The Two Strikes That Ground Hollywood to a Halt | Odd Lots

[Music] [Applause] hello and welcome to another episode of the odd Lots podcast I'm Joe weisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway Trisha you watching anything good on TV these days no I'm serious um I just finished watching the bear which I know you also watched right I did I switch off usually between watching like some new show and then going back and watching all six seasons of The Sopranos I've been watching a new show and then The Sopranos again so I think I recently right before the bear I did my seventh viewing of The Sopranos it's one of these things I never I don't know what to watch now I mean I don't have a new show do you need suggestions I need suggestions actually I just finished watching all of Cheers which I've never seen really like it was kind of it was always in the background I was a big Frasier fan so I thought I should try cheers and I really enjoyed it I want to watch Northern Exposure but it's not on any of the streaming services yeah I would love to to re-watch I remember my mother loved that show um okay well we are not we are not actually doing TV reviews are we we could but you know it is true there is a lot of archive TV material to watch you don't even need to watch new shows no uh that is true you could endlessly watch the back catalogs of old TV which is fun and entertaining but has also given rise to uh a new issue for us to worry about right and so you know right now we are in the midst of a sort of I think at least two strikes I think the the writers the screenwriters in Hollywood have been on strike for at least a few months now the actors are on strike so while there's plenty to watch and actually people are excited about going to the movies again for the first time in a while like my understanding is that basically nothing is getting made right now yeah this is actually I know we said there's tons of TV to get through but I do also worry about what if some of the good stuff shuts down but more broadly and I do want to know whether the guy gets out of the freezer after in the Bear right because he got caught in the freezer at the end so I hope there's a third season that resolves that you know how they call everyone Chef while you're there it's like yes chef yeah okay Chef should we start calling each other co-host yeah yes co-host yes host yes host okay okay all right okay so there is a concern over future content but this also fits more broadly into some of the more active labor discussions and things that we've seen going on recently and we just finished up that episode about the United Auto Workers Union and their fight against the big three and it feels like these are two very different Industries car manufacturers and you know content creators for Hollywood but there are some similarities and also key differences underlying both of these labor movements yes host uh let you know what let's just get started we have two perfect guests to describe to help us understand what's going on with Hollywood and the unions right now both of them in-house here are colleagues we're going to be speaking with Lucas Shaw here's the managing editor for media and entertainment at Bloomberg and the author of The excellent screen time newsletter and we also have Josh idolson senior reporter for Bloomberg and businessweek who covers organized labor so uh Lucas and Josh thank you both so much for coming on odd lots thanks for having us thank you for having us uh Lucas why don't you give us the state of play generally right now in Hollywood like how many strikes are going on who's on strike who isn't on strike where are talks how long have they been going on give us like the quick summation of where things stand there are two strikes happening right now which is the first time that that has happened since 1960 the First Union to go on strike was the writer's Guild which was at the beginning of May so they've been on strike for about three months the last writer strike was in 2007 2008 that lasted for a hundred days this one looks almost certain to blow past that the actors joined the writers on strike in the middle of July and so that's been going on for for a couple of weeks the other guild that had a deal coming up this year that was a big deal was the directors they did make a deal with the studios and so they are not on strike but you've now got you know we've had months of writers on the picket lines outside of Studios chanting and getting attention and now the actors have joined them and the studios haven't made a lot of progress in in trying to to sort it out with the actors they are now trying to get back at the table with the writers but from everything we've seen the studios and the writers were really far apart not even close the studios and the actors were a little bit closer but still a lot of ground to make up and nobody's really certain when this is going to end which is incredibly disorienting and destabilizing for most of the people who work in the entertainment business and all of the industries that work around it whether it's you know restaurants or stylists or Transportation so talk to us a little bit about the issues at play here and you know Joe brought up the idea of the back catalogs which I I guess have become more valuable given the rise of streaming and it seems like writers or actors involved with those want a bigger piece of the pipe so what exactly are the uh the complaints here and how do they tie in with the way the media business has sort of changed over time yeah so the the writers and and actors have