Movie and TV productions have come to a nearly complete stop in Hollywood. Both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America are on strike, with the latter having halted work for the major studios over three months ago. What brought the industry to this point? What do the two opposing sides want? And how do these strikes fit into other labor actions that we're seeing this summer? On this episode, we speak with Lucas Shaw, entertainment reporter at Bloomberg and the author of the
Screentime
newsletter, as well as Josh Eidelson, a labor reporter for
Businessweek
and Bloomberg News, about what's going on with the strikes right now, what both sides are looking for, and the prospects of a resolution. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity
.
Key insights from the pod
:
The current status of the two strikes — 3:36
What the two unions want — 5:14
How the strikes fit into the broader state of labor — 7:05
The significance of two strikes happening at once — 13:01
How Hollywood unions maintain solidarity — 15:41
Who has the leverage? — 19:34
Fran Drescher’s role in as the head of SAG — 26:12
The anxiety surrounding AI in Hollywood — 30:15
How big is the pie to get carved up? — 34:02
How Hollywood stars are similar to grad students — 40:18
---
Joe Weisenthal: (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy Alloway: (00:15)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe: (00:16)
Tracy, you watching anything good on TV these days?
Tracy: (00:20)
I just finished watching The Bear, which I know you also watched, right?
Joe: (00:23)
I did. I switch off usually between watching like some new show and then going back and watching all six seasons of The Sopranos. And then watching a new show. And then The Sopranos again. So I think right before The Bear, I did my seventh viewing of The Sopranos. It's one of these things, I don't know what to watch now. I mean, I don't have a new show.
Tracy: (00:42)
Do you need suggestions?
Joe: (00:43)
I need suggestions
Tracy: (00:45)
Actually. I just finished watching all of Cheers, which I've never seen really, it was always in the background. I was a big Frasier fan, so I thought I should try Cheers. And I really enjoyed it.
Joe: (00:56)
I want to watch Northern Exposure, but it's not on any of the streaming services.
Tracy: (00:59)
Yeah, I would love to re-watch that too. I remember my mother loved that show. Okay, well we are not actually doing TV reviews, are we?
Joe: (01:08)
We could? But you know, it is true. There is a lot of archive TV material to watch. You don't even need to watch new shows.
Tracy: (01:14)
No, that is true. You could endlessly watch the back catalogs of old TV, which is fun and entertaining, but has also given rise to a new issue for us to worry about.
Joe: (01:27)
Right. And so, you know, right now we are in the midst of at least two strikes. I think the writers, the screenwriters in Hollywood have been on strike for at least a few months now. The actors are on strike. So while there's plenty to watch and actually people are excited about going to the movies again for the first time in a while, my understanding is that basically nothing is getting made right now.
Tracy: (01:49)
This is actually, I know we said there's tons of TV to get through. But I do also worry about what if some of the good stuff shuts down, but more broadly...
Joe: (01:57)
And I do want to know whether the guy gets out of the freezer after in The Bear, right? Because he got caught in the freezer at the end. So I hope there's a third season that resolves that.
Tracy: (02:05)
You know how they call everyone ‘chef’ on The Bear? It's like, ‘yes, chef. Okay, chef,’ should we start calling each other co-host?
Joe: (02:11)
Yes. Yes, host.
Tracy: (02:13)
Okay. Alright. Okay. So there is a concern over future content, but this also fits more broadly into some of the more active labor discussions and things that we've seen going on recently. And we just finished up that episode about the United Auto Workers Union and their fight against the Big Three. And it feels like these are two very different industries, car manufacturers and content creators for Hollywood. But there are some similarities and also key differences underlying both of these labor movements.
Joe: (02:46)
Yes host. Let's just get started. We have two perfect guests to help us understand what's going on with Hollywood and the unions right now. Both of them in-house here, our colleagues. We're going to be speaking with Lucas Shaw. He's the managing editor for media and entertainment at Bloomberg, and the author of the excellent Screentime newsletter. And we also have Josh Eidelson, senior reporter for Bloomberg and Business Week, who covers organized labor. So Lucas and Josh, thank you both so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Lucas: (03:19)
Thanks for having us.
Joe: (03:20)
Thank you for having us.
Joe: (03:21)
Lucas, why don't you give us the state of play generally right now in Hollywood. How many strikes are going on? Who's on strike? Who isn't on strike? Where are talks? How long have they been going on? Give us the quick summation of where things stand.
