Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2023

Front Burner Transcript for July 18, 2023

Host: Tamara Khandaker

[music]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Hi, I'm Tamara Khandaker.

SOUNDCLIP

[movie clip]

MR. SHEFFIELD: These are for you.

FRAN DRESCHER: Mr. Sheffield, I can't go in there. My mother had three rules. Never make contact with a public toilet.

[audience laughing]

FRAN DRESCHER: Never, ever, ever cross the picket line.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: This is a scene from the 90s show “The Nanny”, starring Fran Drescher. In it, she's refusing to walk into this really lavish party being thrown by her boss because there's a group of busboys picketing outside.

SOUNDCLIP

[same movie clip]

[audience laughing]

MR. SHEFFIELD: It’s fine. You're embarrassing me. Now, come along.

FRAN DRESCHER: I can’t. My Aunt would roll over in her grave, which was paid for by her union.

[audience laughing]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: The clip has been circulating online the last few days because right now, Fran Drescher is at the head of her own protest as the president of the Actors Union, SAG-AFTRA, and Hollywood's biggest shut down in over 60 years.

SOUNDCLIP

FRAN DRESCHER: We are labour and we stand tall and we demand respect.

[more protests and chants]

[Music: Theme]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: After failing to reach a deal with an alliance of Hollywood's biggest producers, around 160,000 actors have gone on strike. The union is fighting for better pay and better residuals as the rise of streaming services have meant actors now make way less money when their movies and shows are watched on repeat. They also want guarantees against artificial intelligence being used to reproduce their voices and bodies.

SOUNDCLIP

FRAN DRESCHER: It is a slippery slope. If big business corporations think that they can put human beings out of work and replace them with artificial intelligence, it's dangerous and it's without thinking.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: This is all happening as 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America are also on strike, shutting down production of most American films and TV shows and raising a giant question mark around the future of the industry.

SOUNDCLIP

FEMALE SPEAKER: This strike is really going to shut down every piece of production in Hollywood. Everyone who's involved in catering, makeup and production, every one of these people is going to be out of work right now.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Maureen Ryan is on the show today. She's a Vanity Fair contributing editor and the author of “Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood”.

[Music: Theme]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Hi, Maureen. Thanks so much for being here.

MAUREEN RYAN: Thank you for having me.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: So I just want to start with some of the nuts and bolts first. What can't actors do right now as a result of this strike?

MAUREEN RYAN: They cannot perform acting services for struck companies. And struck companies would be any signatories that the Screen Actors Guild in America and the Writers Guild of America have with a group called the AMPTP, which is the most awkward acronym of our time, I think. A lot of times, we in the media just say the studios. So the AMPTP covers many dozens, if not hundreds of organizations. But essentially, if you have a large production employing many Screen Actors Guild individuals and Writers Guild of America individuals, probably that production has been shut down. And by the way, just as a side note, the Screen Actors Guild also incorporates many other kinds of performers. So essentially, folks who do a lot of voiceover work, on screen work, other kinds of performance work, if they are in the Screen Actors Guild or ever want to be in the Screen Actors Guild, they cannot perform work for the companies against which those unions are on strike. And that's an interesting little side note of itself that influences are now a big deal. If influencers ever want to be in the Screen Actors Guild, they cannot perform, you know, enter into new work and do work for struck companies because they will be banned from joining SAG down the road if they do.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Wow! That's interesting. So this is going to have really far reaching implications. So a lot of the conversation around this has been very heated. There has been clips of actors on the picket lines who sound really angry. There was a video that has now been deleted, but it was Ron Perlman more or less threatening this anonymous studio executive who was quoted saying that they wanted to see the strikes last long enough that people start losing their homes.

SOUNDCLIP

RON PERLMAN: You wish that on people. You wish that families starve while you're making 27 fucking million dollars a year for creating nothing. Be careful, motherfucker. Be really careful.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: I wonder if you could talk about who some of the more notable celebrities are who've been speaking out about this and what they've been saying about why the strike is necessary.

MAUREEN RYAN: Right. I did see that Ron Perlman video. And by the way, he did walk some of that back in a new Instagram live.

SOUNDCLIP

RON PERLMAN: We all must try to get along and we all must try to understand. You have your value in giving us the resources we need to make content, and we have our value as storytellers because of the effect that we have when we tell our stories beautifully and properly and the people that come to see them.