slightly different asks or proposals but the UniFi fine theme undergirding this dispute is there's been this dramatic transformation in the entertainment business which every consumer every viewer knows about because it's streaming streaming has replaced cable TV or is in the process of replacing cable TV that has changed how projects are made how they are funded and how Talent gets paid and the writers and actors feel that they are not receiving enough money from these big media companies and from streaming services in particular and that the ways in which they are paid make the job which was already not the most secure position even less secure and so they are looking for ways that that protect themselves a bit more at the same time the the biggest reason that I think there's so much labor unrest is because of that transition most of these media companies also are not making as much money as they used to because the their cable networks are less profitable and they're pouring a ton of money into these streaming services most of which other than Netflix lose money Josh let me bring you in you know one of the themes that we've been talking about on recent episodes and it's just out a lot um is this sort of like this idea of Newfound energy in the labor movement more broadly and I don't know if their actual number of strikes is up but we definitely see a new attitude a result with UPS we see with UAW Etc when you look at the unions in um Hollywood how similar is this like Pro you know is the vibe is the sort of uh political stance sort of similar to what it was maybe in 2006 or has there been also an A change too in the sort of leadership in tactics that we see with some of these Hollywood unions so having covered the labor movement for more than a decade now it has often felt like every six months or year or so someone wants to grab something to declare that the long declining labor movement in the U.S is revived and so I come at this generally with a sense of skepticism and we could go year by year and I could tell you what the cool thing was that was supposedly going to reverse the decline of U.S labor unions and didn't that said what's been happening the past year and a half really is remarkable the most stunning thing that we've seen is that long-time non-union companies the most famous companies in the United States in many cases where for the first time workers actually won Union recognition at Starbucks Amazon Apple other places like Trader Joe's Microsoft and those workers so far have not won Union contracts but the fact that these places that were seen often including by Union organizers as impregnable suddenly now have legally recognized unions is a very significant shift and one that has impacted how workers think about their jobs and about what's possible at other places and also I think has impacted the sense of ambition and possibility for workers who've had a union for a long time and some people may remember in 2021 there was discussion about what was being called striketober where there were lots of union members authorizing or going on strikes what's happened since then is more significant by the Numbers this year has been a big year for strikes already not compared to the 1950s if you go to when I Love Lucy was on we may remember that as uh also a great show which I have rewatched probably on streaming I'm guessing although there could be an I Love Lucy Channel I I don't know about because I cut the cord a long time ago every year that I Love Lucy was on TV there were by current standards tons of people going on strike in the U.S there were close to or over a million people involved in work stoppages every one of those years in the 50s we are far from that because unions are a much smaller share of the U.S Workforce these days in terms of the workers they represent but by recent standards this has been a big year for strikes and for potential strikes like the one that almost happened at UPS the ones that could happen in the Auto industry the one that hypothetically could still happen at UPS if the teamsters rejected the contract and I think we're seeing that for a number of reasons including how the pandemic changed people's mindsets including what's been going on on with the labor market and also changes in leadership at some of these unions as workers have elected more militant leaders to represent them or as with the actors members have been pressuring the leadership to take a more aggressive posture so I think it's fair now to say that at a minimum The Vibes have shifted here hmm so one of the things that came up in our recent episode on the UAW strikes or potential strikes was this idea of you know workers actively banding together but not just in their own industry but with other Industries and I think this is something I actually learned a term for it horizontal solidarity there's a new phrase but this is something that we've seen also in relation to some of the Hollywood actions I think we've seen members of The Writer's Guild like show up to the teamster rallies and vice versa you know Teamsters refusing to make deliveries to the studios and stuff like that but how much of that is a sort of new tactic and how does it make these actions more effective well if you go far enough back in U.S labor history you can find examples of attempts to shut down a whole city in a general strike with workers from all sorts of Industries but more recently there has been more work stoppages and more high-profile labor disputes and potential or existing strikes and organizing campaigns than we had seen in a while particularly