Hot Strike Summer: Day 120-something
Just holding our breaths in the now second-longest tunnel in WGA history
Long time no blog! I’ve missed you guys. Or rather, I’ve missed the idea of you guys, the abstract sense of Lifting Fog as a community — a community of 96 people where I’m both the town preacher and bulletin board, I guess, maybe even its God — that isn’t quite so empty for me as Twitter or Threads, the former of which has now rebranded as “X” and seems weeks away from sputtering out completely and the latter of which is just X (nee Twitter) for people whose favorite Ryan Reynolds movie is his loving relationship with his fellow liquor entrepreneur wife. Literally any effort I’ve put into either this past month, I should have put here. And/or into learning ChatGPT prompts.
We’re almost three four1 months into the WGA strike — now joined by 100,000+ members of SAG-AFTRA in a super-strike the name of which has not yet been decided — and the enthusiasm of those first few weeks (see “clever sign,” above) has long since given way to… well, I don’t know. Resolve, I guess; some sense amongst the writers and actors that this will last as long as it needs to. Sadness? That we even have to do this in the first place, fight for not just our dignity but for, umm, the very survival of our occupations. Hunger, because while Drew Carey’s very generous open tab at Swinger’s and Bob’s Big Boy continues to feed us, there are only so many patty melts the human body can absorb.
If I’ve hesitated to write — and it’s not like I’ve needed excuses ever before! — I can trace that hesitation to a nagging voice in my head, maybe in the head of every TV/film writer right now, asking “what’s the point?” To be fair, this question is always there. Best case scenario, it’s helping you put an idea through its paces: have I thought this through enough? Have I justified its existence, the time I’ve spent and will keep spending on it?
But “What’s the Point?: Strike Edition” is less useful creative tool than… well, existential concern. What’s happening right now, the AMPTP stonewalling 125,000+ employees, isn’t just a contract dispute; it’s a debate about the future of storytelling, about what Hollywood/the entertainment industry even does. What the people who make it do.
I’ve railed against the word “content” before, and will continue to do so until it is abolished entirely. “Content” first started showing up… I don’t know, 2012? 2013? Sometime around the premiere of ‘House of Cards’, probably, a debatably useful flattening of movie/TV show/web series/video/etc. into some catch-all word that just meant… a thing you watched. Whereas all those original designations, those occasionally longer words, they carried with them some sense of their own making. A movie is made, by people — craftspeople — each of whom has devoted some sizable chunk of their One Beautiful Life™️ to an artistic project that they at least sort of believed in. There’s a reason these projects have credits! (Not coincidentally, one of the things Warner Bros. Discovery quietly tried to flatten in the first weeks of the Max roll-out…)
“Content” on the other hand — it’s just a product. Actually, scratch that, it’s a resource. It’s coal being shoveled into a furnace. (If we’re talking about streaming specifically, it’s coal being shoveled into a furnace in the bowels of the Titanic.) To the Zaslavs and Igers and Sarandoses of the world, movies and TV are less individual works to be proud of than interchangeable fuel cells. Sure you’ve got the occasional happy accident (say ‘Power of the Dog’ or ‘CODA’) that punches their ticket to the Oscars or at least Golden Globes, but that was never the point. I truly believe that to most of these studio heads, it’s irrelevant to them that they happen to be in the entertainment industry. They don’t even like the thing they (which is to say the people they hire) make! They’d be just as happy, like, trading lima bean futures if the profit yield were good enough.
On my best days, I think you know what, maybe these strikes will lead somewhere. We have on our hands the first dual writer-actor labor strike in 63 friggin’ years, the last instance of which literally created the WGA’s health fund and SAG residuals. Union bedrocks both! It’s certainly not crazy to imagine that, despite AMPTP’s intransigence thus far, both unions will ultimately prevail. Will we win the right to shoot Ted Sarandos for sport, like America’s favorite son of a union worker absolutely deserves? There’s still time to add it to our list of proposals.
But the scary thing about this fight, and it brings us back to the whole “what’s the point?” thing I got distracted from for 500 words, is that if we don’t win… there’s not a lot of professional jetsam left to cling to. TV writers rooms conducted more often than not over Zoom, with no on-set opportunity. Actors forced to be their own costumers, lighters, and set decorators for their own self-funded auditions, also over Zoom (or pre-recorded). A production slate dominated almost entirely by IP, which even in the best case2 is still a commercial for something else. And don’t even get me started on AI, the globe-quaking possibilities of which we all have to compartmentalize in our brains, like climate change, lest they drive us genuinely insane.
So, like — we have to win.
Artists are of course famously melodramatic creatures prone to making grand statements with lots of italics, but what’s at stake here in a very real sense is the future of art. Do we value art, and the people who create it? Or is it just something to have on, like air conditioning3? If you’ve gotten this far into a Substack newsletter you elect to have sent to your inbox, I think you know where you stand.
(Lifting Fog is art.)
Fun one today! Lotta thoughts, lotta feelings. I want to write more; I need to write more. Help me decide on the next one (published hopefully sometime before the Iowa caucauses)?
I started this post at the end of July, thinking I was going to write about Barbenheimer. Oh, the places you’ll go!
That would be ‘Barbie’ and ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’, to name some recent examples
…which we will need more and more on our rapidly warming plan— I DIGRESS