Post 519 - May 23, 2023

It took me almost as many years as I have been alive to realize just how difficult it is to be friends with someone who employs you. That is not to say that you can’t be friendly and maybe even hang out, but true friendship is well-nigh impossible when one person in the relationship has that kind of control over the other.

As creative people, we are taught to view the world with open hearts. Whether we are acting, painting, dancing, making music, writing, or engaging in any other number of artistic pursuits, what we are doing is diving into an experience, experiencing it, and then responding to it so that the result can be shared with those around us in some way. The people who hire us to do that, however, are not interested in that. They are, quite simply, interested in making money.

There is a profound lack of understanding between these two camps. The creators view the sponsors with a suspicious side-eye. The sponsors do what they can to placate the seemingly, to them, unbalanced makers to ensure that they keep making. Working in the arts is a constant tug-of-war between these two factions.

If you lived in Europe before the 1600s and you wanted to try and make some money by trading in the Far East, you got together with a couple of wealthy people, bought, or rented a ship, fitted it out, and sent it off with something in its hold that you could trade with. Then you waited. It could take months or years before you ever saw your ship again. Often, it vanished without a trace, taking all your money with it. Whole family fortunes could be lost in a single storm.

In 1600, looking for a way to lessen the risk, a group of investors formed the British East India Company. Two years later another group in Holland formed the Dutch East India Company. The idea of these entities was that rather than invest everything in one trip at a time, they would invest in a fleet of ships, and send them out with different things at different times. An individual’s stake was now spread out over many voyages. This greatly minimized the risk of losing everything in one catastrophic event. These two companies were the world’s first corporations.

Unlike the previous way of doing business where investors on a particular voyage all knew each other, these new companies were anonymous. You invested a certain amount and were paid back an amount based on overall returns. You didn’t have a say in how the company was run. Decision-making happened in boardrooms between people who likely had no idea how to sail or how to trade with the local populations in far-off places. They didn’t need to know because they hired people who did. What these board members kept their eyes on were the numbers.

I have spent a great deal of my professional life working in the grey area in-between the financial people and the creative people. I have been able to see into the private lives of both. What I have found is that while it is tempting to characterize producers’ actions as evil, in truth, they are all just doing the one simple thing that they are designed to do – make money.

There are all kinds of producers, some are evil, reprehensible people and some are kind and supportive of the artists they invest in. I’ve worked with both. Regardless of their personalities, though, they all have their eyes on the bottom line. It is a completely non-emotional point of view. They don’t know what it’s like backstage or on a set, they don’t care. They rarely get personally involved. They are just looking at the numbers.

The two East India Companies ran the world for about two hundred years. They were solely focused on profit and committed unspeakable atrocities around the globe to attain it. Everything they did, no matter how evil we would now consider it, was done to ensure that profit. Money-making is a remarkably straightforward endeavor. You do what you can to make it. Period. If your numbers go up, you’ve succeeded. If your numbers go down, you’ve failed. If nobody tells you not to do something in your quest for that buck, you do it. If somebody makes a rule that you can’t follow a certain practice, you figure the cheapest way around it and look to see where you can make up that money elsewhere. It’s all very simple.

When I was still in college and I started volunteering at an off-Broadway show, I thought that I had gone to heaven. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t being paid, I was thrilled to be there and to be a part of honest-to-goodness professional theatre. As its scheduled run approached its end date, the producers decided to extend it because it was making money. They told me that they were going to start paying me $100 per week to stay on. I tried to turn it down. Somehow, in my twisted thinking, I thought that if they were paying me that they would be more likely to decide they didn’t like me and let me go. At that point, I would have given everything to just be able to keep working on that show. The Production Stage Manager, in no uncertain terms, told me to never again turn down money in the theatre when it was offered. I never did.

This, in a nutshell, is why the Writers Guild strike is so important. We can’t be trusted on our own. We can be idiots when it comes to what we love to do

All of us who make things worry that we aren’t good enough. We worry that people won’t like us or whatever it is we are making. We create something then start to second guess ourselves. We yearn for someone to notice what we’ve made and decide to produce or promote it. When somebody does, our first instinct is to often try and give it away so that we won’t scare them off. Since the other side’s job is to make money, they let us spin out and happily take it for free. They will never say that we deserve to get paid more. The theatre started paying me to protect the show. They weren’t being nice. They needed to know that I was going to show up every day. Looking back, I should have held out for more.

We all live emotion-driven lives. The companies and corporations that employ us do not. There are plenty of perfectly nice people producing artists, but even so, their eyes are always on that profit margin.

“Don’t take it personally, it’s just Show Business.”

We do take every business decision personally and, they’re right, we shouldn’t. To try not to react that way, the creative side got together and created unions. A good union should be fluent in both languages. They should understand and empathize with our sometimes erratic emotional one and they should be able to speak the simpler direct dialect of numbers to the producers. We form them so that they protect us. We form them so that we don’t have to try and stand up to the profit-seekers on our own. If we are lucky, we choose people to lead us who enjoy the thrill of the financial battle as much as the financiers do.

