Linked List: July 13, 2023

Thursday, 13 July 2023

Deadline: ‘Hollywood Studios’ WGA Strike Endgame Is To Let Writers Go Broke Before Resuming Talks In Fall’ ★

Dominic Patten, reporting for Deadline two days ago:

“I think we’re in for a long strike, and they’re going to let it bleed out,” said one industry veteran intimate with the POV of studio CEOs. With the scribes’ strike now finishing its 71st day and the actors’ union just 30 hours from a possible labor action of its own, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers are planning to dig in hard this fall before even entertaining the idea of more talks with the WGA, I’ve learned. “Not Halloween precisely, but late October, for sure, is the intention,” says a top-tier producer close to the Carol Lombardini-run AMPTP. [...]

Receiving positive feedback from Wall Street since the WGA went on strike May 2, Warner Bros Discovery, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Paramount and others have become determined to “break the WGA,” as one studio exec blatantly put it. To do so, the studios and the AMPTP believe that by October most writers will be running out of money after five months on the picket lines and no work.

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”

Cold as ice indeed. There are very few people, in any field, who can go months without a paycheck.

Hollywood Actors to Strike, Setting Off Industrywide Shutdown ★

The New York Times:

About 160,000 television and movie actors are going on strike at midnight, joining screenwriters who walked off the job in May and setting off Hollywood’s first industrywide shutdown in 63 years. The leaders of the union, SAG-AFTRA, approved a strike on Thursday, hours after contract talks with a group of studios broke down. Actors will be on the picket line starting on Friday.

“What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor,” said Fran Drescher, SAG-AFTRA’s president. “When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors who make the machine run, we have a problem.” [...]

It’s been even longer — since 1960, when Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films — since actors and screenwriters were on strike at the same time. The dual strikes pit more than 170,000 workers against old-line studios like Disney, Universal, Sony and Paramount, as well newer juggernauts like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.

Labor is clearly on the upswing, and there’s no higher-profile union than the Screen Actors Guild, whose members are literal movie stars.

‘Anchor Brewing Was San Francisco’ ★

Patrick Redford, writing for Defector:

It is tempting to read this as another grim story about the pandemic claiming a beloved business, given an extra bit of apocalyptic flair by the degree to which Anchor is synonymous with San Francisco. In that light, the death of one of the city’s most iconic companies goes hand in hand with the narrative that San Francisco is a dying city riven by the tripartite scourges of unchecked crime, spiraling unaffordability, and, uh, wokeness. Even if you don’t want to go that far, you can correlate San Francisco’s high office space vacancy rates, declining national craft beer sales, and “inflation,” and conclude that this economy was too harsh for Anchor to survive in. Indeed, how can any small business keep its lights on under such conditions? That is the story Sapporo’s PR goons are selling and the San Francisco Chronicle is buying, without any pushback or worker perspective, even though it’s not true. Economic conditions matter, though they aren’t nearly as relevant to the Anchor story as Sapporo’s uniquely catastrophic stewardship of the company.

A fine remembrance, replete with great links to further reading, including this excerpt from David Burkhart’s book, published just last year, The Anchor Brewing Story.

What comes to mind is that small-scale excellence is delicate and precious. It seems unfathomable that Anchor could be losing money when their beer remains as popular as ever, but leave it to a large conglomerate like Sapporo to tank a good small thing in the name of making it a bigger thing.