MAUREEN RYAN: He said People are very… he was very agitated and, you know, basically was responding, as many people did, to a trade magazine piece in which, you know, executives for these large companies that fund and make a lot of the entertainment content, executives were quoted as saying they were waiting out people so that they would lose their houses or be unable to make rent. And so, you know, if you're just an average working Joe, which most people in these unions are, for someone to say, I'm going to wait for you to crawl back to the bargaining table after you're homeless, that gets people very, very angry.

SOUNDCLIP

RON PERLMAN: At one point, admittedly, I got quite heated. I don't wish anybody any harm. I hope the ass hole who made that comment also doesn't wish anybody any harm.

MAUREEN RYAN: And, you know, Sean Gunn is the brother of James Gunn, who's now the head of everything D.C. But, you know, Sean Gunn is just a working actor, has been on Gilmore Girls, has been in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. He's among the many people saying, we used to meaningfully share a little bit in the financial health of the industry. Residuals that used to be in the hundreds or the thousands are now pennies. Garrett Wang was an actor who was a series regular on Star Trek Voyager. For six seasons, he was on that show. He recently got a residual cheque that was for 34 cents. And I have seen across social media a number of actors showing residuals that are, again, pennies or dollars. And if you're living in Los Angeles or Vancouver or New York, you cannot pay your rent with a $30 residual cheque. You know, that's just not a realistic thing. A lot of high profile actors, the actors for Oppenheimer, one of the biggest releases of the year, left that premiere once it was clear that there was going to be a strike. So what's interesting to me is that someone on the level of a Florence Pugh or any of those other high level actors, Matt Damon came out at an Oppenheimer event before the strike occurred and said he fully supported the Screen Actors Guild demands. These people in the Guild have seen their income fall for years and it was never that great to begin with. So every A-list actor that you can think of did not start out as an A-list actor, so they understand what it's like to work as a background actor.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Right. Yeah. Like when you see A-list actors like Margot Robbie and Florence Pugh and Matt Damon supporting this union, people might be left with the impression that this is about a bunch of millionaires whining about not being paid enough. But that's not really the bulk of these unions’ memberships, is it?

MAUREEN RYAN: Absolutely. Yeah. A really talented writer, performer, producer, Ashley Nicole Black, made this point that I think is an important one to reinforce. What these guilds are negotiating at the moment are the minimums, the floor. Most people in the entertainment industry in North America are possibly middle class, but oftentimes working class and living pay cheque to pay cheque.

[music]

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST MALE SPEAKER: When I started out, there was a lot more conversation, there was a lot more residuals. And now with streaming, the residuals aren't the same as they used to be.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I actually make less money working in film than I did in the year 1990.

SECOND MALE SPEAKER: Streaming came along and the contracts have not adjusted according to the newest business models. They're operating under antiquated models that don't account for the way people consume entertainment now.

[music]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: So the Actors union has joined the Writers Union which walked out in May. What are they asking for?

MAUREEN RYAN: The problem that's going on right now really dates back to, I would say, around a decade ago. You know, streamers began dipping their toe in the water with Amazon and so forth and Netflix. A decade ago this month is When Orange Is the New Black premiered. And that is kind of like patient zero for the streaming revolution, which did bring in a lot of good changes. You know, we saw a difference in the people who were allowed to create shows. The commercial entertainment industry certainly in North America has been… there's been many gatekeepers that have kind of kept out people from historically marginalized communities, and that began to change. But what also changed, and this is what we're seeing now, is the pent up frustration over the fact that residuals fell off a cliff. And that's something that I write about in my new book. Residuals will help people weather the dry spells of not working. So if you were, you know, a series regular on a show, if you created a show, you shared a little bit or sometimes a lot in the wealth of that show. You know, very famously, the actors on Friends banded together for equal compensation, and they also benefited from Friends’ long term success. You know, part of the reason that they are millionaires is because they made a lot of money every time Friends was sold into syndication or hit some new window. You know, it never really was, for most actors, a lucrative job, but it became even less sustainable over the past decade because seasons were short, the overall run of a show. Even if you were the star of a show, even if you created a show, how much money are you really going to make if it only runs for 18 episodes? So all of these different factors pressed down on income, pressed down on people's ability to make it in these jobs during a time when the amount of productions actually went up. So, you know, the number of scripted shows aimed at North American consumers, about a decade ago, those scripted shows numbered about 200. Now, it's about 600 as of last year. Let's say that you get, for the sake of argument, $100 per episode of TV that you're in. If the season is only six episodes, that's very different from a season that's 22 episodes. This is a very large drop in income, so they want to have an adjustment around compensation because of shorter seasons, shorter runs and all of that. So that's the direct compensation. Okay, for today's work, here's how much you're going to get. They want that to go up, but they also want residuals to go up because residuals, if you were on CSI Miami, you would be getting a healthy cheque from that show. If you were a creator, a writer of a script, an actor, even a guest actor, you would get fairly healthy cheques from that. Maybe you had a three-hour appearance, you would get cheques from that for a while and they would be decent. Now, you're getting pennies for that. And this has been going on for years and actors are really angry about that.

