Just Pay Us, Man
So the actors and writers are now both on strike.
Just Pay Us, Man
By now, you know that SAG-AFTRA is on strike. The actors are no longer acting until they get a fair deal. You've also probably heard or read about the WGA strike. I hope it was read because, you know, writers. The good news is that the WGA and SAG are not just in solidarity with each other, we also have a massive overlap in what we need from our contracts and solid ideas on how to get there. The bad news is that the studio executives currently hate any and all reasonable ideas because those ideas would cost them money.
But here’s an idea: Just pay us, man.
That’s it.
You might think I’m exaggerating here. Obviously, actors and writers get paid when they do a job. Right? Yeah. Sort of. At least part of their contracts get fulfilled. When the studios feel like it. But what’s ironic is the studios have created a new business model that has turned out to suck for them while really sucking for everyone else who works in this industry. We pay for and watch movies and television shows in a different way than we did twenty years ago. Streaming has changed the industry.
To be clear, we didn’t change the fucking industry. Actors and writers didn’t create streaming platforms. I got into comedy because I’m fucking awful at programming. We didn’t tell studios to move away from advertising and physical media sales to a monthly subscription model. We didn’t tell studios to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on films that would never see a dollar from a movie theater. One successful streaming service convinced an entire industry that everything must be streaming. And, look, I can’t blame them. Everyone loves convenience and what streaming platforms can do is a modern technological marvel. It’s not the audience’s fault.
But it did change the business model. And to paraphrase the motherfucking Nanny - whose press conference from yesterday you should really watch - if the way these companies make money has changed, the contracts in which we make money need to change. It’s fucking ridiculous this needs to be pointed out. It’s like if you worked at a fancy restaurant that changed its business model to being a Foot Locker, but you still relied on tips from customers. That’s a terrible metaphor, but kind of what’s going on with streaming residuals.
Just pay us, man.
There’s no reason on this dying planet Earth that someone who’s spent years on a hugely successful sitcom should be still making less than he did from a one-season guest starring role decades ago. The reason he’s being paid less has nothing to do with budgets or where his name appears in the credits. It’s because the business model has fucking changed. It’s not our problem or our fault that some companies have been shocked to discover that infinite growth is a fucking fantasy. The only thing that is our fault is that the companies have content to put on those platforms.
Lemme give you an example. I worked on two extremely successful educational comedy shows in the same year. Both were WGA jobs. One was for a massive streaming platform. The other was for a tiny cable network. Both took about the same amount of time. Both paid roughly similar weekly amounts. But somehow, I’ve received tens of thousands of dollars more in residuals for my work on the tiny cable one. I’m proud of both. I’m glad I worked on both, but it’s insane that two pretty similar projects that were both successful have such a massive difference in pay for what is - theoretically - the same contract agreement. By the way, we were told repeatedly how successful our streaming project was. We didn’t miss a milestone. We didn’t even have a milestone.
What’s crazy is that, after realizing that throwing a 100-year-old business model out of an airlock wasn’t strategically sound, companies are returning to advertising-supported models. They started cutting password sharing. They started raising prices. Because a lot of this new business model was an illusion. Essentially, businesses are punishing both the audience and the people creating things for that audience. Maybe CEOs believe that if they can squeeze out just a little more, they’re going to finally be just as cool as an actually famous person. Perhaps kill one more comedy and they’ll be crowned the King of Cannes!
Just pay us, man.
They won’t even tell us how much we’re owed. And, shit, Hollywood math was bad before this. Despite Men In Black being, you know, Men In Black, its writer, Ed Solomon, is still told year after year that it didn’t make enough money for him to get paid more. So imagine that level of fuckery, but magnified by ten. Shit, at least the studios were willing to show some respect and lie to our faces. In the new model, they don’t even need to lie. They can just say “it did great” or “it did terribly” and we won’t really know what that means at all. That’s the advantage they want to hold onto. At least until they can replace us all with machines.
It’s frustrating because we want to work. If you believe that writers and actors are lazy, let me assure you that sitting in an air conditioned room eating sandwiches while making jokes is far more relaxing than walking outside in 90 degree heat for three hours while chanting. We want to make shit. We know how lucky we are to be part of this business. We know how hard we worked to get in. We know how hard it is to get a shot. In fact, that’s why we’re doing this.
If the new business model is difficult or it’s a “bad time” for negotiations, that’s not on us. Remember that. CEOs love to cut costs and do layoffs when a business struggles, but somehow elide the fact that those struggles are almost entirely caused by their own fucking professional failures. We shouldn’t be asked to patiently wait for the studios to fix a problem they both created and don’t want to admit creating.
There is no waiting. Because, just like Hollywood math, this isn’t the last time company executives are going to come up with inventive ways to fuck us. One of their proposals to SAG was to be gracious enough to allow background actors to make money for one day and then get scanned so the company can use their likeness for free forever. It took twenty years, but we’ve finally made the movie Simone into a documentary.
They want to scan actors. And own their likenesses. Forget if that background actor later becomes famous, this could cause problems. Or, shit, maybe they don’t want their face to appear in a fucked up horror film.
There’s no waiting. We know it. They know it. They’re going to keep trying to squeeze us. And, yeah, they still will after these strikes end. We’ll always be unreasonable in their eyes because we aren’t thanking them on our knees for letting us make them money by using skills they don’t have. However, we can either fight the squeeze or just let the CEOs have every last drop to pay for their boring fucking boomer yachts.
So just pay us, man.
Good luck. The Midwest is rooting for you. The streaming business model is a joke!