Lucas Shaw: (03:36)
There are two strikes happening right now, which is the first time that that has happened since 1960. The first union to go on strike was the Writer's Guild, which was at the beginning of May. So they've been on strike for about three months. The last writer's strike was in 2007, 2008. That lasted for one hundred days. This one looks almost certain to blow past that. The actors joined the writers on strike in the middle of July. And so that's been going on for a couple of weeks. The other guild that had a deal coming up this year that was a big deal was the directors. They did make a deal with the studios.
And so they are not on strike, but now we've had months of writers on the picket lines outside of studios chanting and getting attention. And now the actors have joined them and the studios haven't made a lot of progress in trying to sort it out with the actors. They are now trying to get back at the table with the writers. But from everything we've seen, the studios and the writers were really far apart, not even close.
The studios and the actors were a little bit closer, but still a lot of ground to make up and nobody's really certain when this is going to end, which is incredibly disorienting and destabilizing for most of the people who work in the entertainment business and all of the industries that work around it, whether it's restaurants or stylists or transportation.
Tracy: (04:50)
Talk to us a little bit about the issues at play here and, you know, Joe brought up the idea of the back catalogs, which I guess have become more valuable given the rise of streaming. And it seems like writers or actors involved with those want a bigger piece of the pie. So what exactly are the the complaints here and how do they tie in with the way the media business has sort of changed over time?
Lucas: (05:14)
Yeah, so the writers and actors have slightly different asks or proposals, but the unifying theme undergirding this dispute is there's been this dramatic transformation in the entertainment business, which every consumer, every viewer knows about because it's streaming. Streaming has replaced cable TV or is in the process of replacing cable TV that has changed how projects are made, how they're funded and how talent gets paid.
And the writers and actors feel that they are not receiving enough money from these big media companies and from streaming services in particular, and that the ways in which they're paid make the job, which was already not the most secure position, even less secure. And so they're looking for ways that protect themselves a bit more. At the same time, the biggest reason that I think there's so much labor unrest is because of that transition. Most of these media companies also are not making as much money as they used to because their cable networks are less profitable and they're pouring a ton of money into these streaming services, most of which, other than Netflix, lose money.
Joe: (06:24)
Josh, let me bring you in. You know, one of the themes that we've been talking about on recent episodes is this idea of newfound energy in the labor movement more broadly — and I don't know if the actual number of strikes is up, but we definitely see a new attitude. We saw it with UPS, we see it with UAW, etc. When you look at the unions in Hollywood, how similar is this? Is the vibe, is the sort of political stance sort of similar to what it was maybe in 2006? Or has there been also a change too in the sort of leadership and tactics that we see with some of these Hollywood unions?
Josh Eidelson: (07:05)
So having covered the labor movement for more than a decade now, it has often felt like every six months or year or so someone wants to grab something to declare that the long declining labor movement in the US is revived. And so I come at this generally with a sense of skepticism. We could go year by year and I could tell you what the cool thing was that was supposedly going to reverse the decline of US labor unions and didn't.
That said, what's been happening the past year and a half really is remarkable. The most stunning thing that we've seen is at longtime non-union companies, the most famous companies in the United States in many cases, where for the first time workers actually won union recognition at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, other places like Trader Joe's, Microsoft. And those workers so far have not won union contracts.
But the fact that these places that were seen often, including by union organizers, as impregnable suddenly now have legally recognized unions is a very significant shift. And one that has impacted how workers think about their jobs and about what's possible at other places. And also I think it has impacted the sense of ambition and possibility for workers who've had a union for a long time.
And some people may remember in 2021 there was discussion about what was being called Striketober, where there were lots of union members authorizing or going on strikes. What's happened since then is more significant by the numbers. This year has been a big year for strikes already, not compared to the 1950s. If you go to when I Love Lucy was on, we may remember that as a...
Tracy: (08:59)
Also a great show, which I have re-watched.
Josh: (09:02)
Probably on streaming, I'm guessing?
Tracy: (09:04)
Yep.
Josh: (09:04)
Although there could be an I Love Lucy channel I don't know about because I cut the cord a long time ago. Every year that I Love Lucy was on TV there were, by current standards, tons of people going on strike in the US. There were close to or over a million people involved in work stoppages every one of those years in the fifties. We are far from that because unions are a much smaller share of the US workforce these days in terms of the workers they represent. But by recent standards, this has been a big year for strikes and for potential strikes like the one that almost happened at UPS, the ones that could happen in the auto industry.
