Posts Tagged ‘Writers’
“Hollywood will rot on the windmills of Eternity”*…
… or possibly, Daniel Bessner argues, sooner…
… Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.
“The industry is in a deep and existential crisis,” the head of a midsize studio told me in early August. We were in the lounge of the Soho House in West Hollywood. “It is probably the deepest and most existential crisis it’s ever been in. The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. The top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically.”
Hollywood had become a winner-takes-all economy. As of 2021, CEOs at the majority of the largest companies and conglomerates in the industry drew salaries between two hundred and three thousand times greater than those of median employees. And while writer-producer royalty such as Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy had in recent years signed deals reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a slightly larger group of A-list writers, such as Smith, had carved out comfortable or middle-class lives, many more were working in bare-bones, short-term writers’ rooms, often between stints in the service industry, without much hope for more steady work. As of early 2023, among those lucky enough to be employed, the median TV writer-producer was making 23 percent less a week, in real dollars, than their peers a decade before. Total earnings for feature-film writers had dropped nearly 20 percent between 2019 and 2021.
Writers had been squeezed by the studios many times in the past, but never this far. And when the WGA went on strike last spring, they were historically unified: more guild members than ever before turned out for the vote to authorize, and 97.9 percent voted in favor. After five months, the writers were said to have won: they gained a new residuals model for streaming, new minimum lengths of employment for TV, and more guaranteed paid work on feature-film screenplays, among other protections.
But the business of Hollywood had undergone a foundational change. The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves. Today’s business side does not have a necessary vested interest in “the business”—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital. The union wins did not begin to address this fundamental problem.
Currently, the machine is sputtering, running on fumes. According to research by Bloomberg, in 2013 the largest companies in film and television were more than $20 billion in the black; by 2022, that number had fallen by roughly half. From 2021 to 2022, revenue growth for the industry dropped by almost 50 percent. At U.S. box offices, by the end of last year, revenue was down 22 percent from 2019. Experts estimate that cable-television revenue has fallen 40 percent since 2015. Streaming has rarely been profitable at all. Until very recently, Netflix was the sole platform to make money; among the other companies with streaming services, only Warner Bros. Discovery’s platforms may have eked out a profit last year. And now the streaming gold rush—the era that made Dickinson—is over. In the spring of 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates after years of nearly free credit, and at roughly the same time, Wall Street began calling in the streamers’ bets. The stock prices of nearly all the major companies with streaming platforms took precipitous falls, and none have rebounded to their prior valuation.
The industry as a whole is now facing a broad contraction. Between August 2022 and the end of last year, employment fell by 26 percent—more than one job gone in every four. Layoffs hit Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Paramount Global, Roku, and others in 2022. In 2023, firings swept through the representation giants United Talent Agency and Creative Artists Agency; Netflix, Paramount Global, and Roku again; plus Hulu, NBCUniversal, and Lionsgate. In early 2024, it was announced that Amazon was cutting hundreds of jobs from its Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios divisions. In February, Paramount Global laid off roughly eight hundred people. It’s unclear which streamers will survive. As James Dolan, the interim executive chair of AMC Networks, told employees in late 2022 as he delivered news of massive layoffs—roughly 1,700 people (20 percent of U.S. staff) would lose their jobs—“the mechanisms for the monetization of content are in disarray.”
Profit will of course find a way; there will always be shit to watch. But without radical intervention, whether by the government or the workers, the industry will become unrecognizable. And the writing trade—the kind where one actually earns a living—will be obliterated…
Film and television writers face an existential threat; viewers, a drab future: “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” from @dbessner in @Harpers. A bracing piece, eminently worth reading in full.
* Allen Ginsberg
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As we study streaming, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that AT&T connected the first Picturephone call (between Disneyland in California and the World’s Fair in New York). The device consisted of a telephone handset and a small, matching TV, which allowed telephone users to see each other in fuzzy video images as they carried on a conversation. It was commercially-released shortly thereafter (prices ranged from $16 to $27 for a three-minute call between special booths AT&T set up in New York, Washington, and Chicago), but didn’t catch on… though, of course, it augured the “future” in which now we live.
“Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel”*…
The television industry, in its new streaming-led form, is in turmoil. The companies that control it are slashing their available libraries and “reorganizing” their operations, leading to layoffs throughout the industry, and writers are on strike. To some extent, these are consequences of the years of deficit-funded efforts to grab subscribers coming home to roost. But as Max Read argues, there is a deeper problem: the people making our entertainment don’t like it…
… [David] Zaslav is this cycle’s big Hollywood villain, most famous for burying completed but unreleased movies for tax write-offs and removing shows from their streaming platforms to save money. When “Max,” the new streaming service that combined all of WBD’s streaming apps into a single offering, was released in May, its interface credited directors and producers together under the hilariously dismissive heading “Creators,” which was both a blatant violation of bargaining agreements around credits and an on-the-nose suggestion that the WBD people simply couldn’t be bothered to care what a “director” is or what one does.
But he is hardly the only person in Hollywood who seems to have more contempt than love for what the industry does. This excellent Vulture piece about the state of streaming by Lane Brown and Joseph Adalian has been rattling around in my head all week, specifically this quote:
One high-level agent says that studios regard the WGA’s demands — for higher minimum pay and staffing requirements, among other things — as simply incompatible with the way TV is now made: “The Writers Guild, delusionally, is harkening back to a day when there were 25 episodes of Nash Bridges a year and repeats and residuals. Back-end payments existed because Europeans were willing to watch our garbage, and Americans were willing to watch repeats of that garbage on cable at 11 at night. The real issue is that the medium changed. Instead of getting a job as a staff writer on CSI: Miami for 46 weeks a year, now it’s a 25-week job working on Wednesday, which is a better show. That’s just progress.”
This begins as a relatively lucid description of why back-end payments existed and then becomes a bizarre fantasy in which, for some strange reason, writers are now obligated to trade stable and remunerative employment for a vague sense of creative fulfillment and prestige, and this trade is called “progress.”…
I don’t meant to make one agent’s offhand quotes to Vulture emblematic of an entire industry, and I know there are many people in Hollywood who would disagree. But the contempt on display for (1) the product being produced, (2) the people who make that product, and (3) the people who consume that product is, I think, widely shared–look at Zaslav, HBO, and TCM. That contempt is nothing new in the entertainment industry, of course. But as it grows and develops it has increasingly made the people in charge unable to distinguish between good product and bad product.
The agent here is committing the same mistake as a lot of bad critics and even more bad development executives, which is to think of “prestige” as a desirable marker of quality, instead of as a kind of genre, or, more cynically, a set of narrative and aesthetic tropes (antiheroes, serialized narratives, film-like cinematography) designed to appeal to a particular marketing demographic–one that happens to be a target demographic for subscription streaming services. As the Vulture piece goes on to point out, just because something is eight episodes long and “actually about trauma” doesn’t automatically make it good, let alone popular…
The agent describes the old residuals system like this: “Back-end payments existed because Europeans were willing to watch our garbage, and Americans were willing to watch repeats of that garbage on cable at 11 at night.” The idea is that people are no longer willing to watch “garbage,” presumably because so many more options are available to them. But this is only a satisfying answer if you assume that “garbage” is automatically bad. What if the problem is that we’re not really making much good garbage anymore?…
You don’t even have to watch the garbage to appreciate its role in the creative ecosystem. The Shield creator Shawn Ryan, who’s quoted in the story above, was a Nash Bridges writer; so too was Watchmen and The Leftovers creator Damon Lindelof. I’m not the first person to make this point, but the entire first generation of “prestige TV” in the 2000s–which is to say, 90 percent of the actually good prestige TV–was written by people who’d spent a lot of time learning to write quickly to a tight structure for a big audience, a set of skills no longer as widespread among writers, to dire consequences for audiences, who have essentially traded consistent, engaging entertainment for the convenience of on-demand streaming.
Networks used to create several Honda Civic shows a year (and, yes, a lot of lemons); these days, if I can stretch this metaphor past the breaking point, streaming platforms seem to mostly create Tesla Model 3s, which is to say expensive, technologically interesting products that gesture at luxury and quality but tend to fall apart quickly and rely almost entirely on hype and conspicuous consumption (not to mention labor exploitation!) to make themselves profitable–and then only after years of burning cash in pursuit of a business model…
Is the problem really that streamers (or writers) are too focused on “prestige” at the expense of “populist” “garbage”? Netflix, the biggest streamer of all, produces mind-boggling amounts of middlebrow and trash TV; every time I open the app there’s a new reality competition between friendship bracelet makers or whatever.