at really prominent companies where lots of people notice what's happening whether it's because they see it on TV or because they know someone who works there or because they depend on their UPS delivery person and have a conversation with them one of the phenomena that our colleague Spencer Soper has been writing about is the role of UPS in Amazon's supply chain in that the drivers for Amazon will now have more interaction with drivers from UPS who just got this contract deal that includes very significant raises and so Starbucks workers for example have inspired people at all sorts of companies including Apple we've seen workers at places that some people don't think about when they think about the labor movement historically like graduate students doing teaching and research who have come to think of themselves more as workers and as having more in common with workers they see taking action other places Lucas just on the specific Hollywood actions that we've seen is it significant at all that sag and the wga are striking at the same time and should we think of those two different strikes as two different labor disputes or do they share similarities it's incredibly significant I mean again it hasn't happened in six decades and it has shut down the industry for months now you know the writers strike prevents a lot of development of new projects that prevent Studios from buying things from writers because writers and studios are not supposed to be communicating it shuts down work on a lot of TV shows because those are often sort of written as you shoot them the actors add to that because you know you could have a movie that was in production like the the new Deadpool movie with Ryan Reynolds the script's done they're in production it's supposed to come out next year the actors go on strike that has to shut down suddenly Disney has no big tentpole movie for next year actors can no longer promote their projects you have a bunch of movies coming out in the fall where some studios are pushing because if the talent in them can't promote them they fear that it will impact how that performs and so the combo strike means that it's not just something that's an inside Hollywood Story something that starts to affect what the average person can see and feel as to whether you can see them as sort of distinct strikes or or one of the same I think it's a little bit of both you know there are issues that are very specific to writers around being on set or the number of people in a writer's room or all these things that the actors don't care so much about and same deal with the actors you know the actors have some issues with their pension plan which the writers do not have but there are a number of kind of big picture thematic problems that unify them that includes residuals payments for projects being re-aired it includes how much they get paid for people watching overseas on streaming services it's being able to share in the upside of a successful show and is also one of those issues that has been unifying across the different unions [Music] thank you I definitely want to get into AI a bit more and how it affects writers and actors and how the studios are thinking about it but I also just want to go back to this question of like Lucas within the context of these unions like some actors make an insane amount of money and we all know that and then some actors like you know they have to take a side job uh waiting tables or attending bar or teaching an acting class or something like that I think it's probably the same with writers and so forth and so of course like when we talk about say UPS or the United Auto Workers of course this tiering question how do the Hollywood unions maintain solidarity when the economics of their own members are so skewed and so diverse yeah I mean solidarity is one of the bigger challenges for these unions you know Josh was talking about some of the changes in the approach and the membership of these of these unions and I think if you know you talk to both members of the unions and the studios the unions in Hollywood today feel very different from how they did 10 or 20 years ago you know far more Progressive farmer activist and at least in the case of the writers unified you're right that there are a lot of people in these unions who make a lot of money which I think sometimes makes them sort of unsympathetic figures because it seems like you know Rich Hollywood actors and writers fighting with Rich Hollywood studio Chiefs and there's a degree to which that's true obviously you have movie stars who are in these unions or you have writers like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy who've made hundreds of millions of dollars who are in them but that's a really small layer at the top most of the people in these unions are very much Working Class A lot of them have second in their jobs which ironically makes them able to sort of hang on a little bit longer there's not the same pressure to reach a deal really quickly this strike can go on for months and it seems like everybody sort of figures out a way to make it work they've been able to to really get the wealthier members especially in the Actors Guild on their side there was a famous letter signed by a few hundred of of the richest and most famous actors in Hollywood basically telling the the leadership of The Actors Guild like don't make a big compromise or don't compromise your values go for a big deal we support you I think the writers it's a little murkier you do have some writer producers who are maybe not on board with everything but they're not going