The one that hypothetically could still happen at UPS if the Teamsters rejected the contract. And I think we're seeing that for a number of reasons, including how the pandemic changed people's mindsets, including what's been going on with the labor market. And also changes in leadership at some of these unions as workers have elected more militant leaders to represent them. Or as with the actors, members have been pressuring the leadership to take a more aggressive posture. So I think it's fair now to say that at a minimum the vibes have shifted here.
Tracy: (10:26)
So one of the things that came up in our recent episode on the UAW strikes or potential strikes was this idea of workers actively banding together, but not just in their own industry, but with other industries. And I think this is something — I actually learned a term for it — horizontal solidarity. There's a new phrase, but this is something that we've seen also in relation to some of the Hollywood actions. I think we've seen members of the Writer's Guild show up to the Teamster rallies and vice versa. You know, Teamsters refusing to make deliveries to the studios and stuff like that. But how much of that is a sort of new tactic and does it make these actions more effective?
Josh: (11:12)
Well if you go far enough back in US labor history, you can find examples of attempts to shut down a whole city in a general strike with workers from all sorts of industries. But more recently there has been more work stoppages and more high profile labor disputes and potential or existing strikes and organizing campaigns than we had seen in a while, particularly at really prominent companies where lots of people notice what's happening, whether it's because they see it on TV or because they know someone who works there or because they depend on their UPS delivery person and have a conversation with them.
One of the phenomena that our colleague, Spencer Soper, has been writing about is the role of UPS in Amazon’s supply chain. And that the drivers for Amazon will now have more interaction with drivers from UPS who just got this contract deal that includes very significant raises. And so Starbucks workers, for example, have inspired people at all sorts of companies, including Apple. We've seen workers at places that some people don't think about when they think about the labor movement historically, like graduate students doing teaching and research who have come to think of themselves more as workers and as having more in common with workers they see taking action other places.
Tracy: (12:43)
Lucas, just on the specific Hollywood actions that we've seen, is it significant at all that SAG and the WGA are striking at the same time? And should we think of those two different strikes as two different labor disputes? Or do they share similarities?
Lucas: (13:01)
It's incredibly significant. I mean, again, it hasn't happened in six decades and it has shut down the industry for months now. You know, the writers strike prevents a lot of development of new projects. It prevents studios from buying things from writers because writers in studios are not supposed to be communicating. It shuts down work on a lot of TV shows because those are often sort of written as you shoot them.
The actors adds to that because you know, you could have a movie that was in production like the new Deadpool movie with Ryan Reynolds. The script's done, they're in production, it's supposed to come out next year. The actors go on strike that has to shut down. Suddenly Disney has no big tent pole movie for next year. Actors can no longer promote their projects. So you have a bunch of movies coming out in the fall where some studios are pushing because if the talent in them can't promote, they fear that it will impact how that performs.
And so the combo strike means that it's not just something that's an inside Hollywood story, something that starts to affect what the average person can see and feel. As to whether you can see them as sort of distinct strikes or one and the same. I think it's a little bit of both. You know, there are issues that are very specific to writers around being on set or the number of people in a writer's room or all these things that the actors don't care so much about.
And same deal with the actors. You know, the actors have some issues with their pension plan, which the writers do not have. But there are a number of kind of big picture thematic problems that unify them. That includes residuals payments for projects being re-aired. It includes how much they get paid for people watching overseas on streaming services. It's being able to share in the upside of a successful show. And is also one of those issues that has been unifying across the different unions.
Joe: (15:00)
I definitely want to get into AI a bit more and how it affects writers and actors and how the studios are thinking about it. But I also just want to go back to this question of, Lucas, within the context of these unions, some actors make an insane amount of money and we all know that. And then some actors have to take a side job waiting tables or tending bar or teaching an acting class or something like that.
I think it's probably the same with writers and so forth. And so of course, when we talk about say UPS or the United Auto Workers, of course [there’s] this tiering question. How do the Hollywood unions maintain solidarity when the economics of their own members are so skewed and so diverse?
Lucas: (15:41)
Yeah, I mean solidarity is one of the bigger challenges for these unions. You know, Josh was talking about some of the changes in the approach and the membership of these of these unions. And I think if, you know, you talked to both members of the unions and the studios, the unions in Hollywood today feel very different from how they did 10 or 20 years ago. You know, far more progressive, far more activists and, at least in the case of the writers, unified.
