Why I, A Studio Exec, Am Totally Unconcerned About The Writer and Actor Strike
It's not like they know what it's like to scrimp and save in Hollywood or anything.
Starting at midnight, @sagaftra, WGA East and @WGAWest will be on strike at the same time for the first time in 63 years. - SAG-AFTRA
“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. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.” - Deadline
The cast of Oppenheimer walked off the red carpet. Production has halted on sets across the country. And the Writers Guild of America is on day 77 of their strike. But we here at the Alliance of Motion Pictures And Television Producers are staying strong. In the face of the workers conspiring to shut down Hollywood for things like ‘dignity’ and ‘a living wage’, we are perfectly prepared to wait them out. After all, what are they going to do: work another job? Please.
It’s not like actors and writers spend years waiting tables and serving coffee, collecting side hustles and odd jobs like HBO at the Emmys, for just a sniff at a hope of realizing their dreams. They don’t have the constitution to go months without being paid for their passion. Take it from us — a few days without hyper-oxygenated water and raw kale chips from Erewhon and they’ll be begging to have their likeness and voices be captured and used without payment for eternity.
These effete artistses don’t know what it’s like to work an honest day in their lives. What does an actor know about taking late shifts so they can be free to run to an audition in the middle of the day? What does a writer know about cobbling together various copywriting gigs on Fiverr in between staffing seasons? Can you imagine an Emmy nominated writer folding jeans at Madewell just so they can make rent? We work in Hollywood and even we think that’s a little bit far-fetched. Give it another month and Christopher Nolan will be banging down the door to feed his scripts into our AI scriptwriting machines in no time.
Honestly, it’s hard to take their demands seriously. They’re living the dream! They get to dress up and play make believe and becoming household names while making money — even if it is just a hair short of minimum wage. Can you imagine how privileged you have to be to complain about getting to sit in a room with a bunch of fellow writers to build the bones of a multi-million dollar franchise? These people are just completely disconnected from the realities of actual working people in America. Which is why we cut the writer’s rooms to pay for Bob Iger’s place at billionaire summer camp.
It’s not our fault that they don’t know how to stretch their money. Between exorbitant expenses like rent and health insurance, is it any wonder that they’re crying bankruptcy? Maybe instead of throwing a temper tantrum and denting our quarterly earnings reports, they could get a real job — the kind that involves slashing thousands of jobs and gutting beloved properties for hundreds of millions in stock and bonuses.
Making it in Hollywood isn’t for everyone. It takes a special kind of mindset to look at an industry where only 2% end up making a living and say, “That’s where I want to be.” That’s why we worked our way up the old-fashioned way — by leveraging family wealth and connections to attain key positions in the entertainment business, or muscling in as an investment-funded industry disruptor. Can you imagine any writer or actor capable of doing the same? Didn’t think so.
This whole strike is just a multi-billion dollar of chicken. Who do you think is going to blink first – the hundreds of thousands of actors and writers who have learned how to scrimp and save and piece together a living in some of the most expensive cities in the world while still pursuing their dreams, or the handful of executives whose jobs depends on investors not freaking out about our next earnings report? I know where my money is.