Towards the end of the pandemic, I was asked to stage manage a production of Jersey Boys that was going to be filmed for streaming. The set was built from scratch somewhere out in the Midwest. The show was cast with some stars and some alums. We had a normal theatrical rehearsal time, a normal tech period, and then we filmed it. The Actors were on SAG-AFTRA contracts, and the film folk were on either Directors Guild contracts or one of the other usual film contracts. As stage managers, when it came to negotiating, we were out in the cold. There wasn’t a union contract that covered the work we were doing. We were offered weekly salaries but with no health insurance and no pension benefits. We also were not given any part of future residuals.

I fought to get residuals and lost. One of the arguments I used was that after sixteen years of working for the company on the show, it was only fair. “Fair??!!” was the response I got. Without the union coverage, we had no protection. Because they weren’t forced to pay us a wage commensurate with our DGA colleagues or give us benefits comparable to our SAG-AFTRA colleagues, they did neither.

When the job came up, it had been a long time without work, we all needed it, so I took it. The one thing I had to leverage was my participation. I could have walked but when push came to shove, I wanted to be in the building too much. Perhaps if I’d had a dispassionate agent negotiating for me, I could have made out a bit better. Given that we were working in a union roadhouse and the work was identical to work covered by Actors’ Equity I made an appeal to the theatrical union. They said they’d investigate, but I never heard another word from them

So, back to the Writers’ Guild strike. Instead of advertising revenue, where profit came from in the past, the giant entertainment companies are now making money from subscriptions to their services. They are not required to release any information about how many people are watching any given program, so we have no idea how many folks are watching. These corporations’ profits have risen with streaming, but artists’ residuals have bottomed out.

Nobody knows how to quantify streaming. Up until now, the unions have largely ignored it because it was so indefinite. Maybe they were assuming it would go away or that it would not really impact the industry in a meaningful way. The truth of the matter is, it seems to be here to stay, and it has radically altered the entertainment landscape. The pandemic taught us all how to stream, and we have taken to it like a fish to water. There are no rules telling the producers that they must pay anyone when they stream their work, so they don’t. They aren’t actively being evil; they are just fulfilling their mandates.

In the past, residuals were calculated based on where the product was sold. If you filmed an episodic TV show you were paid when they showed it in prime time and then paid again when they repeated it in prime time. If the show was then sold into syndication or to a foreign market, you got some money from that. When the corporation made money, so did the artist. If the program failed and nobody bought it, then nobody got anything. It was all relatively easy to track. From all his television work, Michael like every other working SAG-AFTRA actor gets piles of little residual checks in tiny amounts – sometimes just pennies – from every weird niche market the world over.

This isn’t happening with streaming. A movie or a television episode can be streamed once or a million times and nobody gets paid regardless. Netflix isn’t concerned with getting advertisers to pay them. Instead, they are looking to increase the number of eyes on them at any given time. Netflix and companies like them are making a profit from the people who sign up for their channel. That is, of course, driven by the popularity of what they program, but none of that information is available to us. As a result, they aren’t letting any of the profit trickle down to the artists. Why? Because they don’t have to. That’s what this fight is for, to make them have to.

The big entertainment conglomerates are making the same if not more, money. The writers are now standing up and saying, wait a minute, it is still our work. We should be getting the same residuals as we were getting before. These companies need to figure out how to quantify viewership and compensate the makers appropriately.

If the writers lose this strike, then nobody else in other facets of the business has a chance to get the part of this pie they are due. This is the moment when something must change. For those who argue that Broadway and Hollywood are separate industries and the writers’ strike doesn’t concern them, I would tell them to open a few playbills and look at the list of producers at the top of the title page. It is a rare show that doesn’t count a major film company among its backers. The same people are running theatre that are running Hollywood

This writers’ strike is going to affect everyone even peripherally involved in the performing arts. We need to stand by our unions and let them fight this battle. They speak the language. This isn’t an emotional battle; it is just about the numbers. It isn’t personal. The producers are doing everything in their power to avoid having to pay anyone anything so that they can create bigger numbers for themselves. We can call it greed, but it is simply and truly what they are designed to do. Is a clock greedy for ticking away the seconds?

That it took me so long to truly understand, “Don’t take it personally, it’s just Show Business,” is a bit embarrassing. There were people who I worked for that I considered friends and that was a mistake. They were friendly and I enjoyed being with them, but they weren’t friends. They were the people who employed me. If any of them had to choose between what was good for me and what was good for the company, they wouldn’t think twice. It would be the company every time. That’s not friendship.

I can live with that. I can still be happy to see people I used to work for on the street. (There are, of course, a few that I will cross against the light to avoid.) I just can’t count on them to ever have my best interests at heart. That’s on me. What I might need, I will stand up for. I don’t have to fight them for basic compensation, though, my union will. I’ve now seen what it is like not to be protected – even from the producers I considered friendly. I don’t need to experience that again.

Support this strike.

Support your union – whichever one it might be.

Support each other.

Brace yourself. They’re coming for the rest of us next.