You're right that there are a lot of people in these unions who make a lot of money, which I think sometimes makes them sort of unsympathetic figures. Because it seems like, you know, rich Hollywood actors and writers fighting with rich Hollywood studio chiefs. And there's a degree to which that's true. Obviously you have movie stars who are in these unions or you have writers like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy who've made hundreds of millions of dollars who are in them.
But that's a really small layer at the top. Most of the people in these unions are very much working class. A lot of them have second and third jobs, which ironically makes them able to sort of hang on a little bit longer. There's not the same pressure to reach a deal really quickly. This strike can go on for months and it seems like everybody sort of figures out a way to make it work. They've been able to really get the wealthier members, especially in the Actors' Guild on their side. There was a famous letter signed by a few hundred of the richest and most famous actors in Hollywood, basically telling the leadership of the Actors’ Guild like, don't make a big compromise or don't compromise your values. Go for a big deal. We support you. I think the writers, it's a little murkier. You do have some writer-producers who are maybe not on board with everything, but they're not going to come out and say it.
Josh: (17:15)
And that letter ended in an interesting way because they were telling the leadership of the actor's union ‘we're concerned, you may not be as willing to go out on strike as we are.’ And the leader of the union, Fran Drescher, responded by adding her own name to the letter to herself.
Tracy: (17:34)
Can I just ask on the actor's side, there was one demand that I saw, and it kind of reminded me of some of the issues, Joe, that we saw with truckers idling at the ports. And, you know, they, they sign up for a job that's for X amount of money and supposed to take X amount of hours or days and then they wind up spending a lot of time just waiting to take on the loads. And the actors are complaining about not being paid for audition times, which if anyone has ever done acting or modeling, you know that you can spend all day going to castings and come away with nothing in some cases. How thorny is that issue and what are the proposals actually to fix that? Because it seems like a difficult one.
Lucas: (18:17)
The issue of free labor is one that I'd say both the writers and actors are unified in. Obviously the type of labor is different, but writers don't want to have to do a bunch of drafts of something without getting paid more money. Actors don't want to have to spend all this money going for auditions without getting paid something in return. I'm not sure how that's going to get solved. There are a bunch of asks that the writers and actors have made that are fairly fundamental structural changes to how the industry works.
Those being some big examples and I don't get the sense from the the studio side that there's a lot of interest in giving on them. You know, they feel like if they give the writers and actors more money on some of the core issues that the free labor thing may be overlooked. But there's no question that Hollywood has long preyed on the fact that there are thousands, if not millions of people who would love to be famous and so they can get them to do a bunch of work for free.
Tracy: (19:14)
Well, this was going to be my other question, which is how much leverage do the studios actually have here? Because it seems there is this endless stream of starry-eyed wannabe TV stars who potentially would be more than happy to, I guess, break union lines and go for things?
Lucas: (19:34)
It's a really good question and I'm not sure I know the answer. I think that the conventional wisdom is that the studios and big media companies have more leverage than the writers and actors because at a certain point you're going to have a lot of these writers and actors who have bills. If they don't work and they don't make money for months and months and months, it's going to start to negatively impact their lives in ways that, you know, they won't be able to make rent. There are all these horrible things that could happen to them. The media companies, they will suffer a little bit from not having new product and not being able to make money. But a lot of the ways those companies make money are unaffected. Right? They have deals for their cable networks with pay TV distributors where they get paid fees every month.
They get paid no matter what, right? As long as the ratings don't fall off a total cliff. They have backlogs of programming and library that they can put on. CBS doesn't have as much new programming to put on in the fall because of the strike, but they can still do reality TV, which is not part of these. So there's going to be Survivor, they can still do news, so there'll be 60 Minutes. They can still do sports, so there'll be football coming in the fall. And then they're part of a company where they can take a show like Yellowstone that's a big hit for the Paramount network and put it on CBS to an audience that probably hasn't seen Yellowstone before.
Joe: (20:48)
What about international TV? I mean that's a huge thing, like when I turn on Netflix, it's like, there's a hot show that's in Korea or a show from Israel or a show from Poland or something like that. Does that implicitly undermine the bargaining position of the US-based actors and writers that presumably there are a lot of people working internationally who are not engaged in the same actions right now?