to come out and say it and that letter ended in an interesting way because they were telling the leadership of the actors Union were concerned you may not be as willing to go out on strike as we are and the leader of the Union Fran Drescher responded by adding her own name to the letter to herself can I just ask on the actor's side there is one demand that I saw and it kind of reminded me of some of the issues Joe that we saw with truckers yeah idling at the ports and you know they they sign up for a job that's for x amount of money and supposed to take x amount of hours or days and then they wind up spending a lot of time just waiting to take on the loads and the actors are complaining about not being paid for audition times which if anyone has ever done acting or modeling you know that you can spend all day going to castings and Come Away with nothing in some cases how thorny is that issue and what are the proposals actually to fix that because it seems like a difficult one the issue of Free Labor is one that I'd say both the writers and actors are unified in obviously the type of Labor is different but writers don't want to have to do a bunch of drafts of something without getting paid more money actors don't want to have to spend all this money going for auditions without getting paid something in return I'm not sure how that's going to get solved there are a bunch of of asks that the writers and actors have made that are fairly fundamental structural changes to how the industry Works those being some big examples and I don't get the sense from the the studio side that there's a lot of interest in giving on them you know they feel like if they give the writers and actors more money on some of the the core issues that the Free Labor thing may be overlooked but there's no question that that Hollywood has long preyed on the fact that there are thousands if not millions of people who would love to be famous and so they can get them to do a bunch of work for free well this was going to be my other question which is how much leverage do the studios actually have here because it seems there is this endless stream of starry-eyed wannabe stars who potentially would be more than happy to I guess break Union lines and and go for things it's a really good question and I'm not sure I know the answer I think that the conventional wisdom is that the studios and big media companies have more leverage than the writers and actors because at a certain point you're going to have a lot of these writers and actors who have bills if they don't work and they don't make money for months and months and months it's going to start to negatively impact their lives in ways that you know they won't be able to make rent they're all these things that horrible things that could happen to them the media companies they will suffer a little bit from not having new product and and not being able to make money but a lot of the ways those companies make money are unaffected right they have deals for their cable networks of pay TV Distributors where they get paid fees every month they get paid no matter what right as long as the ratings don't fall off a total Cliff they have backlogs of programming in library that they can put on right CBS doesn't have as much new programming to put on in the fall because of the strike but they can still do reality TV which is not part of these so there's going to be Survivor they can still do news so they'll be 90 minutes of 60 Minutes they can still do Sports so there'll be football coming in the fall and then they they're part of a company where they can take a show like Yellowstone that's a big hit for the Paramount Network and put it on CBS to an audience that probably hasn't seen Yellowstone before what about International TV I mean that's a huge thing I like when I like turn on Netflix you know it's like here's a hot show that's in Korea or a show from Israel or a show from Poland or something like that does that implicitly like undermine the bargaining position of the us-based actors and writers that presumably there are a lot of people working internationally who are not engaged in the same actions right now I don't know that it's undermining them but it has put what some of the unions abroad in an uncomfortable position right I think people in the UK in particular are a little uncomfortable because they want to show solidarity with their peers in the U.S and there have been marches you know famous actors like Brian Cox from succession shouting AI will not replace us sort of screw you Studios but if you have Productions that are filled with actors that are not in the US unions they can continue right like House of the Dragon The Game of Thrones spin-off for HBO pretty much all the actors in that work in the UK and so they can keep shooting that or in South Korea which has become a huge producer of film and television those Productions continue and that's why a service like Netflix is in a fairly good position relative to some of its peers because so much of its Productions come from outside of the U.S Josh I'd be curious to get your thoughts on The Leverage held by corporations in you know 2023 versus say a decade or even two or three decades ago well to take a step back sure the U.S legal system gives companies a lot of Leverage over workers with or without a union people in the United States generally can be fired for almost any reason with a couple exceptions that's not the case in most of the industrialized world the process of forming a union and getting it recognized is difficult as we've seen at places like Starbucks