SOUNDCLIP

FRAN DRESCHER: I mean, this entire industry has changed so dramatically with the advent of streaming that to try and think that by just making incremental changes on a contract that was forged since 1960 before there was Internet, before there was digital, before there was anything that's threatening us today is crazy.

MAUREEN RYAN: And then the final thing that's really getting people wound up, it's disturbing people in the extreme, is one of the proposals that Fran Drescher and her negotiating team fielded from the producers side of the negotiating table before the strike, just before the strike happened, was we want to be able to scan every background artist the day that they start work and own the image in the scan in perpetuity without paying any additional money. Like essentially, the person would just get a flat rate.

SOUNDCLIP

MALE SPEAKER: They proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day's pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.

MAUREEN RYAN: And 60% of the Screen Actors Guild, 60% of its membership, if they're earning income as actors or performers, 60% are getting it from that particular stream from being a background artist or an extra. So that felt like very much an existential shot across the bow because many, many actors, they're very protective of their images, and rightly so because they can be used to sell things or to be used, they can be used in ways that they don't agree with and so forth. What the studios would like to do is to be able to use AI and use other kinds of digital and computer enhancement methods to have people's images on file in an image bank. They pay once for that imagery, and then you essentially don't own your own likeness, your own body, your own face on screen anymore. This is kind of an actor's nightmare because someone else is giving the performance for you. You've essentially, you know, if you give away your image, then essentially, you're becoming a digital puppet and you're not controlling that work. You're not controlling that performance and you have no say over how it transpires. You know, actors, so many people in the industry already are so disempowered around many issues, around issues of abuse, treatment, all kinds of exploitation. And then the next level nightmare is, oh, and by the way, your face is going to be doing things on screen that you had nothing to do with. That's just… it's dystopian and the extreme. You know, I can't think of anything that they could have proposed that would have gotten people more up in arms quite literally. They're on the picket lines and were very energized to hit those picket lines because too many actors that I've spoken to and that have been giving interviews on this, this feels like the end of their profession if this is what happens.

[music]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: How much money are we talking about here? Like what would it cost for these studios to meet the demands of the actors union?

MAUREEN RYAN: I haven't seen a dollar amount for that myself personally, but what they are asking for is around 2% of the profits of these studios, which, you know, apparently, that's a non-starter, which is wild if you think about it because if you don't have actors, if you don't have writers creating the world or, you know, the script, these executives, you know, David Zaslav, the head of Warner Brothers Discovery, made $250 million in 2021. Many other executives make over $20 million. If not all the top executives make over 20 million, if not 30 or 40 or $50 million a year. Those people have nothing to sell if actors and writers are not willing to work. So it's just odd to me that they would think that they cannot share even a bit of this wealth. And again, you know, I've been doing it for a number of interviews based on my book, and some people will come back with the question, understandably, oh, well, you know, some of these firms are in trouble financially. Right. Well, the grip on set, the actor on set, the writer who created that show, they didn't make the decision to saddle those firms with debt. And by the way, even though that's happened, these dudes are making hundreds of millions of dollars over the last few years. So there is money.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: I wonder if we can spend a bit of time on what the AMPTP has been saying in response to the actors’ demands. So the debt, I wonder if you can talk a bit about the financial situation of these studios and why they claim they can't pay these actors more money. Like I saw that Disney CEO Bob Iger, he talked about how this action's very disruptive and that it's come at the worst time. What is he talking about?