Lucas: (21:11)
I don't know that it's undermining them, but it has put some of the unions abroad in an uncomfortable position. I think people in the UK in particular are a little uncomfortable because they want to show solidarity with their peers in the US and there have been marches, famous actors like Brian Cox from Succession shouting ‘AI will not replace us’ or ‘Screw you studios.’
But if you have productions that are filled with actors that are not in the US unions, they can continue, right? Like House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones spinoff for HBO, pretty much all the actors in that work in the UK and so they can keep shooting that. Or in South Korea, which has become a huge producer of film and television, those productions continue and that's why a service like Netflix is in a fairly good position relative to some of its peers because so much of its productions come from outside of the US.
Tracy: (22:00)
Josh, I'd be curious to get your thoughts on the leverage held by corporations in, you know, 2023 versus say a decade or even two or three decades ago.
Josh: (22:12)
Well, to take a step back, the US legal system gives companies a lot of leverage over workers with or without a union. People in the United States generally can be fired for almost any reason. With a couple exceptions, that's not the case in most of the industrialized world. The process of forming a union and getting it recognized is difficult as we've seen at places like Starbucks. Even when workers successfully, legally, formally form a union, actually getting a union contract can be difficult and may not happen for years if at all.
And in contract negotiations, both sides are legally required to negotiate in good faith, but the penalty for not negotiating in good faith if you're the company generally is being ordered to come back and negotiate in good faith. There are no punitive damages for violating labor law as a company the way that there could be if you were polluting the river or something.
And so workers go on strike in some industries largely as a symbolic move, a way to galvanize workers and the public and go after a company's brand. There are other places, like we're talking about like UPS, the auto industry and Hollywood where workers have relatively more clout because they can actually shut down the industry at least partially or at least for a while or both.
I talked to one longtime labor leader who said, when we look at Hollywood and UPS and the auto industry, we're talking about three of the top five or 10 places in the United States where workers really do have leverage over their conditions. And even so that leverage is limited for all of the reasons that Lucas mentioned. The executives are not going to have to worry about mortgaging their homes or being able to pay rent in the way that some of these workers are.
And there are serious issues here about the long-term future of the industry and the money and the discretion that management will have to navigate changes. So those are not things that the company has reason to budge on easily. That said, a lot of people were expecting that the studios would try to wait out the writers and in the meantime get deals with everyone else, including the actors. And they were not able to do that. And the fact that the studios did reach out to the writers about at least talking about talking again is a good sign for the writers because generally in a contract fight you want the other side to be more hungry to negotiate with you than you are to be back at the table negotiating with them. And so that may be a sign that the studios would rather not wait out the actors and writers forever.
Joe: (25:37)
I'm going to ask like a really weird question.
Tracy: (25:39)
Go for it.
Joe: (25:40)
Prior to the strike years ago, I'm like thinking 2017 maybe 2018, I seem to recall a lot of like socialist, red rose emoji, DSA types on Twitter thinking of Fran Drescher as this sort of like trade unionist socialist heartthrob. But then I think at the beginning of the strike there was, like, some question how militant or how committed she would be. And I think you sort of hinted at this Josh, ideologically how does she fit in with past presidents of the Screen Actor's Guild?
Josh: (26:12)
Fran Drescher occupies an interesting place here because at both the UAW and the Teamsters, you had the incumbent faction in the union lose and someone come in. Both happened to be guys named Sean. Who ran on being a more aggressive bargainer, someone who was more ready to take the fight to the companies, someone who was against the types of concessions that had been made in the past and whose election was a signal that the membership was ready to go into tough fights and to not concede as easily.
That does not seem to have been the case with the actors. And there was a perception among at least some people in the membership that Fran Drescher was someone who was hoping not to have to go out on strike and someone who was not particularly militant. And that's part of why we saw this letter emerge trying to push from below, so to speak, from the membership for a more aggressive stance. Now all of that was going on while there was relatively, these are celebrities but relatively less attention to this fight. And then once they were out on strike, what a lot of people saw, who hadn't been paying attention, from Fran Drescher was very militant, loud, compelling, charismatic speeches that drew a lot of attention because this wasn't what some people had expected from The Nanny.
Tracy: (27:51)
Even though The Nanny was famously pro-union.
Josh: (27:54)
Yeah.
Lucas: (27:55)
For one, Fran Drescher doesn't have a ton of history as a labor activist, at least in her personal life. Her election to be the head of SAG was something of a surprise. I think at the time a lot of people thought the actor Matthew Modine would be the the next head of SAG and he does have a little more experience in that area. If Fran won in a close election, that was fairly surprising. More broadly, the SAG doesn't have a long history of striking or fighting with the Hollywood studios.