even when workers successfully legally formally form a union actually getting a Union contract can be difficult and may not happen for years if at all and in contract negotiations both sides are legally required to negotiate in good faith but the penalty for not negotiating in good faith if you're the company generally is being ordered to come back and negotiate in good faith there are no punitive damages for violating labor law as a company the way that there could be if you were polluting the river or something and so workers go on strike in some Industries largely as a symbolic move away to Galvanize workers and the public and go after a company's brand there are other places like we're talking about like UPS the Auto industry and Hollywood where workers have relatively more clout because they can actually shut down the industry at least partially or at least for a while or both I talked to one longtime labor leader who said when we look at Hollywood and ups and the Auto industry we're talking about three of the top five or ten places in the United States where workers really do have leverage over their conditions and even so that Leverage is limited for all of the reasons that Lucas mentioned the executives are not going to have to worry about mortgaging their homes or being able to pay rent in the way that some of these workers are and there are serious issues here about the long-term future of the industry and the money and the discretion that management will have to navigate changes so those are not things that the company has reason to budge on easily that said a lot of people were expecting that the studios would try to wait out the writers and in the meantime get deals with everyone else including the actors and they were not able to do that and the fact that the studios did reach out to the writers about at least talking about talking again is a good sign for the writers because generally in a contract fight you want the other side to be more hungry to negotiate with you than you are to be back at the table negotiating with them and so that may be a sign that the studios would rather not wait out the actors and writers forever [Music] foreign years ago I'm like thinking like 27 team maybe 2018. I seem to recall a lot of like socialist red rose Emoji DSA Types on Twitter thinking of like Fran Drescher as this sort of like trade unionist socialist heartthrob but then I think like at the beginning of the strike doors like some question like about how uh militant or how like committed she would be and I think you sort of hinted at this Josh like ideologically like how does she fit in with past presidents of the Screen Actors Guild Fran Drescher occupies an interesting place here because at both the UAW and the teamsters you had the incumbent faction in the union lose and someone come in both happen to be guys named Sean who ran on being a more aggressive bargainer someone who was more ready to take the fight to the companies someone who was against the types of concessions that had been made in the past and whose election was a signal that the membership was ready to go into tough fights and to not concede as easily that does not seem to have been the case with the actors and there was a perception among at least some people in the membership that Fran Drescher was someone who was hoping not to have to go out on strike and someone who was not particularly militant and that's part of why we saw this letter emerge trying to push from below so to speak from the membership for a more aggressive stance now all of that was going on while there was relatively these are celebrities but relatively less attention to this fight and then once they were out on strike what a lot of people saw who hadn't been paying attention from Fran Drescher was very militant loud compelling charismatic speeches that Drew a lot of attention because this wasn't what some people had expected from The Nanny even though the nanny was famously pro-union yeah right yeah for one frandrasher doesn't have a ton of history as a labor activist in at least in her personal life and her election to be the head of sag was something of a surprise I think at the time a lot of people thought the actor Matthew Modine would be the the next head of zag and he does have a little more experience in that area Fran won in a close election that was fairly surprising more broadly the SAG doesn't have a long history of striking or fighting with the Hollywood Studios it's really been the writer's Guild that is kind of famous for agitating and for asking for more and fighting with Studios you know it was the writer's Guild that went on strike in 2000 and 2007 2008 that was sort of at the dawn of streaming which was a big part of those negotiations The Writer's Guild went on strike in the 1980s twice and so it's typically been the writers that go on strike and as Josh mentioned the studios try to go to the directors and the actors sort of undercut their writers and eventually forced them back to the table which is one of the reasons why the actors also going on strike has become such a big deal because I think now the studios are a little in a little bit of disarray trying to figure out how they Solve IT Carmen at some point in this episode I'm going to need you to insert a clip from Fran drescher's iconic pro-unionization speech from the 1997 Masterpiece The Beautician and the Beast coming right up excellent now we'll have to work late tonight I'll miss myself oh I should be able to Rack in some good overtime huh what is over the time representative what is a union [Music] Lucas you