There are many, many cultural and technological reasons for the various (and often overstated) malaises of the streaming era, and there’s no one weird trick for the industry to fix itself. But it’s hard not to notice that, from a labor perspective, the big difference between the era of West Wing and Ally McBeal and now is not so much that writers and directors and actors are too pretentious for lady-lawyer shows but that back then seasons lasted for 20+ episodes, paid more people, promised more consistency (to audiences and to workers above and below the line), and underwent more development. Streamers seem happy to make middlebrow TV; but they also seem unable or unwilling to consistently make good middlebrow TV–by paying enough people, building enough institutional knowledge, committing enough resources, and marketing the product.
You hear sometimes a call from writers or directors or other creatives for studios and streamers to take more risks and get more creative. But I don’t really think the problem of bad TV in the streaming era is an issue of “creativity” (versus conservatism) or “risk” (versus safety) so much as it is an issue of professionalism (versus saying “yes” to 1,000 shows at once, under-developing them, and then killing them en masse for no clear reason). Maybe the reason writers and directors and other creatives are treating TV “like art” instead of like “a job” is because none of the people who hire them are treating it like a job either!
If you do not like movies and TV you cannot make good movies and TV: “Why do entertainment executives hate entertainment?” from @readmaxread in his ever-illuminating newsletter, Read Max. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Gore Vidal
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As we change the channel, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that Elvis performed his last concert at Indianapolis’ Market Square Arena.
“Living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive… archives are a kind of site in the sense of an archaeological site”*…
Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas? D.T. Max dives into what is, arguably, America’s “hottest” literary archive, and chronicles the acquisition strategy of its director…
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road”; and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center’s archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.
The current director of the center is Thomas Staley. Seventy-one, and a modernist scholar by training, he is mercurial and hard-driving. Amid the silence of the center’s Reading Room, he often greets visiting scholars with a resonant slap on the back. In college, at a Jesuit school in Colorado, Staley pitched in a summer baseball league, specializing in a slow, sinking curve. His “crafty pitch,” as he calls it, was good enough to attract the attention of professional scouts. The Ransom Center, under Staley’s leadership, easily outmaneuvers rivals such as Yale, Harvard, and the British Library. It operates more like a college sports team, with Staley as the coach—an approach that fits the temperament of Texas. “People take a special pride here in winners,” Staley says. “They like success.” (After the Ransom bought its Gutenberg Bible, the center sent the Bible on a victory lap, displaying it at libraries, museums, and universities around the state.)…
A fascinating look into the (surprisingly competitive) world of literary archives: “Final Destination,” from @dtmax in @NewYorker.
(One archive that is not at the Ransom Center is that of Lou Reed. His widow and executor Laurie Anderson had originally intended to house the papers, tapes, and memorabilia there, but changed her mind when the Texas legislature passed a law allowing the open carry of hand guns on state college campuses. They are now at the New York Public Library– and the subject of an exhibit at The Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.)
* John Berger
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As we turn every page, we might send archival birthday greetings to Henry Clay Folger; he was born on this date in 1857. A businessman and philanthropist, he founded (with with his wife, Emily Jordan Folger) the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., an independent research library (and archive) that houses the world’s largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materials from the early modern period (1500–1750) in Britain and Europe. The library is privately endowed, and is administered by the trustees of Folger’s alma mater, Amherst College.
“How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity”*…
When one writer speaks frankly to another: William S. Burroughs’s bizarre and mean– and strangely prescient– “open letter” to Truman Capote after the publication of In Cold Blood…
As Thom Robinson writes at RealityStudio, Burroughs had long been dismissive of Capote—and sometimes resentful of his success. For his part, Capote was none too impressed with Burroughs, who wasn’t yet the literary star he would become. Robinson quotes Capote telling the Chicago Daily News in 1967: “I hate pop art to death . . . Now William Burroughs. He’s what I’d call a pop writer. He gets some very interesting effects on a page. But at the cost of total lack of communication with the reader. Which is a pretty serious cost, I think.”
…
In the below letter, Burroughs engages in a sort of bizarre role-play, claiming (it seems) to speak for a department responsible for the cosmic fate of writers. He tells Capote that he has been following him closely, reading his works, his reviews, and his actions, even interviewing his characters, and that he has decided to withdraw the talent given to him by the department and curse him to never write anything good again—as if he were a minor god of creative action, or king of the muses. Robinson points out that Burroughs actually believed in curses at this time, and maybe he was right, because his damning words came true—he never wrote anything good again. Read Burroughs’s attack on Capote below. (He’s also not too keen on the New Yorker.)