It's really been the Writers Guild that is kind of famous for agitating and for asking for more and fighting with studios. You know, it was the Writers Guild that went on strike in 2000, 2007, 2008. That was sort of at the dawn of streaming, which was a big part of those negotiations. The Writers Guild went on strike in the 1980s twice. And so it's typically been the writers that go on strike and as Josh mentioned, the studios try to go to the directors and the actors sort of undercut the writers and eventually force them back to the table. Which is one of the reasons why the actors also going on strike has become such a big deal because I think now the studios are in a little bit of disarray trying to figure out how they solve it.
Tracy: (29:06)
Carmen, at some point in this episode, I'm going to need you to insert a clip from Friend Dreher's iconic pro-unionization speech from the 1997 masterpiece The Beautician and the Beast.
Carmen: (29:19)
Coming right up.
Tracy: (29:20)
Excellent.
Factory Worker: (29:20)
Now we'll have to work late tonight. I'll miss my supper.
Joy Miller: (29:24)
Well at least you'll be able to rack in some good overtime, eh?
Factory Worker: (29:27)
What is overtime?
Joy Miller: (29:30)
You kidding me? Who's you union representative?
Factory Worker: (29:33)
What is a union?
Tracy: (29:36)
Lucas, you touched on this already, but there is this sort of threat of artificial intelligence hanging over this, not just over the long term, but the idea that, well ,actually if the studios don't have writers or actors, maybe they could use AI in the interim to produce content. And I'm kind of fuzzy on the timeline of how realistic this is. We did have one guest, Josh Wolfe, who came on and said he thought we would see entirely AI generated movies within a year, I think he said. How realistic is that threat both on the long-time scale and in the short term while this labor action is ongoing?
Lucas: (30:15)
The short-term threat is largely non-existent. I don't think Josh Wolfe is right that you'll see movies that are fully AI generated within the year, or I should say you certainly won't see it from traditional studios. You might see people at home making really low budget stuff that could go viral on social media.
But studios have no intention of having ChatGPT write an entire script for them. ChatGPT cannot direct a movie. They're not going to replace all these actors with synthetic characters. But there are ways in which AI is already being used. It's being used in post-production to work on dubbing or take out swear words. It's been used to de-age people. So Harrison Ford in the new Indiana Jones movie appears as a younger version of himself and that younger version of his face.
Josh: (31:07)
Oh yeah, in The Irishman, they did that too.
Tracy: (31:10)
It looked weird. It was very uncanny valley. I think so.
Lucas: (31:14)
But those are examples where the actor has sort of blessed the use of AI to affect their face. What a lot of the writers and actors are worried about is unsanctioned use of their work either to train these large language models or to create some synthetic person based on them, or that studios will do something a little simpler and sort of adjust their facial expression or what they say without their consent.
And some of that could happen in the next year or two. But I think this is more trying to establish some guardrails for what could be a threat many years in the future. And since these deals tend to run three years, there's concern that studios will do things that the writers and actors don't like in the next year or two and they just won't be protected.
Josh: (31:57)
And everyone should read Lucas's great cover story about AI in Hollywood. One of the important points I think here, as Lucas is saying and wrote, this is about control. Many people in the industry who are working as writers or as actors are not dead set against technological change and AI, although some may be, but for many people it's about this question of who gets to decide.
And these are like debates we see about automation in all sorts of industries where there are ways that technology can make people's jobs easier, can make it safer, can replace some not very fun or safe jobs with other better jobs. But when workers don't have a voice in how that's happening, often they get freaked out and often they have good reason to see technology making their conditions potentially worse if it's all being dictated by management and not by them.
And some of this anxiety is about, as Lucas said, what will happen over the next few years. I mean on picket lines in Los Angeles and New York, what I heard from a number of the writers is that they see this as like streaming when they were on strike 15 years ago, some people thought it was premature as a time to be so concerned about what would happen with streaming. And now streaming is everything. And some people see AI having the potential to be the same way. Even if, as Lucas explains, there are some significant obstacles to that actually happening.