touched on this already but there is this sort of threat of artificial intelligence hanging over this not just over the long term but the idea that well actually if the studios don't have writers or actors maybe they could use AI in the interim to produce content and I'm kind of fuzzy on the timeline of how realistic this is we did have one guest Josh Wolf who came on and said he thought we would see entirely AI generated movies within a year I think he said a year or so how realistic is that threat like both on the long time scale and in the short term while this labor action is ongoing the short-term threat is largely non-existent I don't think Josh Wolf is right that you'll see movies that are fully AI generated within the year or I should say you certainly won't see it from traditional Studios you might see people at home making really low budget stuff that could go viral on on social media but Studios have no intention of having chat gbt write an entire script for them chat GPT cannot direct a movie they're not going to replace all these actors with synthetic characters but there are ways in which AI is already being used it's being used in post-production to work on dubbing or take out swear words it's been used to de-age people so Harrison Ford in the new Indiana Jones movie appears as a younger version of himself and that younger version of his face and the Irish they did that too yes the Irish weird yeah it's a little weird it's very uncountable I think but those are examples where the actor has sort of blessed the use of AI to affect their face what a lot of the the writers and actors are worried about unsanctioned use of their work either to train these large language models or to create some synthetic person based on them or that Studios will do something a little simpler and sort of adjust their facial expression or what they say without their consent and some of that could happen in the next year or two but I think this is more trying to establish some guard rails for what could be a threat many years in the future and since these deals tend to run three years there's concern that Studios will do things that the writers and actors don't like in the next year or two and they just won't be protected and everyone should read Lucas's great cover story about Ai and Hollywood one of the important points I think here as Lucas is saying in Rhode is that this is about control many people in the industry who are working as writer there's actors are not dead set against technological change in AI although some may be but for many people it's about this question of who gets to decide and these are like debates we see about Automation in all sorts of Industries where there are ways that technology can make people's jobs easier can make it safer can replace some not very fun or safe jobs with other better jobs but when workers don't have a voice in how that's happening often they get freaked out and often they have good reason to see technology making their conditions potentially worse if it's all being dictated by management and not by them and some of this anxiety is about as Lucas said what will happen over the next few years I mean on picket lines in Los Angeles and New York what I heard from a number of the writers is that they see this as like streaming when they were on strike 15 years ago some people thought it was premature as a time to be so concerned about what would happen with streaming and now streaming is everything and some people see AI having the potential to be the same way even if as Lucas explains there are some things significant obstacles to that actually happening I'm glad you brought up streaming Josh because that sort of anticipated my next question which is like a thing you hear is that oh no one has figured out how to make money in streaming and I can never tell whether that's like one of those like it's like hyperbole or whether it's Hollywood accounting that obfuscates making money I mean obviously some people are doing very well and and I know you've written about this how do you sort of adjudicate this question like how big is the pie to even be redistributed in some way the pie is very large but the profit pie is pretty small so the amount of Revenue being generated from streaming is quite significant tens of billions of dollars a year and the biggest player Netflix does make a substantial profit now it is not as profitable as cable TV was and one of the questions for all of these companies is whether that is the result of streaming still being somewhat nascent and that it will grow into larger and larger profits or whether it is a defect effect of the business model even if streaming is not as lucrative as cable it can be profitable for a lot of these entities but I think what people lose sight of is that a lot of these streaming services are new and companies were also encouraged by investors at the time to spend lots of money just for the sake of growth and they didn't need to worry about profit they only started to be told to worry about profit in the last sort of 18 months and because of the way that film and television works you can't just sort of flip a switch and make these things profitable they've committed lots of money to projects that they're in the middle of developing or in the middle of shooting and so a lot of these companies are now trying to slow down or reallocate their spending but they're somewhat limited because they've got this melting Iceberg which is the cable TV networks and they're trying to transfer as many of the viewers and as much of the money over to streaming and we're