henrygandorf

production is not the issue, it's distribution. nobody wants to shoot a movie or tv series and upload it to youtube or tiktok. it's basically self-publishing a book.

i didn't follow that closely this year, but were we able to take advantage of signing anyone under slot? did we money-whip anyone away from college? truly amazing that we did that for several years before every other team was like, wait, this might work. all those charts and graphs exist for a reason.

haven’t read this thread, but here’s one i skimmed. 🧵 so does buying a ticket for this count as a charitable/political donation? about to do my taxes and such.

gotta give him credit, he says all the right things.

this strike is way more about television production than film production, and the bolded is a shitty take.

yeah, turns out you can ditch produced material, never release it, fuck over the people who worked on it, and then claim hundreds of millions in impairment charges to avoid paying taxes, before you cry poverty to the media. (cusack covered a lot of ground on twitter today, this was just part of it)

*the republican nomination yes, i agree with everything you're saying about the general.

everybody plays fast when they drive their cart onto the green.

so many words to say, "this is probably a fair solution, but i'm going to make sure all y'all feel like you're getting fucked."

😳

yeah, there's a lot of low cards in that hand.

uh huh. as we've been saying for months, streamers with other sources of income (disney, apple, amazon) will be just fine. any other studio head is rolling the dice.

expect these graphs to continue to pop up until they find one we’re not leading. where the yankees at?

and the senate isn’t even 50/50. facepalm.

queen could be completely right and i could be way off. ai is largely an unknown quantity, so people fear it. personally, i think it's being treated as a bit of a red herring. a year ago i didn't know shit about ai, but i knew all about the 13 years of writers bitching about how they were getting screwed by streaming platforms since the 2009 deal didn't protect them. a lot of people feel like this new deal needs to right some of those wrongs, along with protecting against future encroachment (like ai). i'm not in the room, so i don't know what the hang-ups are, the non-starters, the sticking points. but i know that networks/studios would rather dangle ai protection than unfuck what happened 14 years ago. room size and staff size (as well as timing required) is all brought on to account for shorter seasons. tv has evolved and it's not the 80's anymore. they need to find something in the middle that ensures writers will have jobs, but they also need to look back and understand that fair residuals keep writers afloat while they're developing projects. non-staffed writers are often not being paid at all while they develop and pitch. same could be said about actors while they're auditioning.

their costs are down, their staffs are smaller, the marketing budgets are down (because of the netflix model). yes, revenue is down since covid and the movie theaters are getting pounded. that's not the fault of the writers and changes nothing in terms of getting credit (money) for work that you've done every time it's consumed/sold. showrunners started making huge money in the 90's and 00's and studio/network heads didn't like that. 75 years ago actors were stuck in the studio system and were basically slaves to that studio (apologies for use of the word slave, but not sure what else to call it). things change. adapt or die.

well there are new rules, and the writers aren't the ones making them. a better analog would be if quarterbacks were making so much money that the nfl owners decided to change the rules of nfl and make it beneficial to run the wildcat 90% of the time, justifying paying the qb a lot less. used to be 24 eps a season + reruns and syndication with a 3 month break + involvement in dvd sales, etc. now it's 8 eps per season, with 12-15 months in between, and when the season is over, it's over and just sits on a platform. there were no situations like that in 2008 so they're trying to make the rules fair. i don't think this is about retroactively fixing/compensating what was broken before as much as knowing this might be the last chance to make a permanent realignment to the structure moving forward.

i think that if the entertainment business is too rough on their ceo's, he's welcome to change professions. studios and networks are laying off people left and right for their share price, yet upper management seems to be just fine. it should be pointed out that this was not some walk-out. this is a strike based on the expiration of the previous agreements for writers and actors. if they simply sign a new one, they're stuck with the terms for as long as it lasts. if it's bad timing for the studios, that's just a bonus. it should also be pointed out that this is not about tom cruise or aaron sorkin. this is about mid-level actors and writers who are trying to make a living. that's why the directors never strike.

i can tell you that ai is being painted as a huge sticking point in these negotiations. like it's the one main issue. it's not. it's a very minor one. streaming has changed a lot since 2008-09. so has network syndication. that's what this is.

is this back when he was still a democrat (no cr)? i watched his docu-series and i highly recommend it. his life from the late 1950's thru the late 1970's was pretty fascinating. and horrifying. just in case people are wondering "fran drescher??!?" - the head of sag/sag-aftra can be a pretty intense position. most of the higher-up officers are not busy working actors.