Hollywood Strike

[Mongrel]

Really there's a very long list of studio execs who I would find it very easy to believe would say that.

That's what it's boils down to, really. Any of them could have said it and it almost doesn't matter who exactly.

[Büge]

[Thad]

SAG Files Unfair Labor Practice Against Universal After It Trimmed Trees on Picket Line Without a Permit

I'd say this is inept supervillain shit, but it's way too petty. This is like...something Doctor Doom might do but then a later writer would retcon it and say it was Doombot.

[Mongrel]

[Upthorn]

SAG Files Unfair Labor Practice Against Universal After It Trimmed Trees on Picket Line Without a Permit

I'd say this is inept supervillain shit, but it's way too petty. This is like...something Doctor Doom might do but then a later writer would retcon it and say it was Doombot.

Relatedly, according to these two tweets,

Universal Studios might be in the shit with the City of Los Angeles due to Tree Law.

[Friday]

I remember posting this graph in #finalfight alongside a pic of

actually, hold on.





Anyway, everyone realizes that the world is run by racist, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic old shitfucks. What is news to some people is how incredibly petty and babylike they also are.

[Mongrel]

I'm used to petty IRL villains, because those sorts of people are usually broken people through and through, but the fake Obama killed me at the time because imagine being that guy.

I'm happy for anyone to take money off Trump (assuming he was actually paid in the end, which is a badly-weighted coin toss with Trump), but goddamn, wow.

[Mongrel]

SAG Files Unfair Labor Practice Against Universal After It Trimmed Trees on Picket Line Without a Permit

I'd say this is inept supervillain shit, but it's way too petty. This is like...something Doctor Doom might do but then a later writer would retcon it and say it was Doombot.

Relatedly, according to these two tweets,

Universal Studios might be in the shit with the City of Los Angeles due to Tree Law.

We have pretty robust municipal tree protection here, so that came to mind right away; that if the trees were public (and it did look like they were, as that seemed like public sidewalk) they're in deep shit with LA municipal if those weren't on Universal property. I've been to US cities where you can't even see weeds in the cracks of old broken sidewalks, the concrete is so all-consuming, but LA is not one of those towns.

Glad to hear it's happening right away. LA isn't stupid (at least, not in this particular way) - they at least know it's the actors that make Hollywood what it is, not the studios. Of course I don't know what the consequences for this will be. Probably a fine that Universal will just eat :/

[Büge]

At least Clint Eastwood had the good taste to berate an empty chair

[Thad]

The AMPTP continues to be shockingly bad at this.

Deadline: WGA Slams Studios’ Latest Offer & Meeting As Attempt To Make Guild “Cave”; “Not To Bargain, But To Jam Us”

That one includes the full text of the email the WGA leaders sent to their members:

DEAR MEMBERS,

After 102 days of being on strike and of AMPTP silence, the companies began to bargain with us on August 11th, presenting us for the first time with a counteroffer.

We responded to their counter at the beginning of last week and engaged in further discussions throughout the week.

On Monday of this week, we received an invitation to meet with Bob Iger, Donna Langley, Ted Sarandos, David Zaslav, and Carol Lombardini. It was accompanied by a message that it was past time to end this strike and that the companies were finally ready to bargain a deal.

We accepted that invitation and, in good faith, met tonight, in hopes that the companies were serious about getting the industry back to work.

Instead, on the 113th day of the strike – and while SAG-AFTRA is walking the picket lines by our side – we were met with a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was.

We explained all the ways in which their counter’s limitations and loopholes and omissions failed to sufficiently protect writers from the existential threats that caused us to strike in the first place. We told them that a strike has a price, and that price is an answer to all – and not just some – of the problems they have created in the business.

But this wasn’t a meeting to make a deal. This was a meeting to get us to cave, which is why, not 20 minutes after we left the meeting, the AMPTP released its summary of their proposals.

This was the companies’ plan from the beginning – not to bargain, but to jam us. It is their only strategy – to bet that we will turn on each other.

Tomorrow we will send a more detailed description of the state of the negotiations. And we will see you all out on the picket lines so that the companies continue to see what labor power looks like.

It wasn't entirely clear to me what those last few paragraphs meant, but this THR article summarizes it nicely: “Releasing the Counteroffer Was an Unforced Error”: Writers Weigh in on Latest Studio Proposal

Basically, what the producers tried to do was make an end run around the negotiators and take their offer directly to the rank-and-file WGA members, in the hopes that the latter would put pressure on the former to accept the deal.

I'm not surprised by how out-of-touch these motherfuckers are. I am a little curious as to whether their PR people are totally incompetent or whether they're just not listening to them.

One more link: Washington Post: Talks heat up in Hollywood, but studio tactics anger striking writers

[Thad]

Not seeing much in the way of momentum towards a resolution, but here are a couple articles and an op/ed.