Joe: (33:35)
I'm glad you brought up streaming Josh, because that sort of anticipated my next question, which is a thing you hear is that ‘oh, no one has figured out how to make money in streaming.’ And I can never tell whether that's like hyperbole or whether it's Hollywood accounting that obfuscates making money. I mean obviously some people are doing very well and I know you've written about this. How do you sort of adjudicate this question? Like how big is the pie to even be redistributed in some way?
Lucas: (34:02)
The pie is very large, but the profit pie is pretty small, so the amount of revenue being generated from streaming is quite significant. Tens of billions of dollars a year. And the biggest player, Netflix, does make a substantial profit now. It is not as profitable as cable TV was. And one of the questions for all of these companies is whether that is the result of streaming still being somewhat nascent and that it will grow into larger and larger profits or whether it is a defect of the business model. Even if streaming is not as lucrative as cable, it can be profitable for a lot of these entities. But I think what people lose sight of is that a lot of these streaming services are new and companies were also encouraged by investors at the time to spend lots of money just for the sake of growth.
And they didn't need to worry about profit. They only started to be told to worry about profit in the last sort of 18 months. And because of the way that film and television works, you can't just sort of flip a switch and make these things profitable. They've committed lots of money to projects that they're in the middle of developing or in the middle of shooting. And so a lot of these companies are now trying to slow down or reallocate their spending, but they're somewhat limited because they've got this melting iceberg, which is the cable TV networks. They're trying to transfer as many of the viewers and as much of the money over to streaming. And we're still in the middle of seeing how that transition is going to play out.
Josh: (35:32)
That's interesting. I mean we look at companies like Amazon that for year after year did great in the stock market while not being profitable, right? because there was a sense that they were getting big enough to become really profitable.
Tracy: (35:44)
So that's really interesting — that sort of shift in incentives from growth to profitability. And this is something that has come up on the podcast a number of times now, but I'm curious if you see that kind of feeding through into content choices. Because this has been one of the criticisms of Netflix. You know, they start a season of a new show and if it's not an absolute monster hit then they cancel it and a lot of people get upset. Do you see an impact of those decisions? Can you see people more focused on profitability and that leading into, I guess, safer choices for content?
Lucas: (36:20)
Well it's interesting that you bring that up because streaming has in some ways actually been more forgiving to the creative process because they will commit to making and releasing a full season on broadcast. There were shows that if they didn't work, they could get canceled after four episodes. They would never even finish the season.
I think one of the problems in streaming has actually been that they have spent too much money on projects that people don't watch and that are not financially lucrative. But to the question about impacting what we see in companies being more safe, I think that's absolutely a concern that companies will fall back on — franchises and known intellectual property and will take fewer risks. Because the early days of streaming, you saw companies like Netflix and Amazon and then later Apple take a number of risks with unknown creators or with famous creators who just had an idea because they needed to convince them to work with these new players in streaming.
There wasn't the trust that there is with a Warner Brothers or a Disney, and so they had to to take some chances on riskier IP And I think that was good for all of us. That led to a lot of really interesting programming. I think over the past few years that we already saw to some extent a decline in quality because you saw too many companies trying to make too much. And so there weren't the same quality control mechanisms in place.
And so the question as they recalibrate is on the one hand they'll probably be more conservative and that may lead to slightly less interesting storytelling on the other, if they're trying to make slightly fewer projects and put more emphasis on quality or making sure those work, that could actually be a good thing, especially if the creative energy comes from outside of the system. I think a lot of people, most people don't expect your Netflix or Disneys to really be trailblazers in terms of edgy programming, but there will be people on the outside who see an opportunity in this to make something new and fresh.
Joe: (38:18)
Josh, this is something that we talked about, but you know, you mentioned like grad students at more and more universities having voted to unionize. And one way I think that like grad students are sort of similar to actors is that they're really early, like a small number of really plum academic jobs that you can get. But if you get like a sort of a tenured professorship at a big flagship state university, certainly at like an Ivy League school, that's amazing, but the vast majority of academics never get them.
And it feels like that's similar with Hollywood in many respects where, yes, there are a handful of actors that we all know who have just like incredible careers and make tons of money, but the vast majority of actors none of us have ever heard of. And I'm curious whether you see unionization solidarity across some of these, like, people at different levels is threatening maybe in a good way to like change the sort of tournament nature of some of these industries.
