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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. We're going to mark the 10th anniversary of the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black with Piper Kerman, whose memoir inspired the series, and we'll talk about the show's legacy with Vulture TV critic, Kathryn VanArendonk. We'll also hear from two female musical powerhouses. Ani DiFranco joins us to reflect upon her groundbreaking album, Little Plastic Castle.

Lucinda Williams will be here to talk about her memoir, her new album, and her tour. That is the plan. Let's get this started with journalist Maureen Ryan and the SAG-AFTRA WGA strike.

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Alison Stewart: For the first time, since 1960, both actors and writers are on strike at the same time. We're five days into the SAG-AFTRA actor strike and 76 days into the Writers Guild of America strike. It isn't accurate to call these Hollywood strikes, even though we often use the studio's location as shorthand for the industry as a whole, so many people in our area are a part of this. According to a statement from City Hall, Film and TV employs more than 185,000 workers and makes up about 6.5% of New York City's gross domestic product.

That means a lot of our friends and neighbors are out of work and on the picket line. Then there are those in adjacent fields facing questions about what type of work they can do without being scab-like because everyone's still got to earn a living. With that listeners, we want to hear from you in this conversation. We can take your questions and stories about the writers' strike and the actors' strike. If you're out there picketing, call in and tell us what it's been like or tell us how you're managing to stay afloat financially during the strike.

Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can also text us your thoughts at that number. You can DM us on our socials @AllOfItWNYC. Folks out there who are striking call in, tell us about the experience, what it's like, how you're managing to stay afloat. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can join us on the air or you can text us at that number. Listeners for full disclosure, many of us here at New York Public Radio are members of SAG-AFTRA, myself and most of my team included, but we're in the news and broadcast division, which is not involved in the theatrical and TV strike, nor are we involved with the writers' strike.

Join us now to help take those calls. Please welcome Maureen Ryan, film and TV critic, currently contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and author of the recent book you heard about it. She was on the show recently, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call For Change in Hollywood. Mo welcome back.

Maureen Ryan: Thank you for having me back. I'm so excited.

Alison Stewart: This strike was announced last Thursday after a failed round of contract negotiations. What were some of the main sticking points between the studios and the actors that led to this strike?

Maureen Ryan: Well, a very big sticking point turned out to be AI, and that was something that I just saw sweep through social media that the studio side, I'll just call them the studios because AMPTP is the acronym, and it's a very unwieldy one in my view. The studio said, if you are a background performer, the people who may not have speaking lines but are in the scene, we want to be able to scan your image, own that image in perpetuity, and theoretically use it in AI or in software generated films and TV shows.

60% of SAG-AFTRA actors make the majority of whatever income that they make from background work. Essentially, this was saying to more than half of the membership, we'd like to just pay you a day rate for one day's work and then use your image for all time, which is just wild because this is the backbone of the Guild. I would also just to point out for your listeners, and I'm hoping that we do hear from some working folks in the industry, but as those folks probably known, as you probably know, to qualify for SAG-AFTRA health insurance you have to reach a minimum income level of $26,000 per year earned from SAG covered work.

Now that in New York City or LA or even Atlanta or Vancouver, it's not a ton of money, but 87% of the SAG-AFTRA membership does not rise up and make that cutoff point. We are talking about people who honestly, in many cases, are not primarily paying the majority of their bills from SAG-covered work because most people in the industry are not stars. As the writer, producer, and actor Ashley Nicole Black pointed out on Twitter the other day, "What the guilds are now negotiating for is minimums the bare minimums, literally the floor."

Of course, this is not necessarily to do with Jennifer Lawrence or Denzel Washington, or the biggest A-list stars that you can think of. Many of whom, by the way, have expressed extreme support for the strike because they understand, they had to come from somewhere. People whose names you now know, they may have started out as background actors, day players, person who had a recurring role, or once in a while, we're on a TV show or in a small role in a film. They understand what it's like to be a working actor.

A big issue too is residuals. Glen Powell, the actor from Top Gun: Maverick and other projects said, "When I was a working actor coming up, the way that I kept myself afloat was to have residuals." What that meant was if you were a series regular on, say, Scandal, you got a fee for appearing on each episode of Scandal. When that show aired in other markets or were sold into syndication, things of that nature, you got a cut of it. We may have talked about this the last time we chatted, but for writers, residuals have fallen off a cliff.

