Many on the right are saying a pox on both their houses in Hollywood. The battle is between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and their new allies at SAG-AFTRA, the actors union, and Hollywood management at the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).
And what better way to personalize this mud wrestling match next to some Palm Springs swimming pool than to have Disney’s Bob “Demands-are-Unrealistic” Iger facing off against SAG’s president, Fran “The Nanny” Drescher. The Disney CEO has ditched the soft, cuddly image and is showing boardroom teeth only a shark in “Jaws” could envy. As for the 11,500 writers moaning and groaning that inflation has eaten away their livelihood, there is only one word for them, and it isn’t plastics or Rosebud. It is Bidenomics. But, despite their financial predicament, they aren’t going to be pining for the good old days of Donald Trump’s low inflation and strong economy any time soon. Although this time the green they are interested in promoting isn’t in the environment.
As a part of a left-wing union that filed a winning lawsuit against the New York Times on a similar issue, there is some sympathy for the writer’s position here. In that case, The New York Times v. Tasini went to the Supreme Court, where they ruled 7-2 that writers were entitled to additional compensation for reusing their work when new internet technology allowed publishers to monetize independent content online. As in the case here, new technologies, in this case streaming and AI, require new contract and royalty structures.
But streaming and AI may not be the game changers both sides in the industry hoped it would be. For writers and actors, AI might be the greatest tool for intellectual property theft since the days before international copyright laws protected writers like Dickens from being ripped off by American publishers. But no matter the technology, the old rule of garbage in, garbage out applies. And there has been a lot of Hollywood garbage lately, and the public isn’t buying it.
The so-called entertainment industry has been its own worst enemy. At the turn of the 20th century, the biggest stars were opera singers. Then came the golden age of Hollywood, which represented a high point of Hollywood’s cultural outreach and worldwide fame. But today, superstar musicians hold the spotlight in fame and earnings that Hollywood once did. Concerts tours can make more in one night than some of Hollywood’s past greats made in a year or even a lifetime.
So Hollywood is fighting harder and harder for less and less. Like the auto unions that fought innovation, this battle may well kill their golden goose, already on life support. Netflix is about the only streaming service that has made money. This may explain management’s reluctance to pay more and why AI replacement for writers and actors has such a bottom-line appeal.
Of course, this purported example of an AI request for a film trailer for a non-existent production of “Heidi” may give pause, if not nightmares, about going too far too fast.
Although it is probably a put-up job by a Swiss comedian, right now, off the shelf, AI isn’t ready for prime time. Whether it is ripping off Sinatra or others doing cover tunes, it is not yet there. But just as with “tweening” technology in the 1980s, which did away with hand animation at Disney, AI will shake things up.
Right now, management is offering a little under $100 million, and the writers want about $450 million, along with guaranteed minimum job tenures. Hire a writer or actor for a few weeks, and AI him forever is the fear.
But both sides are in a weak position. The New York newspaper strikes in the 1960s and ’70s should give pause. When the fighting stopped, so did a lot of the newspapers. Years of anti-American bias in Hollywood productions have reduced their market. Years of funding left-wing causes have damaged the economy and alienated the public. In California and New York, taxpayers are fleeing, leaving those in these industries paying more for less. And hiring and creating products based on equity and inclusion instead of talent and entertainment isn’t working. Producing propaganda-ladened shows that annoy the public has been shrinking Hollywood’s market for years.
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The public has a backlog of entertainment options. Movie mogul Sam Goldwyn once complained about people who ignored telling a good story for propaganda. “If you’ve got a message, send a telegram,” he said. And until Hollywood gets the message and becomes serious about entertaining and respecting the American public and what they believe in, no one will notice or care that they aren’t producing anything new.
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