I think it first started happening in October of last year, but I didn’t really notice until January. I had been doing a lot of political ads in the fall (yes of course all Democrats — I’m a mercenary, not a monster), and a lot of video editing work after that, so I was doing fine financially. But when I looked at my freelancer-required spreadsheet of jobs and hours and payments at the end of 2022, I saw that my earned hours were way down. Why does this matter? Because earning a certain number of hours is how I get health insurance through my union. Still, it didn’t concern me too much because I had banked as many hours as I could, and figured I could easily make them up before things got worrisome.
Nope.
The last time I had to think about working more hours was about 2008, when they raised the number we needed to qualify. At that time I was mostly doing relatively cushy commercial work — shorter days, higher pay — but not enough to make up the 100-hour difference. So I started putting out texts, telling all of those TV and film folks I’d been avoiding for years that I was available — even that guy who always insisted on calling rather than texting and leaving me messages that indicated he thought his personal magnetism would convince me that I wanted to work on whatever low-budge project he’d managed to get hired on between the ballroom dancing competitions that were his real passion (once I pictured him doing Flamenco, it all made sense). Those texts resulted in my filling in for the sound utility, who had a shoulder injury due to being hit by a production vehicle on her last job — which had hopefully earned her enough hours to be insured — on the first 2.5 weeks of a new show called The Good Wife. From there, the avalanche of TV offers started and basically didn’t stop.
That’s because TV production has been going gangbusters in NYC for over a decade thanks to state tax incentives, and there weren’t enough qualified sound people to cover not only all of the full-time work, which I didn’t want, but all of the tandem units. These are additional crews hired to work simultaneously because the production can’t shoot the episode in the eight 12- to 14-hour days they’ve allotted to an approximately 52-minute episode. And of course they can’t: that’d mean filming an average of 6.5 pages a day, which requires a skill set that most directors just don’t have, especially if those scripts have the stunts that are ubiquitous in this era of superhero/FBI/cop/detective show domination. So I was able to settle into a pretty consistent mix of commercials and TV day-playing, and that sustained access to health insurance for myself and eventually my husband (welcome to America, where you get married for health insurance), even when union commercials got more sparse due to everyone involved trying to spread their budgets wafer thin between TV advertising and social, a phenomenon that caused a booker I know to say to me recently, “I don’t know how anyone shoots a commercial in the U.S. any more.”
So this time, I didn’t start reaching out to my TV sound friends to say What’s up? until maybe March, when most of them texted back that they had recently finished a job or were on jobs that were wrapping up, but had nothing on the horizon. None of them knew exactly why things were so slow, but they had suspicions. First among them was the potential for the upcoming strikes by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA that have now become a reality, but the logic of that seemed to dictate trying to get more content in the can before May, when the WGA contract expired, not less. Then there was the theory of one particularly astute sound mixer and his business manager, about how the streaming services, which were being driven by people from tech and finance who went by different rules and had different priorities, had overextended themselves. You had people like Ted Sarandos (whose whole career pre-Netflix was spent selling videos, not producing them) and Jeff Bezos (who came from Wall Street and then got super-rich selling books, not writing them) who came in with the corporate philosophy of paying people as little as possible, and for a while that worked. But then they found that this particular industry meant dealing with 1) unions and 2) creatives. THE HORROR. At best, despite how Sarandos likes to talk about how much he loves movies and how his dad was a union guy, they were idiots about how to do that, and at worst, Bezos-style, anti-union as fuck. On top of that, you had the VC and private investment firms, who saw the success of Stranger Things and Orange Is the New Black and said, oooh, gimme some of that. You probably know about how those people have affected other industries: private equity buyouts of healthcare companies and nursing homes, leading to draconian cuts in services and personnel, as well as astronomical bills for patients — which is directly connected to the large number of deaths in nursing homes during the pandemic and the current personnel crisis in the healthcare industry; financial firms buying up mortgages and real estate and then pushing out owners and tenants and/or letting the buildings they own go to shit because they don’t care about running them properly, or perhaps anything at all beyond how to make money — directly connected both to the current housing crisis and, lest we forget, the 2008 global financial crisis; and of course the debacle of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X, which I don’t think has caused any crises yet aside from the one those sad boys who worship him are having now that they may be finally starting to realize that he is not a genius. So as one might expect given their awesome track record, private equity got into our industry, not realizing that a) streaming is new and still doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing (I mean, have you used the Paramount Plus app?), and b) film and TV are not safe or high-profit-margin investments. Even formulaic entertainment from prior IP that appeals to a lowest-common-denominator global audience, like, I dunno, Transformer movies, sometimes fail.
