🎧 Joy, Worry and 'Very Tired Tears'
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🎧 Joy, Worry and 'Very Tired Tears'
Exhausted and exhilarated, actors (and an entire industry) enter the next phase of a changed Hollywood
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The longest actors strike in history is over, but a scarred landscape of reduced spending, fewer shows and a shrinking job market awaits. Sean McNulty, Elaine Low and Richard Rushfield reveal what executives are saying privately, and how to interpret those messages coming from Disney’s Bob Iger to WBD’s David Zaslav. To top it off, labor discontent is still afoot: Elaine interviews former Love is Blind alums Nick Thompson and Jeremy Hartwell, who detail “inhumane” treatment on the show as advocates for reality TV’s unionization (32:21), and, on a lighter note, the team offers a round of winter box-office predictions (24:54).
Transcript here.
🎧 Joy, Worry and 'Very Tired Tears'
I do think that the anti-AI feeling is more than a Luddite reaction, and I say this as someone who still has a landline and occasionally use a portable manual typewriter. (I have no lawn, but I'm sure if I did I'd want those dang kids to get off it, with that noise they call music...in my day we had wax cylinders and liked it...) Anyway - there are advances in the industry that are artistic tools that might disadvantage people but do expand the art...things like sound and color. Then there are advances that no one really wants, like 3D. But the enthusiasm for AI seems to come from the studios, and it's quite clear that -- not to get all class warfare-y -- the current run of Folks in Charge are essentially hostile to the people they're forced to pay. The Folks in Charge are not, I think, looking at AI as a way make art, but to save money. I think that AI is being seen, not as something like sound or color, but more like other "advances" -- like right to work states or foreign countries, where in the 50's and 60's you could hire Franco's army to put on costumes and charge a castle. That did expand the art -- but it did hurt Hollywood extras. The realization that you could re-use old footage in new movies (war, Westerns, pirate flicks) was often the difference between a movie getting made or not, and I can see that as the inspiration for reusing an actor's scanned image forever. Although there seems to be a qualitative difference in the "zombie clause" the studios want. What actor dreams of having one good day of work and then becoming immortal by becoming an eternal manipulated image? Did Fred Astaire hope he'd be dancing with a vacuum cleaner? The question of manipulating images is a tricky one -- every award-winning audiovisual performance is the result of editing choices that are totally out of the actors' control. Sometimes the studios' pushed a radical new technology and were right to do so. If you look at a lot of silent films from, say, 1926, they're aching to have sound. In a way, the history of 20th century film has been a gradual accretion of greater fidelity to perceived reality, and audiences liked the new technology (but not, ultimately, 3D or Sensurround, say). But the studios are hoping that AI will save them money so they will need fewer writers, fewer actors, fewer annoying people. They come at this from an essentially hostile attitude. If they could wave a wand and get rid of every guild and union, they would. If they could pay less money to everyone for everything, they would. (Except in cases where spending money is a signal of power and prestige. There are people who will buy Picassos for their home and feel aggrieved at having to tip a barista.) As has been said a gazillion times, AI can't do, yet, what everybody's afraid of, but the studios are looking to the near future, and what they want is not in the interest of the people who support them. (How we're going to get on in the future with such animosity is another question. Maybe if the current poobahs all retire, that would be a start. Nobody would really miss them...)