MAUREEN RYAN: Well, yeah, he also called actors’ and writers’ demands unrealistic, which is interesting, given that, you know, I think that what's unrealistic is expecting people to make poverty wages indefinitely and not have anything to say about that. You know, there are headwinds facing the industry. But frankly, again, and this was taken at the highest executive levels, these decisions that were taken were to expand, expand, expand, spend a ton of money on content without a clear path to making profit from that content, because we switched over from essentially an advertiser driven model to a subscription driven model. So all of these economic factors led to an arms race of spending, which, you know, you as a consumer, if you load up 10 credit cards with debt, you're going to eventually have to pay that piper. That's something we all can understand. But the problem is now they are retrenching and they are trying to make that retrenchment on the backs of people who were already earning wages for, you know, in Los Angeles and New York were essentially barely working class wages in many instances. So to hear them say, oh, well, we can't pay you X because of these economic forces, we over expanded, we got too big for our britches, but I'm still going to be paid $50 million this year, you know, that's hard to take. And also, here's an interesting fact. So they went to this all subscription model and then realized that the old model by which advertising fed into their revenue source streams was a good model, and now they're trying to go back to it. They're trying to recreate 2007 through science or magic, to paraphrase Jack Donahue from 30 Rock. They're trying to reintegrate advertising into the stream of revenue. But when television especially was an advertising driven medium, creators shared in that wealth much more meaningfully. Now they're trying to go back to an advertising driven model or partly driven model, and they're not prepared to compensate people for the way people were compensated, you know, 10 to 15 years ago when that was the norm.

[music]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Right now, we're at the height of the summer blockbuster season, and Barbie and Oppenheimer are possibly the two most hyped movies of the year, and they're being released on Friday. What does the strike mean for the summer blockbuster season?

MAUREEN RYAN: That the promotional machinery is definitely going to be harder. There's not going to be red carpets for the most part. There was a waiver for the Tony Awards a couple of months ago when the Writers Guild was on strike. So there will be exceptions. But the norm that you see of people giving big interviews, going on camera, doing appearances, doing promotional work of any kind, that will be greatly diminished, if not reduced. And that is really going to hurt the awards season. And these are ways that people keep their products, their films, their TV shows in the public eye. We don't even know right now when the Emmy Awards will air. It's not… it’s up in the air. It might be this fall. It might be early next year, by which point, are we going to really care about the Emmys in February? I mean, I guess so. But, you know, it's at a very weird time.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: So when you have all these productions shut down, what kind of impact does that have on the economy of places like L.A. and Atlanta and other cities that have big film industries?

MAUREEN RYAN: It's a massive impact. You know, I just heard a stat this morning from a journalist who was interviewing me that 6.5% of the New York City economy has links to the entertainment industry and the film and TV shows and all kinds of productions, including unscripted, that are shot there. So that is really massive for L.A. I would say it's probably for L.A., Atlanta, Toronto, Vancouver, I would say that probably the ballpark is similar. And so what you're already seeing and hearing about in Hollywood is restaurants, florists, prop houses, costumers, car services. You know, there's a million different professions that touch this. But again, I think people are feeling incredibly existentially afraid of not having the strike as well, because as one person from the costume design department of The marvelous Mrs. Maisel said, they dressed on that show, no lie, 35,000 background actors. So that's tens of thousands of costumes and fittings and hours that that department spent on that and pay that people in that department took home and paid their rent with. So I do definitely know that there has been already an impact. And I just have got to give like a nice shout out. I don't know Drew Carey personally, but if you show a WGA card, and I don't know if it extends to SAG, but it might, a couple of different diners in L.A., Drew Carey has pledged to pick up people's meals and pay for them, and he has been reporting to those restaurants. At least one of those restaurants, he has been paying $10,000 a month for people to get a meal, which I think is just like, that's cool. Like if you're a rich celebrity, do that. You know what I mean? There’s a lot of pain going around. So people in the Directors Guild and other guilds are putting together fund raisers to help IATSE members who have lost their jobs because these productions shut down to help them with groceries and with bills. So there's a lot of collective actions happening right now. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that they're going to make up for a normal pay cheque that somebody gets because they probably aren't, but there's a lot of effort to try to ease at least some of this pain.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: So both sides sound pretty dug in here and emotions are running high on the unions’ side. Meanwhile, there is that deadline piece I mentioned where the studio exec implied that the goal was to wait this out until it becomes financially unsustainable for the unions. How long do you think this could potentially go for?