Dominic Patten, Deadline: AMPTP Hires Crisis PR Firm As Studios Seek To Reset Strike Messaging

Prior to that, the firm worked on behalf of the now imprisoned Elizabeth Holmes as her medical tech firm Theranos was revealed to be a scam.

Matt Donnelly, Variety: DGA Email Scandal: Members Urged Not to Elect 10 Writers to Board, Including Boots Riley and Craig Mazin

In a sign of Hollywood’s escalating internal tensions, a prominent Directors Guild of America member openly advocated against the election of 10 writer-directors to the guild’s board earlier this month on the grounds that they were “primarily writers” and hailed from “fringe groups.”

In a leaked email that has been shared widely in the creative community, Linda Montanti, chair of the guild’s Western AD/UPM Council, urged a bloc of DGA voters to not support the board candidacies of a number of multihyphenates who are members of both the DGA and WGA — some of whom have been outspoken about strike issues. The list includes writer-producer Boots Riley, Oscar-winning “CODA” writer-director Sian Heder, actor-filmmaker Justine Bateman, actor-writer Paul Scheer and “Chernobyl” creator Craig Mazin. The unorthodox move prompted DGA president Lesli Linka Glatter to contact the members affected to assure them that Montanti’s move was not condoned by top DGA leaders.

Mary McNamara, LA Times: Studios already lost writers', SAG strikes. Time to surrender

You know what would be the best PR right now? Ending the strikes.

Because it isn’t the guilds that are divided at this point, it’s the studios; on Wednesday, many of their heads met in an attempt to sort out what has been characterized as increasingly frantic infighting.

(links/formatting not included in copy-paste)

[Friday]

Studios: hahaha, we'll just keep this strike on indefinitely until the pressure mounts and they are all kicked out of their houses onto the street and are forced to accept our terms or become homeless!

also Studios: oh god we're bleeding so much money we have to end this somehow

[KingRoyal]

Kind of delightful that the studios assumed they were more popular than the actors and writers who make everything

[Thad]

The LA Times article has this bit near the beginning:

How many times does Hollywood have to tell this story, in fiction and non-, before the people who run the entertainment industry understand it? Do they even watch anything they make?

They watch it and they think they're the good guys. They watch The Lego Movie and they're like "Man, fuck that Mr. Business guy; it's a good thing we're the scrappy underdogs banding together to defeat him." Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer saw The Matrix and fucking thought they were Neo and Morpheus.

I've done this dance with fanboys every time I've seen a dispute between comic creators and publishers. Motherfuckers seriously think Jack Kirby's family is the evil empire and Disney is Captain America. This is not an exaggeration; I've seen people use that exact analogy unironically, more than once.

On the one hand, I'm a little surprised that somebody like Iger has proven so clueless in this scenario given how shrewd he's been in others (ousting Perlmutter and outmaneuvering DeSantis are a couple recent examples). But I really think that's what it comes down to; he's convinced he's the good guy, and doesn't understand that most people see a big fucking difference between taking on right-wing billionaires and corrupt politicians and taking on people who work for him and are asking for more money.

(I'm not surprised that, say, Zaslav is clueless at all; I'm not sure I've ever seen that guy do anything right.)

[Friday]

I'm sorry to gloat, it's just that it's always so satisfying to watch the employer at the start of any strike assume they have all the power and then gradually as the strike goes on and on realize that they, in fact, do not have any of the power

as an aside, I will never ever blame anyone for working at amazon or wal-mart or exxonmobil whatever. If you have to work at evil corps, you have to work at evil corps. People need money to survive and while I would prefer that people stopped working for corporations that are heavily invested in destroying our future to make money right now, I can't blame people for doing whatever jobs they can get to earn money so they can live.

Except scabs.

I will never be anything other than incredibly angry at a scab. I don't give a fuck how dire your economic situation is. I legitimately think that turning to (nonviolent) crime like theft is a more moral option than working as a scab if you need money that badly.

[Thad]

Really "dipshits who watch The Matrix and don't realize they're the bad guys" could be a whole soc/psych book in itself.

[Brantly B.]

You can't blame the head of Disney too much for assuming that leaning on his brand name will Magically turn every opinion, rivalry, and court decision his way. If he thinks of himself as the protagonist then this is that episode where his one invincible finishing move doesn't actually work and now he's fuck-all out of ideas.

[Thad]

There's definitely something to that; he's just doing what's always worked for him before.

But he really should know, at least in the abstract, that just the Disney name in itself isn't a guarantee that you're going to win friends and influence people. Because he's the guy they brought in to fix all the shit the last CEO fucked up.

Twice.

[Thad]

Meanwhile: SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry

[Thad]

I'm not clear on how Drew Barrymore returning to her show without her writers is different from when Leno, Conan, Stewart, and Colbert did it during the last WGA strike. They're all still in the WGA but she's getting threatened with a lifetime ban. Is it that she's going to be performing scripted material and they just ad-libbed all their shit when they did it?