For actors and other folks too, they have fallen off of a cliff. It's such a precarious industry. One thing I would just love for people to understand, the vast majority of working professionals on any set in New York City, in LA, in anywhere really in the world are not wealthy. They are living oftentimes paycheck to paycheck. The stats bear this out, for many of the guilds, the average income of a guild number went down as the number of TV shows exploded. The math is not mathing as people say.

Alison Stewart: Well, last Tuesday to pick up on that point, a studio executive apparently told the publication deadline, and here's the quote, "The end game for the writer strike is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses." Deadline reported that another industry insider called the strategy, "A cruel but necessary evil." They said the quiet part out loud.

Maureen Ryan: They took the mask fully off, did not expect that.

Alison Stewart: If we can put on our journalist hats for a moment rather than our human being hats, why would a studio consider it necessary?

Maureen Ryan: Because they want to show who's boss really. They do not want guilds to have power, meaningful power that would upset the apple cart in these corporations that are now under massive pressure to service debt loads. Again, the CEOs, they themselves took on those debt loads. Many of these CEOs make at least tens of millions of dollars per year. Some years they make hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of compensation. They want to be able to make everyone a day player. Hey, if there's 400 TV shows on the air, we'll just make one person write every show.

There's only 400 writers in the Guild that qualify for any kind of Guild membership. If we scan every actor that comes in the door, even as a background player we'll own those images forever. We don't need these pesky creative talents. We don't want them around. They're making trouble for us, and they're interfering with our cost-cutting measures. As I'm sure you saw, and maybe some of your listeners saw, that was the wrong move. The interesting thing about that statement, it was designed to scare people.

I think in my human being opinion journalist hat, I guess you could call it, this was like threatening your teenage. like, "If you ever do this again, I'm going to ground you for the next 100 years." Basically, it's a threat designed to get people to step in line, or to fall in line. It had very much the opposite effect because I do think that for most people in the Guilds who are, again, living paycheck to paycheck, not wealthy, middle class, or working class, they are already facing an existential threat. Really the effect of that statement was, "You're already saying to us metaphorically speaking, we'd like to punch you in the face."

This statement was, "Come closer so we don't have to walk over to you and punch you in the face." I honestly feel in some ways, people I have been talking to, they have no choice but to be on the picket lines because what is happening now, it is simply not sustainable to be a working professional in these fields anymore, and it hasn't been for some people, for some time.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Mo Ryan, Maureen Ryan, contributing editor at Vanity Fair. The name of her book is Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call For Change in Hollywood. We're talking about the actor strike and the writer strike. I've got a long text here, but it's very interesting. It says, "I've worked as a background actor and stand-in off and on since 1983 before SAG merged with AFTRA. I'm also a member of AEA, Actors' Equity. The SAG strike some 20-plus years ago gave rise to reality TV or I call it surreality TV.

Please note, background actors do not get residuals only actors with a screen credit get residuals. Our pension and healthcare is dependent on how much we work we get, and subsequently, how much we make each year. Back in the day, there were only big three networks and a few movie productions. Thankfully, because of all the new streaming productions in New York City, background actors have been able to work more now than ever. However, the studios only have to use '50 SAG-AFTRA members' and the rest can be all non-union actors."

Maureen Ryan: I would take issue a little bit with part of that assertion that, oh, no, they'll just replace everything with reality TV. I do understand that in reality TV, the costs of that are often suppressed because those folks are mainly non-union. Let me tell you, I hear from plenty of people in the reality or unscripted world that wish they were union because there is a lot of exploitation that goes on there. In the time I've been covering TV, the amount of TV for sure, the number of scripted shows aimed at American consumers has gone from 200 about a decade ago to around 600 now.

There absolutely has been an explosion in the number of shows. Just the other day, someone posted on social media, one of the costume design team at The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which I believe films in New York City. They dressed tens of thousands of background actors. Just going back to your point, there are affiliated crafts that are wildly affected by this, and costume designers are among the folks who are really up in arms about these proposals about scan somebody once, and then we own your image and then it's just something we feed into a computer program.