And this returns me to a theme that I talked about here and here and wish I didn’t have to keep coming back to. The film industry, which would ideally be driven by the creativity and love of the medium that brought most of us into it, is being damaged even more by this new set of people who really, only, truly care about money. That was okay when they thought they could make it in streaming by providing shows, like pay cable, not just for one big audience, but for many smaller ones — which created the great flowering of quality television we now call Peak TV. But post pandemic, just as Peloton somehow didn’t foresee that once people could leave their houses again they weren’t going to want to spend all their time riding incredibly expensive bicycles that went nowhere, these new investors in streaming didn’t anticipate how maybe people wouldn’t need to have all the streaming services they could get their eyeballs on any more either. So when that came to pass, the corporate hacks who could (investors) fled elsewhere, and the ones who couldn’t (the companies themselves) decided cuts had to be made the way they always are in the corporate world: by reducing output, laying off workers, and basically cutting back on everything but — god forbid — profits for their shareholders and executive salaries.
Which brings us to where we are now: a WGA strike going into its third month, a SAG-AFTRA strike coming up on week three, and no end in sight. Why? Because with the members of the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture Studio Producers — basically studio execs) getting even more corporate, and more anti-union, and more just plain rich, making money is even more everything to Hollywood than ever before. Studies have shown that the wealthy lack empathy (just like sociopaths!), and have less and less of it as they get richer and their lives grow progressively distant from those of us normals. We can see this in how one studio exec who makes more money per year than any human being can realistically be worth, said the unions were “not being realistic” in asking for job stability and living wages, and how some others actually came out and said that they intended to “allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” presumably while twirling their mustaches. These are the types of things people only do and say when they have lost any concept of what it means to live a normal human life.
Bob Iger of Disney also called people like me, non-writers and -actors who are being affected by the strike, “collateral damage.” That point of view, internalized, is why crew people have never really gotten a fair deal for ourselves. When our contract came up in 2021, at a time when it was clear that the studios were not following through on the pandemic-era promises of cutting back the average on-set workday to ten hours for the sake of everyone’s health, I thought we might finally push for those kinds of basic changes. But did we? Nope. Writers and actors consider themselves human beings deserving of decent working conditions, dignity and fair pay, even if the executives do not, but do we? I’m not sure, because we continue to contort through mental gymnastics to make ourselves okay with our cogs-in-the-machine status. One recent pommel horse routine I witnessed was when I was on my last TV set four weeks ago, one of the only five shows left shooting in town (three of them Ryan Murphy projects, whatever that tells you). The strikers showed up, but everyone in my union stayed at work, because we were told that we weren’t crossing the picket line if we didn’t physically cross it — so we just filmed all of the scenes that took place inside the building where our equipment had been stored the night before, and then we went home (at around ten hours, which I had to once again explain was a short day when I told this story to my friend’s kids who work in tech). I mean, how does this even qualify as logic in any other way but that we crew have to find a way to keep working, because that’s all we think we are?
I’m lucky in that I have some video editing work to help pay my bills, and in theory there should still be commercial work since the contract is different (but there has been hardly any since May. Again, the why is a mystery, so we’re left to guess that they don't want to make new commercials if there isn’t going to be new content to show it with…?). I do also have enough hours in my bank that I might just make it through this with my health insurance intact, if I entirely drain it. The most recent message from my union about our plan is, “It should not be expected that the employer trustees support any accommodations for participants as was done during the COVID-19 pandemic.” I didn’t even know before reading that that there were employer trustees connected with the studios who had a say in my health plan at all, but yup, there’s an AMPTP Senior VP on the Board of Directors. (And thinking back on how they seem to be constantly looking for ways to kick us off of it, from only being able to bank 450 hours even when I’ve earned thousands more than that over the years, to giving us a ten day window to return the letter they used to send us every year — during the holidays, mind you, when many people go out of town for that long — just so we could check a box that said essentially, “YES OF COURSE I WANT TO KEEP MY FUCKING HEALTH INSURANCE,” again, the mustache twirling seems apparent). Now, they want to literally use our lives as bargaining chips. That’s why I did work that last TV day, in spite of knowing it wasn’t the right thing to do: because those ten hours might be the difference between my husband and I being able to to pay for medications and go to the hospital without going bankrupt, and just hoping that one of us won’t die while we wait for the studio executives to somehow realize that we are human beings too.
I will say it is nice to see writers and actors standing up to those one-percenters not just for the sake of their basic humanity, but for the art we got into this business to create. Somebody needs to finally start talking about how the greed and massive inequality of an increasingly corporate industry is destroying both those of us who work in it and why we work in it: because human beings love stories, and we love creating them. It’s felt for a while like the people at the top have stopped caring about any of that. Now I’m starting to wonder if that’s not just because they’re focused solely on profit, but because they basically no longer understand what it means to be people. If the point is no longer to tell stories about those who strive, and suffer, triumph, and maybe even do the right thing in ways that make them unmistakably human, then why are any of us even here?