“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” entreaties a woman to the disheveled prophet with the stock sign reading “THE END IS NEAR!’ in one of the many, many such cartoons by the New Yorker’s David Sipress.
I’m writing this on the fourth day of the writers strike. And already everybody knows that “nobody knows anything,” as William Goldman’s infamous quote is famously misapplied left and right.
Is it over? As you read this? Did writers get survival wages as the streaming bubble of the past several years recedes and a corporate facsimile of sustainable economics come to the fore? (Ha-ha.)
Also on this Friday in early May, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav—whose compensation in 2022 was $246 million, that is, one-quarter of a billion dollars—announced that streaming for Max, which will no longer be burdened with the HBO moniker, was doing good: “Our U.S. streaming business is no longer a bleeder,” he told investors on a post-earnings announcement call. “The streaming unit, which includes the HBO Max and Discovery+ services, posted adjusted pre-tax earnings of $50 million in the quarter, compared with a loss of $227 million a year earlier. It gained 1.6 million subscribers,” Fortune reports.
Nice one, David! But how do these “products” come to market? How many workers make them? That’s far more consequential, even monumental, than stock buybacks, profit-taking at will, and the immense salaries of executives moving assets about and firing departments with whimsical abandon.
“Every film, as with every TV show,” posted screenwriter Ed Solomon on the third day of the writer’s strike, “is an industry in and of itself. We are essentially building businesses in partnership with the financing entities. How is it fair that the creators and co-creators of these exceedingly lucrative businesses be forced to work as gig workers?”
As first-run movie tickets fast approach the twenty-dollar mark in multiplexes, you pause to wonder about the physical exhibition of films versus the now-discredited streaming utopia, and the finances of those companies—bankruptcy or thereabouts—but… it’s better to stick for now with the tumult at the headwaters. Movies don’t exist without writers.Television doesn’t exist without writers.
“In my case, films I wrote have generated over $2 billion,” writes Solomon. “Studio accounting has us believe NOT ONE is in profit even though they’ve spawned multiple sequels. Thus I’ve gotten exactly $0 of my five-percent of net points.”
Then there’s the other economic maelstroms inside and outside of the industry: a system that’s faltering and failing, it’s been rocky for years, there’s COVID and there’s greed, there’s a great past—a century-plus!—and a murky future, like most everything these days. But, looking back at pieces on the industry from the past quarter-century, including my own, this multifaceted industry with so many potential revenue streams and so many paid jobs along the way, has always been in crisis.
Some insist that commerce and craft must always be kept separate when looking at how movies manage to get made, and even manage sometimes to touch greatness. Others, if they can’t offer succor, offer at least surmise, such as Susan Sontag in “The Decay Of Cinema,” a notorious piece she published in the New York Times.
“Cinema’s one hundred years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline,” she wrote in 1996. “It’s not that you can’t look forward anymore to new films that you can admire. But such films not only have to be exceptions—that’s true of great achievements in any art. They have to be actual violations of the norms and practices that now govern movie making everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world—which is to say, everywhere. And ordinary films, films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, are astonishingly witless; the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative film-making, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art, in the hope of reproducing past successes.”
16mm leader/Courtesy: Chicago Film Society
Sontag then reviews the anomalies she esteems in her broadside, finding the flowers blooming in the barnyard. But in the year of 2023, studio representatives are saying aloud that writers are fortunate to be employed in any sustainable work at all, and that maybe “artificial intelligence” software, cheap chatbots, can substitute their pixelated palaver for the act of creation.
When a man’s an empty kettle He should be on his mettle And yet I’m torn apart Just because I’m presumin’ That I could be a human If I only had a heart
“We’re seeing the logical unfolding of a process by which all of us already, as consumers of hyper-financialized dataveillance entertainment ‘content,’ are served up our amusements by algorithmically conditioned streaming feeds,” posited veteran screenwriter-producer James Schamus, a former studio head, also writing in early May, in the Guardian. “In a mirror image of that consumptive process, that very ‘content’ will be produced under similar conditions of dataveillance and data extraction.”
He makes it sound inevitable: “They haven’t been subtle about their intentions. We’ve heard industry leaders (some of whom just this past month announced annual salaries of $50 million and more) tell us that they can weather a strike because they have plenty of international programming produced far outside the Guild’s jurisdiction.”
SMPTE countdown leader
One more prickly prospect! It will take time for the complex issues at stake to be negotiated, and as writers know, not writing is among the simplest tasks of all. “The bosses won’t immediately be replacing us all with AI, but they have every intention to use it to place us deeper and deeper into indentured servitude, under the guise of liberating us, as they have ride-share drivers, into a state of eternal, job-seeking ‘free’ agency,” Schamus says.
Commerce; evaluation. Criticism; quarterly returns to stockholders. It’s a muddle! Critic Godfrey Cheshire composed an epic surmise, “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema” in 1999 as James Cameron and George Lucas and their financiers facilitated the transition from light passed through 35mm celluloid strips to video projection: “[T]he overthrow of film by television–which is what this amounts to–will be related to a dissolution of cinema esthetics and the enforced close of cinema’s era in the history of technological arts.”
Sontag again: “Cinema, once heralded as the art of the twentieth century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art.”
Now it’s 2023. Nearly a quarter-century. Who’s as august as Sontag, who should I ask for the hottest take today? I offered a quick question for the chatbots at Google’s Bard offering: “What would Pauline Kael say about screenplays written by A. I.?”
“I’m intrigued by the possibilities of A.I.-written screenplays. It’s an exciting new frontier, and I’m eager to see what filmmakers can do with it. I’m concerned that A.I.s might not be able to capture the human experience in a way that is both authentic and emotionally resonant. But I’m also optimistic that A.I.s will learn over time, and that they will eventually be able to create great art.”
Directly from Pauline’s posthumous compendium: “When The Lights Go Down… I Lost It At The Hyper-Accelerated Markets Of The Purveyors And Profiteers Of Late Capitalism. Reeling. For Keeps.”
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