MAUREEN RYAN: This is not just the million dollar question. I think now it's going to be the billion dollar question. And I've covered the industry a long time. What I have learned during the 30 years I've been covering it is that literally anything can happen, good or bad. The wildcard in all of this is for Amazon, for Apple, what they spend, the billions that they spend on entertainment product is a rounding error. It's not a big deal to them. They, and I think to some degree Netflix, because Netflix is picking up content from all over the world, I think of some of these newer players in the game, if you will, think that they can wait things out. But I do think within the AMPTP, there are different factions and I think that that's what we might see. Some of the factions that want everyone to get back to work sooner rather than later may prevail. And maybe everyone goes back to the bargaining table and everyone works out a deal within the next few months, two months, whatever, something like that. If that's not successful, then we might be in for an incredibly long strike. I've been saying from the start, I think that this is going to be one of the longer strikes in Hollywood history. It's probably going to go past the 100 day strike that the Writers Guild of America had in 2007, 2008. That was exactly 100 days. But I do think that SAG going on strike did change the game. And they understand that yeah, we might have a lot of stuff banked, we might have a lot of content for our subscribers banked. By early next year, they don't have that much anymore, I got to tell you. Most people are going to be… the pipes will be running dry. Some factions of the AMPTP could break off and settle a separate deal, separate deals with people. That is certainly something that's possible. I think it's… the worst case scenario is that everybody digs in their heels and the producers are not willing to give on AI especially or on some of these residual issues. And then we might be reconvening to have this conversation again in four months right before Christmas. And that's not a scenario that anybody in any guild that I talk to wants, but they all are prepared for the fact that this might happen.

[music]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: You know, I find this really interesting as a Labour story because you have these really recognizable faces using language like wealth redistribution and means of production. Fran Drescher, who we mentioned in the intro, said in her speech, what happens here is important because what's happening to us is happening across all fields of labour by means of when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority. So what kind of impact do you think this might have on the broader labour movement?

MAUREEN RYAN: I think that's such a great question. And by the way, a fellow Chicagoan of mine, John Cusack, is putting on social media exactly these thoughts. And I think that it's funny to me that they are taking now with SAG being on strike, some of the most charismatic people on Earth and having them serve as spokespersons for collective labour. You know, it's like this is going to be a massive educational project, which actually I think will be good. And I think, you know, one thing I say a lot is Hollywood is both an aspiration and a cautionary tale. It's a cautionary tale because all of these guilds were formed almost 100 years ago because people realized that they were viewed as disposable and replaceable and just widgets that the studios could burn through. And I do think that all of this language that we're seeing around the strike, you know, James Poniewozik is a critic for New York Times, and he just wrote a piece that came out this past couple of days. We are all background actors was essentially the thesis of the piece, because if AI comes for their jobs and there is no regulation around how it's used, this could be any of us. You know, if you write code, if you are a technical writer, if you are anyone who does any kind of storytelling or many, many tasks, if there is no regulation around how AI is used, these trends that Hollywood is facing are coming for all of us. And by the way, I would also say that the wealth inequality talk, it's certainly been going around for some time. You know, I really think that the COVID pandemic kicked a lot of labour issues into the forefront because there were wildcat strikes. Amazon had its in terms of workers organizing that happened during the pandemic, the sort of the birth of the Amazon Labour union. I make the point in my book that someone working on the crew of an Amazon show and an Amazon warehouse worker, their plights are not different. They're working short term gigs often without benefits. They can be injured on the job. They're not making a lot of money and they are often, quite often… and this is not just applied to Amazon. It applies to many places. They are viewed as disposable. And so a lot of workers, I think, are realizing that we might be talking about a Hollywood strike. There may be an initial reaction among some folks of like, oh, it's just a bunch of spoilt, pampered babies wanting to make even more millions. I do think that this is a large scale education for folks about what working conditions are really like, what compensation and falling compensation has really been like in Hollywood and how similar that is to many other professions. You know, the same year that 98% of IATSE workers authorized a potential strike, John Deere workers were on strike. You know, I do think there's much more solidarity and awareness across guilds. Writers Guild of America striking workers were picketing last week with hotel workers in Los Angeles that are on strike. They were picketing last week with people at a UPS plant. So all of these things are much bigger issues within the systems, the economic systems in which we’re living, and the links are being made in people's heads. And what the producers and what the studios have done is give the most charismatic people on the planet literal bull horns they can use to talk about these issues. And that may backfire on these studios. You never know.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: This is all really, really interesting. Mau, thank you so much. It was great to talk to you.

MAUREEN RYAN: It's wonderful to talk to you. Thank you very, very much.

[Music: Theme]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: All right. That's all for today. I'm Tamara Khandaker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you tomorrow.

[Music: Theme]

Actors, writers shut down Hollywood - Transcript

Social Sharing