This started earlier. It started weeks ago and I was aware, I took notice. Yet, that was about it. I mean no disrespect. I do not live in the US, I am not California and as such I am merely partially aware. I see what most outside of the US see. We see the strike, but yesterday I saw an opinion piece in the LA Times and that woke me up a little more and would you believe it, this morning I got more awake. There was an advertisement on YouTube, it was the Pilot of Lioness and it was one hell of an ad. It was 50 minutes, it was the pilot. Yup Paramount Plus took their balls and hung them up the wall. OK, this is a first that I watch a 50 minute advertisement. Yet, it was not about the ad, not about Lioness but it gave me focus, so lets begin.
The LA Times Story (at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-15/netflix-antitrust-anticompetitive-labor) gives us ‘Hollywood strikes prove Netflix and other streamers have grown too powerful. Time to break them up’ here we are given “Many have called the stalemate an existential crisis because it concerns new issues such as residuals from streaming services and rules for the use of artificial intelligence. These go beyond the usual labor issues such as wages and benefits and cut to the heart of an industry in which streamers such as Netflix can dominate all aspects of the business.” It is one side that I had not seen before. ‘Entertainment’ has become an end-to-end business over ALL verticals. I had not considered that merely because I am not part of this industry, I never was. Yet here we are given “Antitrust laws need to be invoked — as they were in the 1940s in U.S. vs. Paramount — to break up streaming services that both produce content and distribute it. This vertical integration has deeply changed the longstanding entertainment industry ecosystem, which allowed employees to survive and studios to prosper.” Which gets us to “In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled against the studios, requiring them to divest themselves of their movie theatres if they wanted to continue in the production business. Shortly thereafter, theatrical films began to be aired on television with no additional compensation for creative talent. This led to the strike by both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild in 1960, the last time the two struck simultaneously.”
With finally “If Netflix and its streaming peers like Apple+, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Max can maintain their vertical control, it will be next to impossible to settle the Hollywood strikes in ways that could preserve the ability of creators and technicians to earn a decent living and protect creative diversity. The old vertical studio system was broken up by the Justice Department. It may be time to do the same with these 21st century behemoths.” And that was the wake up call I needed. The Paramount ‘advertisement’ was apt and consider that Lioness is new stellar series. Kidman, Saldana and several others are making a bundle. They earned it, their work is first rate, as is the director and the director of photography. They all did a stellar job, but it would not have been possible without the writer, without the writer there would be no script, nothing for the director to work from. So how much is he making?
We see the accusations that the top person, which in the case of Disney is Bob Iger, in 2022 he made well over $14,000,000. This amounts to well over a million a month. Now lets take a look at the image below.
So a series that streamed over 3,000,000,000 minutes, making it one of the most profitable and most successful series even, the writers were collectively paid $3,000. Please explain to me in what universe 3 billion streamed minutes gives us a combined pay check of $3,000? You see those three billion minutes amount to 138,121.5 years. Does it make sense now? The writers are beyond underpaid. They are the legal slaves of America and they deserve their right coin. But American history is seeded with injustice and exploitation and to be honest until the LA Times piece I did not see it, so who else was unaware? We are given snapshots, yet until you see the entire vertical of exploitation it makes little sense and now with that streaming vertical exposed you can see just how unfair it is and one series, the series suits, showed us just how much the writers are fed up with being ignored what should be rightfully theirs.
Enjoy the day.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 