July 23, 1970
My Dear Mr. Truman Capote
This is not a fan letter in the usual sense—unless you refer to ceiling fans in Panama. Rather call this a letter from “the reader”—vital statistics are not in capital letters—a selection from marginal notes on material submitted as all “writing” is submitted to this department. I have followed your literary development from its inception, conducting on behalf of the department I represent a series of inquiries as exhaustive as your own recent investigations in the sunflower state. I have interviewed all your characters beginning with Miriam—in her case withholding sugar over a period of several days proved sufficient inducement to render her quite communicative—I prefer to have all the facts at my disposal before taking action. Needless to say, I have read the recent exchange of genialities between Mr. Kenneth Tynan and yourself. I feel that he was much too lenient. Your recent appearance before a senatorial committee on which occasion you spoke in favor of continuing the present police practice of extracting confessions by denying the accused the right of consulting consul prior to making a statement also came to my attention. In effect you were speaking in approval of standard police procedure: obtaining statements through brutality and duress, whereas an intelligent police force would rely on evidence rather than enforced confessions. You further cheapened yourself by reiterating the banal argument that echoes through letters to the editor whenever the issue of capital punishment is raised: “Why all this sympathy for the murderer and none for his innocent victims?” I have in line of duty read all your published work. The early work was in some respects promising—I refer particularly to the short stories. You were granted an area for psychic development. It seemed for a while as if you would make good use of this grant. You choose instead to sell out a talent that is not yours to sell. You have written a dull unreadable book which could have been written by any staff writer on the New Yorker—(an undercover reactionary periodical dedicated to the interests of vested American wealth). You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning America into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers and the retention of capital punishment to deal with the situation they have created. You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. That talent is now officially withdrawn. Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished. Over and out. Are you tracking me? Know who I am? You know me, Truman. You have known me for a long time. This is my last visit.
[original in the Burroughs Archive of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection]
Can one writer curse another for life? “William S. Burroughs’s Hate Letter to Truman Capote,” from Emily Temple (@knownemily) in @lithub.
[image above: source]
* William S. Burroughs
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As we examine enmity, we might send apocalyptic birthday greetings to Harold Egbert Camping; he was born on this date in 1921. A Christian radio broadcaster and evangelist, he presided over Family Radio, a California-based radio station group that, at its peak, broadcast to more than 150 markets in the United States.
Camping is notorious for issuing a succession of failed predictions of dates for the End Times, which temporarily gained him a global following and millions of dollars of donations. Camping first predicted that the Judgment Day would occur on or about September 6, 1994. When it failed to occur, he revised the date to September 29 and then to October 2. In 2005, Camping predicted the Second Coming of Christ to May 21, 2011, whereupon the saved would be taken up to heaven in the rapture, and that “there would follow five months of fire, brimstone and plagues on Earth, with millions of people dying each day, culminating on October 21, 2011, with the final destruction of the world.”
His prediction for May 21, 2011 was widely reported [including here], in part because of a large-scale publicity campaign by Family Radio, and prompted ridicule from atheist organizations and rebuttals from many other Christians. After May 21 passed without the predicted events, Camping said he believed that a “spiritual” judgment had occurred on that date, and that the physical Rapture would occur on October 21, 2011, simultaneously with the final destruction of the universe by God. That, of course, also didn’t happen. But as Camping had suffered a stroke in June of 2011, he was largely silent thereafter… though in March 2012, he announced that his attempt to predict a date was “sinful,” and that his critics had been right in emphasizing the words of Matthew 24:36: “of that day and hour knoweth no man.” Family Radio is still recovering from the fallout of the failed end-times predictions.
“Superstition is the poetry of life”*…
Charles Dickens
Slept Facing NorthCharles Dickens (1812–1870) carried a navigational compass with him at all times and always faced north while he slept—a practice he believed improved his creativity and writing.
Nine other personal peculiarities at “Ten Superstitions of Writers and Artists.”
* Johann Wolfgang Goethe
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As we knock on wood, we might spare a thought for Michael “Mick” Ronson; he died on this date in 1993. A guitarist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and producer, he is best remembered as the foil to David Bowie in his breakout years, the leader of the Spiders from Mars. But Ronson also served as arranger and occasional producer on Bowie’s work. He went on to a successful career as a session musician recording with the like of Ian Hunter, John Mellencamp, Elton John, and Morrissey, and as a sideman in touring bands with Van Morrison and Bob Dylan (Ronson was the anchor of the Rolling Thunder Revue band). He wrote and recored successful solo albums, and produced albums for acts including Ellen Foley, Roger McGuinn, Morrissey, and many others.
Ziggy and the Spider
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