What about the people who feed them at craft services, feed them lunch, the coffee cart person, the person who does makeup, the person who does the costumes? Those areas of production employ whole teams of people. It is an incredibly terrifying, and again, weirdly enough, I think that the kind of sentiment that person texted, the kind of facts and ideas, I'm really glad that they got to work more. I personally haven't spoken to an actor or a writer or someone in an affiliated craft that is against these strikes.

They understand that they're painful, but the alternative is the annihilation of the craft and the ability to earn any money at all, really. Then it becomes more of just a hobby. Being an actor or being a background actor, it's just, "Oh, it's something you do for fun for $50 bucks a year." That is not a sustainable thing. Actually, I have a great deal of compassion for everybody put out of work by all of this, but I think that at this point anyway, and maybe your sense is different, Alison, my sense is that solidarity is at one of the highest levels I've ever seen it.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's amazing, especially if you follow it on social media. I think that the writers, not surprisingly, are very good at communication, and now they also have the actors to help them with communication. I've read and I believe this is true, but tell me if it's apocryphal, that they have instructed people when they talk about the strike, the people who are on strike, to always mention the salaries of the CEOs and the people who are in charge.

Maureen Ryan: I don't know that that's been a specific indication. I think-

Alison Stewart: Happens a lot.

Maureen Ryan: -that the Writers Guild has given that information to people. By the way, it's in my book also. Here's one fact that went viral that's from my book, but I put it out there again over the weekend after SAG went on strike. In 2021, David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, just one year alone, sit down, be calm, center yourself, he made $246 million. Sometimes these figures are so large that it's hard to get your head around so I gave two subsequent numbers with that. That means that he made something like $675,000 a day.

Now, Alison, I had to sit there and think, "How many years of my life have I worked to-- I don't know if I've ever earned that." You know what I mean? That's a very bananas amount of money. Most working people, including me, I would have to work many years, several years, to earn that what he earned in one day. On top of that, I did some research via this wonderful group called Pay Up Hollywood, which tracks the treatment and the payment of support staff in the industry.

At that time, in 2021, a Warner Brothers Discovery assistant, who by the way, like most people in the industry, wouldn't work every day of the year because they're short-term employees oftentimes. Let's just say for the sake of argument, that person worked as many weeks as David Zaslav. They were earning, by comparison, at Warner Brothers Discovery as assistants, $185 a day. I did the math for you and your listeners. In that year, and again, making the generous assumption that assistants worked as many weeks as David Zaslav, he made 3,600 times what the average support staffer made.

If you think about that, there have been studies on this. In the '60s, the average CEO made 15 times what their entry-level worker made. Then it went up to about 700 times. Right about now, at Starbucks or recently at Starbucks, it was about 1,600 to 1 for CEO versus low-level employees or entry-level employees. That's what I think one thing that people may have a hard time wrapping their heads around. In media and entertainment spheres, you might think, "Oh, it's a crunchy-granola crowd where they all value equality and equity and all these things."

In entertainment spheres, it's often the disparities are wider. If the head of Netflix is earning $50 million in a year, their support staffers, they're trying to combine on some Netflix TV shows four support staff jobs into one, and the pay for those jobs was too low to start with. It's thousands of times more than the lowest-level employees at the moment.

Alison Stewart: Let's take Dan. Dan has a different point of view.

Maureen Ryan: Okay.

Alison Stewart: Dan, thank you for calling from Edison. Thanks for talking to me.

Dan: I'm very sympathetic I have to admit, but on the other hand, we have to consider the fact that television has and now with cable, put a lot of garbage on there. It's cheap shots, more and more, less returns. It's true that the guys at the top make very much, but then there are not that many guys at the top. To make a living wage for everybody who does these background shots like people walking and stuff, it would increase the cost tremendously. What their goal is, is to make these cheap movies as cheap as possible and the computer systems provide them with that means.

Alison Stewart: Dan, you just think because the quality isn't what you think it should be, it sounds like you don't really think background actors have much of a case that it's a weak case. That if the technology is there, studios should go ahead and use it?

Dan: No, they're using this because the whole thing is devalued. All these serial programs, nobody is watching this stuff and they have to sell it to the TV stations as cheaply as possible.

Alison Stewart: Dan, we're going to dive in. That's an opinion. Mo, do you have anything you want to respond to?

