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There are 11,500 members in the Writers Guild of America and 65,000 in the Screen Actors Guild. The question of whether this many writers and actors is a necessary or even a desirable thing is not a concern for us. What is of concern, is the question of what we’re going to be watching if the current strike by both American unions is not resolved soon.
Writers have been out since May and actors since July. Those lined up on the other side of the barricades, the members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, do not have a limitless backlog of movies and TV shows on which they can draw.
Blame streaming, which has changed everything. It created a huge demand for content and a huge potential for profit and a huge number of ways to pay people less for their work. More writers are now working for the Guild minimum than ever. There is more pressure, on more people to produce more work for not much more money.
Please don’t worry about Toms Hanks, Holland and Hardy, or Keira, Kyra and Kate. They are still doing fine. But, according to CNN, the average pay for Hollywood actors in 2022 was US$27.73 per hour. That’s when they are working, of course. Often, if not most, of the time, they aren’t.
It’s not just writers and actors who are affected. Anyone who has sat through the credits of a recent major motion picture will have seen hundreds of names of people who also make their living getting that masterwork on screen in dozens of specialist fields, from Creative Access Trainee Covid PA (Amir Jamal, Hijack) to Lead 3d Print Engineer: Legacy Effects (Dean Schneider, Ahsoka). Not to mention costumers, builders, caterers and many other basic trades.
At the heart of the disagreement are some complex and serious issues relating to disparities between broadcast and streaming TV, the threat of AI and just how many people should be employed on any production.
Given their line of work, it’s not surprising that some of the strikers tend to the theatrical in their commentary. “There’s no going back. It’s like in Apocalypse Now. It’s victory or death,” said former X Files scribe Glen Morgan.
Accounts of the story are a case study in loaded language. At this distance, it’s hard to be certain of all the rights and wrongs involved here, but Wikipedia should not be your guide, with its account referring to producers “shelling out” money to creative talent.
The last major event of this kind took place in 1988 when writers struck for 153 days. As a result, media legend has it, reality TV was created to make up the shortfall. In fact, it existed before, but this opened the floodgates.
At that time, no one said “reality” without raised eyebrows and at least half a smirk and the so-called genre was regarded with barely concealed disdain. Shows like MTV’s Real World and Big Brother were not even slightly real. They may not have involved professional actors, and they may not have had scripts containing dialogue, but they certainly had nothing to do with real life as most humans would define it.
However, because they got around the strike rules, reality shows allowed producers to continue to provide programming and a whole generation became hooked on who was going to get voted off this week.
Perhaps new genres will come into being this time around. Computer-generated puppets acting out scenes from the Bible? A great actor, proverbially, can read the telephone directory and make it interesting. It remains to be seen whether AI will be able to match this. The shortage of drama will prove a boon to shopping, sports and old movie channels.
But drama will not disappear from our lives. Fine programming will continue to be produced. Just not in America. Netflix has already got us hooked on a serious Scandi noir habit, and even folks who wouldn’t dream of buying tickets to a film festival screening are watching subtitled shows from such exotic countries of origin as France, Korea, Spain and Australia.
Finally, the reality TV precedent should not be taken lightly. It directly led to a mediocre businessman with a show called The Apprentice becoming the worst president in American history. Beware the ripples.
