichtenstein, the de facto dean of the nation’s labor historians, to quite rightly proclaim Los Angeles to be “a cockpit of labor militancy … setting the pace for millions of working people across the nation.”
L.A., alas, is also the cockpit of unaffordable housing, which afflicts all of the current strikers save the wealthiest. It’s the home base of the insanely overpaid studio CEOs, with Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav pulling down close to half a billion dollars in the past few years, even as Disney’s Bob Iger is having a 210-foot-long yacht built so it can cruise alongside (catamaran-style?) his current 180-foot-long floating mansion. Then again, “the industry” (as it’s called in L.A.) has long featured some of the nation’s most stratospherically paid executives. Throughout most of the Great Depression, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer was America’s highest-paid CEO.
All that studio-head overpayment, of course, is as naught when compared to the wealth of the leaders of the tech companies that have so much cash on hand that they’ve set up studios of their own—including Amazon and Apple. Can Jeff Bezos make it through the strike now that Amazon’s picture production has ground to a halt? Quite probably.
Still, unless you’re concerned about abstractions like, say, justice, none of this would matter if the studios were willing to share even a small fraction of their wealth with the people who create it, most particularly actors and writers. What both of the Hollywood unions are primarily seeking is adequate compensation when the films and shows they’ve worked on are streamed, just as they’ve long been compensated when their films and shows are aired and re-aired on television and released and re-released in theaters.
Specifically, what SAG-AFTRA asked for in its negotiations was that 2 percent of streaming revenue be paid to actors in those shows and films that had brought in revenues over a certain set level. But the studios have consistently refused to provide the very metric—the number of times a production has been streamed—by which any such determinations can be made. The union noted that that data could be collected by some monitoring service (it suggested Parrot Analytics), much as Nielsen monitors how many people watch particular TV shows. The studios rejected that proposal out of hand, as they had rejected similar proposals from the Writers Guild.
The hard-line stance that the studios have taken may go beyond their intransigence on streaming. An article that ran last week on the Hollywood trade site Deadline quoted unidentified studio executives saying that they intended to oppose any settlement until autumn, in the belief that
by October most writers will be running out of money after five months on the picket lines and no work. “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline.
That strategy, according to the site’s studio sources, is part of a long-term goal to effectively destroy the Writers Guild—a goal reportedly encouraged by the studios’ Wall Street backers. As the writers pose more of a cultural annoyance than an economic threat to studio moguls and their Wall Street backers, Deadline acknowledged that what the executives told them might just be rhetorical posing deployed to weaken the union’s resolve. Nonetheless, the power that Wall Street and major investors now wield over the studios, as they do over every significant publicly traded U.S. corporation, is surely a factor in the harder line that the studios are currently taking.
The SAG part of SAG-AFTRA—the Screen Actors Guild, which predates its TV and radio AFTRA counterpart—hasn’t always had progressive leadership. Its past presidents include not only Ronald Reagan but also Robert Montgomery (President Eisenhower’s television coach), U.S. Sen. George Murphy (R-CA, 1964–1970), John Gavin (U.S. ambassador to Mexico, 1981–1985, appointed by Reagan), and Charlton Heston, though in his pre-gun-nut days. It’s also had one radical president, Ed Asner, who served in the first half of the 1980s, and likely owed his election to the substandard contract that had been negotiated in the year preceding his election.
But when confronted by studio intransigence, a number of SAG presidents have transcended their inclinations and images and worked to roll the union on. So it was with comic Eddie Cantor, whose persona was that of nebbish supreme, but who led the union from 1933 through 1935, when the studios flatly refused to recognize the union’s existence. So it apparently is with SAG-AFTRA’s current president, former television nanny Fran Drescher, who delivered a fiery speech in announcing her board’s unanimous vote to call the actors out. If the studios seriously hope to bust their unions (thinking that every other industry does it, so why not us?), Drescher appears ready to essay the role of a latter-day Clara Lemlich, whose revolutionary rhetoric called out her fellow Lower East Side garment worker “girls” and shut down that industry in 1909.
’Tis not the final conflict, of course, but it does add to a summer of workers seriously pushing back against the plutocracy that’s eroded living standards and norms of common decency over the past four decades. And in Los Angeles today, lots of people are walking.
