Let’s get the dystopia over with first: are the studios threatening to replace unruly, food-eating, shelter-requiring human actors with AI-generated acting machines to star in stories generated by AI writing programs?
Dial down the panic — the reality is rough enough.
The writers have always been the weaklings in Hollywood, viewed as greedy seasonal workers with outrageous delusions of entitlement and no power at all. There’s a sorry old joke about the starlet who was so clueless that she slept with the writer instead of someone with power —the producer, the director, the costar, the studio head.
This nasty old gag demonstrates one sad truth: people with power fear and mock people with talent and brains, treat them like shit, and use them up in exchange for sums of money that impress the talented, but look to the powerful like the coins they’d throw at street beggars.
Hollywood: everything is judged by money and success. Thus its CEOs are bigger, better, brighter, definitely more immortal than mere writers and actors. Aka content creators. The directors have not gone on strike—my dystopian reasoning: directors have to be allowed to think they have power. In objective reality, the DGA reached a tentative agreement with the studios last month.
But the creation of entertainment is an ecology, and the directors need writers and actors (and crews, but that’s a separate story) upon whom to exercise the power they are allowed to have, and the people in power need directors, writers, and actors over whom to have their power, but – dystopia alert – – AI would eliminate the creepy, sweaty, hungry, entitled, demanding, moody, unpredictable human element.
You don’t have to give a robot a trailer, a chef, one or more assistants, housing, transport, a salary, or profit participation. CEO, you could keep all that lovely money for yourself.
Oh, you already do?
The vertiginous salary disparity between the CEO earning $246 million a year and screenwriters earning about $12.50 an hour demands something a little meatier than strike action.
I’m not Hollywood, but I love movies. And, as a contributing editor to Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Condé Nast Traveler, I was considered a freelancer and not entitled to health insurance. I wrote movie scripts so as to earn the right to the excellent WGA health insurance.
I wrote a journalist love story, a reincarnation mystery, a thriller about murderous expat American bankers, a comedy positing Georgia O’Keeffe and Estée Lauder as neighbors in the Hamptons, and was one of many to adapt The White Hotel for two guys who never had any intention of filming it. I spent a lot of time taking notes from young development girls and old producers in exchange for access to Aetna.
None of my five scripts ever made it to the first day of principal photography, but I, too, am on strike. I am in The Actor’s Union SAG-AFTRA because Nora Ephron cast me in Julie & Julia, and for a short time, I played small, disagreeable ladies on film and stage. By now, each residual check would just about cover a pack of cigarettes if I still smoked.
There are 160,000 members of SAG, working actors who are not stars. So, to bring in a star to speak for the masses, I’ll quote what Matt Damon explained: “SAG actors need to earn $26,000 a year to qualify for medical insurance, a sum that in many cases can only be reached by the accumulation of residual payments for past work.”
Because of the studio’s sudden-onset, utterly tragic, helpless, pitiful, heartbreaking inability to calculate residuals from streaming profits, $26,000 a year has gone out of reach for most actors. Residuals in the time of streaming have shrunk to money for cigarettes that no one smokes anymore.
The writers have been on strike for two months and three weeks; the actors have been on strike since midnight on the 14th of July. I like the choice of date. It has been reported by Deadline that an executive said the studios want to allow the strikes to drag on “until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
It’s not just two Davids versus Goliath. It’s the CEOs who earn a quarter of a billion dollars a year expressing, through a minion, a desire to starve the workers.
It’s Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis in the middle of a disaster movie climate change summer, at the dawn of the age of AI.
©️ Joan Juliet Buck 2023
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Joan Juliet Buck, author of The Price Of Illusion, is a member of WGA and SAG-AFTRA. Journalist, novelist , and actress, she has written five screenplays and played Meryl Streep’s nemesis in Julie & Julia. Once the editor in chief of Paris Vogue, now based in The Hudson Valley, she writes fiction, criticism and essays for page and radio.
