Dear holidaying reader,
Perhaps you’re not on vacation right now, but many people are out and about, even if it’s not for an entire week. It’s difficult to pin people down to make plans. Everyone has to reach for their calendar, then hum and haw as they consider their commitments and impending visitors.
July and early August are the months crowds descend upon my home county of Galway, particularly the city. We have a series of international festivals back-to-back which attract a deluge of tourists, artists and filmmakers. The Galway Arts Festival is underway, which is a two-week long love affair with the arts; there’s theatre, discussions, music, and street spectacles on every corner. The Galway Film Fleadh (Fleadh means Festival in Irish), one of the most important film festivals in the country, has just ended. It was in process when the actors’ guild in the USA — SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) — went on strike.
This means that the screenwriters and actors guilds are both on strike in America. It’s been revealed, not to much surprise, that the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) has not been dealing fairly with either guild. Here’s a telling quote about the strategy the AMPTP was employing with the writers:
“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. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”
SAG-AFTRA gave the AMPTP an extra two weeks in July to negotiate a deal. Those two weeks bought the studios time for their celebrity actors to promote the big summer blockbuster movies, such as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Barbie, and Oppenheimer. During that period they did not attempt to mediate a deal in any meaningful way. They let the clock run down and then expressed chagrin at the truculence of the guild.
You might be surprised at the extensive list of prohibited activities for actors during the strike. Any publicity for a movie or TV show from a ‘struck studio’ is not allowed, and that includes streaming services, so the likes of Amazon, Apple, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros Discovery. This means no red carpet appearances at film festivals, interviews, social media promotion, talk about awards, or podcasts. Actors can’t audition or rehearse, don’t mind act for projects with these studios. Voice acting is forbidden also — which impacts a range of industries. Agents can’t put their people up for work or even arrange meetings.
When you consider that 87% of actors don’t make the minimum requirements to qualify for health insurance via SAG-AFTRA — that’s a paltry $26,000 — it means that most of them cannot earn a living wage from acting. The top 1% will weather this strike, but the rest of them are already enmeshed in the gig economy to survive. They’ll walk the picket lines in the baking heat and then dash back to their side-hustle.
If you want to get a sense of what it’s like for a screenwriter today, read the account by experienced writer Cole Haddon of a project he worked on for free for six months. He discusses how the process of pitching and developing a script happened previously, how that’s changed, and all the upfront labour that’s expected from writers:
It’s useful to remember that most producers who pressure writers to keep working for free by dangling a carrot that this next re-write will definitely secure the deal, have salaried jobs.1
When the actors went on strike, Disney CEO, Bob Iger (who is paid approximately $27 million annually), decided to lambast them for their bad attitude. Iger was attending the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho at the time, which could be described as an exclusive summer camp for billionaire tech and media moguls. He said in his CNBC interview:
“We managed, as an industry, to negotiate a very good deal with the directors guild that reflects the value that the directors contribute to this great business. We wanted to do the same thing with the writers, and we’d like to do the same thing with the actors… There’s a level of expectation that they have, that is just not realistic. And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”
Yes, I suppose making enough money to pay rent, buy groceries and afford health insurance is rather ambitious… In these tough times, Iger’s personal project is the new superyacht he has commissioned. It should be 30 feet longer than Iger’s current 184-foot superyacht, Aquarius.
If you want a sense of what life is like for actors, this piece on the Strikegeist is worth reading (the Strikegeist newsletter is one of the best sources of information about the strike):
On the positive side, it’s likely that writers and actors who are supporting each other on the front lines are going to team and dream up their own projects, and figure out independent ways to birth their resulting creations. Theoretically, in this age of the smart phone, with cast and crew out of work, everyone has the means to create and shoot their work, or book theatres for their plays. Expect more podcasts. This labour crisis could result in extraordinary work that never would have existed otherwise. I like to imagine this struggle will manifest beauty.
In the meantime, it’s a tough time for writers and actors (and film crew) in the USA, and I wish them the very best. This is an inflection point: what happens in the next six months will have significant ramifications for creators across the USA, and abroad.
On a related issue, I’d like to point you to another Substack newsletter published this week, by the erudite Jazz musician/historian Ted Gioia (my friends are probably fed up of me constantly telling them to subscribe to The Honest Broker Substack - so here I am, recommending him to you too).
As you can see from the excerpt, Gioia reported that a company called Mubert has boasted it created 100 million songs using AI. To offer context, the entire Spotify catalogue currently consists of that number of songs. It has taken thousands of years of creativity to accumulate this cultural archive, and in a couple of months AI has equalled our output. They have let loose a Tsunami of algorithmic junk, and you can expect that number to increase dramatically in the coming months and years.
It will certainly prove the point that quantity does not equate to quality, so figuring out where to locate the treasure sunk in the churning ocean will be the next mission. AI will be the solution to AI, I’m guessing…
It’s easy to get side-tracked and depressed by these announcements. What is going to be more and more important is in-person meetings/plays/performances and the physical artefact. The more we drown in overwhelming mediocrity, the more our souls will be sickened by it.
It will drive us out of our houses and into the world, to experience reality. The writers and actors sweating and walking together outside the studio gates are joined in camaraderie and fellowship, and meeting in unprecedented ways. Whatever happens next, this gives me hope.
What people need now are other people, so they can imagine and strive for a better creative future. AI is not going to be banished, but we need to figure out how it can be a helpful tool for all of us rather than a way to fund bigger yachts for billionaires.
And to offer you a small uplift and a reminder of the world outside our preoccupations, here’s a small video I filmed earlier today, at the Coole Park Nature Reserve, in Co. Galway, a refuge for past playwrights and poets (and for me). I hope you have a way to reconnect with the real and fill up your well of inspiration.
I plan to do some more of these small videos throughout the year. Let me know if you enjoy them.
Not all producers pull in big bucks or work for big studios. Some specialise in small to low budget productions, and work hard to support their talent.
Always nice to see other people notice your work. Thanks for sharing my piece!