Josh: (39:16)
Well, for many years sociologists have talked about exit versus voice and this question of do you change your job by leaving and finding another one or by staying where you are. And one of the things that my work has focused on is these questions of things that employers do to limit the options that workers have. Whether it's a contractual clause where you have to pay in order to quit your job early as a punishment early from the company's perspective, or it's some kind of non-compete that restricts you from going somewhere else. And in all sorts of industries, whether it's baristas or graduate student researchers, we see often people making a mental shift from thinking of their job as having some kind of particular issues with say their manager or the task that they're doing to more systemic ones that they can better address by changing the job where they are than by going and finding something somewhere else.
And of course there can be tensions and conflicts between groups of workers and workers often are set up to be in competition with each other. And that's part of why solidarity is difficult, whether it's within a company or across an industry or between industries. But in some cases, whether it's the academy or it's Hollywood or it's in the retail industry, you have workers looking at the way that their job is set up and saying there's a structural issue here. There are not enough labor hours for the labor to be done. There are not enough years to do the dissertation work that you're supposed to be able to do and perform the labor that's being asked of you.
It's interesting that you have workers both at Starbucks and at Grindr now demanding a seat on the board of their companies, the kind of thing that would be more common in Europe. And I think as workers see what's happening in other places, in a lot of industries, there are alternatives being voiced by people doing the work about what the organization of the work should look like and what the pipeline should be for future workers coming in that they would argue would make the industry more sustainable long term. And their bosses in many cases do not at all agree.
Joe: (41:47)
Josh Eidelson and Lucas Shaw, such a fascinating topic. Great perspectives. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and I guess if this is still going in three months or six months maybe we'll have you both back on, but really appreciate it. Great conversation.
Josh: (42:01)
Thank you very much.
Lucas: (42:02)
Yeah, thank you guys.
Joe: (42:16)
Tracy, I think the first thing I want to do is I'm going to go watch that video of the Nanny or, no, what was it? The movie?
Tracy: (42:23)
The Beautician and the Beast. So there's a famous, why do I know this? There's a famous scene from The Nanny where she refuses to cross a picket line and makes a big point about it.
Carmen: (42:33)
The Fines don't cross picket lines.
Tracy: (42:35)
That's exactly it, Carmen. Very good. And then there is a lesser known scene from Beautician and The Beast, which is an excellent, excellent movie in my opinion, and highly underrated, in which she encourages a factory in eastern Europe to unionize. Anyway, I just remembered, you know, one of the first articles I ever wrote was actually about labor conditions of teenage models in Japan.
And a lot of these issues were ongoing back then — people coming over on pretty much exploitative contracts into the country and then not earning very much money, but spending all day going to castings and not getting paid for it and things like that. It's kind of crazy how that system remains in large portions. I know I'm talking about modeling, but similarly in acting, it’s kind of unchanged.
Joe: (43:25)
Yeah, it was interesting to the point about how like the last writer strikes in the sort of mid 00s were like at the very dawn, like barely at the dawn of streaming. And I guess there was some question of, well, is it too early to be worried about that in 2006 or 2007? And then with AI now it's like, yeah, I'm like skeptical that we're going to have any decent quality two-hour movie where all the actors are AI actors. I don't think it's there yet, but who knows? But the idea is like, yeah, at some point these issues are going to get more real. And then the question of, to Josh's point, control. Is the technology going to be used in a way to like make the writer's lives worse or can it be made to make the writer's lives better? It's an interesting question.
Tracy: (44:07)
Right. The control aspect is something that I hadn't really considered before, but seems to be an important point and who gets to make these decisions. You know, do you own your own image? And your own work? Or does the studio? That seems to be a very thorny issue. I guess the big question for content watchers, from an entirely self interested perspective is, are we going to get a flood of AI content or reality TV and sports and which is worse?
Joe: (44:34)
Well, I mean the writers strike really did catalyze a lot more investment in reality, in the 2006 or 2007 one. So I do wonder whether in the short term, whether we'll just see like way more reality programming or shows dubbed from Korean.
Tracy: (44:51)
Yeah, yeah. That seems to be the sort of easier one at this moment in time. Like there's huge catalog of foreign content. You're already seeing it on Netflix. Oh, speaking of recommendations — Crash Landing Into You, Joe. You should watch that.
Joe: (45:06)
That's a good one.
Tracy: (45:08)
Yes, it's a Korean love drama. I think you should watch it. Alright, shall we leave it there?
Joe: (45:13)
Let’s leave it there.
You can follow Lucas Shaw on Twitter at
@lucas_shaw
and Josh Eidelson at
@josheidelson
.