Maureen Ryan: I've been covering the entertainment industry for 30 years, and I've never made the case everything that comes out is great or even good or even decent, but all of these people are contributing to the economy. The assistant who is paying rent on her apartment or the grip who is buying a truck, or the costume designer who's buying fabric from the wholesaler, all of these people contribute to a much greater ecology, if you will. I do think that, yes, they are trying to make product for the cheapest amount of money possible, but the thing about not being able to pay people is they are able to pay people.

If seven individuals in one year at the top of the chain made $770 million, again, one year, they have the money, they're just choosing not to spend it on this. You could say, "Okay, well," to take your caller's point, "Oh, well, they shouldn't spend money on things that aren't good to begin with." All of that has a knock-on effect. All of that has an effect on the local economy as you said in your intro. In LA, in New York, in Vancouver, all of the-- Already in LA, florists, restaurants, all of these different ancillary businesses are driven by the coin in the pockets of the average Working Joe, who is just stopping in for some bagels at a store, or having to buy supplies or camera lenses for their crew.

I think this is just actually reflective of a wider trend in America. This is coming for all of us. Are we going to be automated and AI-ed out of jobs? If so, who buys the products then? Who goes to Target and buys cat food and shoes? We need to make money in order to drive the economy. If no one in the industry is making any money except for a few wildly, hugely paid people at the top, then that actually helps drive economic hardship for everyone because the economy starts to slow down and crater even.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jody, calling in from Newark. Hi, Jody. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Jody: Oh, Alison, thank you for having me. This is my first time ever calling into WNYC. I love your show. I listen to it all the time and learned so much from you.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Jody: Thank you. I'm grateful.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Jody: The reason why I'm calling in, I am an interdisciplinary artist working in theater, dance, and film and installation. I have a piece coming hopefully to Sundance soon, and I'm getting my way towards SAG. What I've been thinking about a lot for a very long time is the unfair distribution of wealth. What we're seeing with SAG-AFTRA and many of the occupations businesses is you have people top being paid millions upon millions of dollars. They have their five or six homes, their yachts, their private jets.

I, being a homeowner in Newark, New Jersey, I can barely get my home cleaned in one week, let alone a month. I understand that those homes have a whole staff that gets paid, but I think this goes to the heart of a greater problem in the United States and how we distribute money. It's just unfair, overall. It's great to have an idea, but who carries out the idea? If you look at Amazon and Jeff Bezos, what about the people at the very bottom? What are they making? Why are they living in vans, in the buckets? This is the heart of a big problem and major issues.

I feel excited that this discussion has happened. I hope it opens on a greater level.

Alison Stewart: Thank you, Jody. Yes, we were talking about the larger implications of the strike. I think Jody really got to the heart of it. Mo if you could change one thing and you think it would make a really big difference, what would it be?

Maureen Ryan: Having the people who work on and create the entertainment that we consume share a piece of the pie when it goes out into the world, especially if it's successful. I'm so glad that Jody called in. That was just the perfect moment of expressing it is about a wider income inequality, the bananas amount of money that people at the top are making versus everyday people just trying to pay their bills. By the way, if you think that these people are super geniuses, these CEOs at the top, Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg-- you can check this, I retweeted it again the other day-- compared to about a decade ago, 90% of the profits, [chuckles] these companies have gone away.

Now, maybe that's just market headwinds. Maybe that's just economic factors but the fact is, these companies are not prospering under these people in many cases. Just recently, some of the stocks have gone downward. What we had when I was coming up in the '80s, '90s, '00s and so forth, was if you as the writer created a show, you as the actor on Friends, one of the stars of Friends were part of that winning ensemble, you got a slice of the pie. You got a little piece of it, a little sliver that over time allowed you to--

Obviously, the cast of Friends, they're multimillionaires, the creators of Friends. Good for them. They got the American Dream, which is they enjoyed the spoils of success. They enjoyed part of what made something successful. As your caller pointed out and as you pointed out, the CEOs didn't make this stuff. If you sit down and watch a TV show, like Ted Lasso, the head of Apple didn't make that. He didn't have that idea. He's not acting in that show. He's not writing the scripts. He's not lighting the scene.

Those performers are not asking to be billionaires, they are asking to just have, which they did have for a long time, a meaningful amount of a share in the success. That's gone away.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Maureen Ryan. The name of the book is Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood. Mo, thanks for coming back.

Maureen Ryan: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

 

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