still in the middle of seeing how that transition is going to play out that's interesting I mean we look at companies like Amazon that for year after year did great in the stock market while not being profitable because there's a sense that they were getting big enough to become really profitable so that's really interesting that sort of shift in incentives from growth to profitability and this is something that has come up on the podcast a number of times now but I'm curious if you see that kind of feeding through into content choices because this has been one of the criticisms in particular of Netflix you know they start a season of a new show and if it's not an absolute monster hit then they cancel it and a lot of people get upset do you see an impact of those decisions like can you see people more focused on profitability and that leading into I guess safer choices for Content well it's interesting that you bring that up because streaming has in some ways actually been more forgiving to the creative process because they will commit to making and releasing a full season on broadcast there were shows that if they didn't work they could get canceled after four episodes they would never even finish the season I think one of the problems in streaming has actually been that they have spent too much money on projects that people don't watch and that are not financially lucrative but to the question about impacting what we see in companies being more safe I think that's absolutely a concern that companies will fall back on you know franchises and known intellectual property and will take fewer risks because the early days of streaming you saw companies like Netflix and Amazon and then later Apple take a a number of risks with unknown creators or with famous creators who just had an idea because they needed to convince them to work with these new players in streaming there wasn't the trust that there is with the Warner Brothers or at Disney and so they had to to take some chances on risk your IP and I think that was good for all of us it led to a lot of really interesting programming I think over the past few years that we already saw to some extent a decline in quality because you saw too many companies trying to make too much and so there weren't the same quality control mechanisms in place and so the question as they recalibrate is on the one hand they'll probably be more conservative and that may lead to slightly less interesting storytelling on the other if they're trying to make slightly fewer projects and put more emphasis on quality or making sure those work that could actually be a good thing especially if the creative energy comes from outside of the system I think a lot of people most people don't expect your Netflix their Disney's to really be Trailblazers in terms of edgy programming but there will be people on the outside who see an opportunity in this to make something new and fresh Josh I want to go back to you know this is something that we talked about but you know you mentioned like grad students at more more and more universities having voted to unionize and like one way I think that like grad students are sort of similar to actors is that there really are only like a small number of like really Plum academic jobs that you can get but if you get like a sort of a 10-year professorship and a big Flagship State University certainly at like an Ivy League school that's amazing but the vast majority of academics never get them and it feels like that's similar with Hollywood in many respects where yes there are a handful of actors that we all know who have just like incredible careers and make tons of money but the vast majority of actors like none of us have ever heard of and I'm curious whether you see like like unionization solidarity across like some of these like people at different levels is like threatening maybe in a good way to like change the sort of like tournament nature of some of these industries well for many years sociologists have talked about exit versus voice in this question of do you change your job by leaving and finding another one or by staying where you are and one of the things that my work has focused on is these questions of things that employers do to limit the options that workers have whether it's a contractual Clause where you have to pay in order to quit your job early as a punishment early from the company's perspective or it's some kind of non-compete that restricts you from going somewhere else and in all sorts of Industries whether it's for Baristas or graduate student researchers we see often people making a mental shift from thinking of their job as having some kind of particular issues with say their manager or the task that they're doing to more systemic ones that they can better address by changing the job where they are than by going and finding something somewhere else and of course there can be tensions and conflicts between groups of workers and workers often are set up to be in competition with each other and that's part of why solidarity is difficult whether it's within a company or across an industry or between Industries but in some cases whether it's the academy or it's Hollywood or it's in the retail industry you have workers looking at the way that their job is set up and saying there's a structural issue here there are not enough labor hours for the labor to be done there are not enough years to do the dissertation work that you're supposed to be able to do and perform the labor that's being asked of you it's interesting that you have workers both at Starbucks and at grinder now demanding a seat on the board of their companies the kind of thing that would be more common in Europe and I think as workers see what's happening in other places in a lot of Industries there are alternatives being voiced by people doing the work about what the organization of the work should look like and what the pipeline should be for future workers coming in that they would argue would make the industry more sustainable long term and their bosses in many cases do not at all agree Joshua Edelson and Lucas Shaw such a fascinating topic great perspectives thank you so much for uh coming on the podcast and I guess if this is still going in three months or six months maybe we'll have you both back on but I really appreciate it great conversation thank you very much yeah thank you guys [Music] [Music] Tracy I think the first thing I want to do is I'm going to go watch that video of uh the nanny or no the what was it it was in the it was in a movie The Beautician and the Beast so there's a famous why do I know this there's a famous scene from The Nanny where she refuses to cross a picket line oh um yeah and makes a big point about it and the signs don't cross picket lines that's exactly it Carmen very good and then there is a lesser-known scene from Beautician and the Beast which is an excellent excellent movie in my opinion and highly underrated uh in which she encourages a factory in Eastern Europe to unionized anyway I just remembered you know one of the first articles I ever wrote was actually about Labor conditions of teenage models in Japan and a lot of these issues yeah were ongoing back then people coming over on pretty much exploitative contracts into the country and then not earning very much money but spending all day going to castings and not getting paid for it and things like that it's kind of crazy how that system remains in large portions I know I'm talking about modeling but similarly in acting kind of unchanged yeah it was interesting to the point about how like the last writer strikes in the sort of mid-auts were like at the very dawn like barely at the dawn of streaming and I guess that and there was some question of like well is it too early to be worried about that in 2006 or 2007 and then with AI now it's like yeah I'm like skeptical that we're gonna have like any like decent quality like two-hour movie where all the actors are AI actors I'm just I don't think it's there yet but who knows uh but the idea is like yeah at some point these issues are going to get more real and then the question of to Josh's Point like control and like is technology going to be used in a way to like make the writers lives worse or can it be made to make the writers lives better is like an interesting question right the control aspect is something that I hadn't really considered before but seems to be an important point and who gets to make these decisions yes do you own your own image and your own work or does the studio seems to be a very thorny issue I guess the big question for Content watchers from an entirely self-interested perspective is are we going to get a flood of AI content or reality TV and sports and which is worse well I think like I mean the the writer strike really did catalyze a lot more investment in reality so I wonder if we will or you know in the 2006 or 2007 one so I do wonder whether like in the short term whether we'll just see like way more reality programming or shows dubbed uh from Korean yeah yeah that seems to be the sort of easier one at this moment in time like there's a huge catalog of foreign content you're already seeing it on Netflix Oh speaking of uh recommendations Crash Landing Into You Joe uh watch that that's a good one yes it's a Korean love drama I think you should watch it I'll check it out all right shall we leave it there let's leave it there okay then this has been another episode of the odd Lots podcast I'm Tracy Alloway you can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe weisenthal you can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart follow our guests Lucas Shaw he's at Lucas underscore Shaw also check out his screen time newsletter follow Josh idolson he's at Josh idolson follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin and dashel Bennett at dashbot and check out all of the Bloomberg podcasts onto the handle at podcasts and for more Odd Lots content go to bloomberg.com Odd Lots where we have transcripts a newsletter and a Blog and check out our Discord we have an AI room in there so maybe some of this will come up we've talked a lot about Eco and labor market and stuff in there discord.gg Odd Lots listeners are chatting with each other 24 7. it's really fun and if you enjoy Odd Lots if you like discussions about the future of Hollywood and the content that it produces please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast gas platform thanks for listening [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Podcasts

Views: 3,239

Keywords: Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway, bloomberg, bloomberg odd lots, bloomberg podcast, odd lots, odd lots bloomberg, odd lots podcast, odd lots show, what's going on with the strikes, hollywood, hollywood strikes, writers strike, actors strike, CA strikes, US strikes, Screen Actors Guild, writers guild, writers guild strike, screen actors guild strike, podcast, podcasts, bloomberg podcasts, businessweek, businessweek podcast, finance, finance podcast, market news, markets podcast

Id: GsZ6W4EpRjo

Length: 46min 49sec (2809 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023