🎧 The Trickery of Tariffs & Incentives
Rob Long on why some popular ideas don’t always make financial sense
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As President Trump involves himself in showbiz finances, Rob Long raises the problem of what happens when government gets involved in Hollywood spreadsheets: Everyone above the line gets a raise because A. money is fungible; and B. greed. And below the line? Taxpayers in whatever state is offering cash-back goodies end up paying for second season salary bumps for the cast and the producers.
Transcript here.
Oh, the wraparound show ... I knew it well. I worked the entire run of "Melissa & Joey" from 2010 to 2015 -- 104 episodes -- for "ABC Family Channel," a ruthlessly cheap-ass cable network that has since changed it's brand. I was on the set lighting crew, where Season One paid us basic cable rate, which -- thanks to HBO and the Balkanzation of the IATSE contract structure -- is roughly 20% under union scale, with the added stick-in-the-eye of a "no double-time until after 14 working hours" provision. Granted, this didn't really matter on a multi-camera sitcom, since we rarely approached that limit, but the 20% under scale thing was a very sharp burr under the collective crew saddle. The next two seasons gave us a bump up to a dollar under scale, which was fine, but the contract stated that our final season -- which would take the show runners to the Holy Grail of syndication -- would have to pay us full scale at long last.
So all was good, right? We finally made it to the top of the mountain.
Yeah ... about that. A new CEO had just taken the helm at ABC Family Channel, and apparently wanted to impress the board of directors with his cost-cutting prowess, so he told our show runners that they could go ahead and film the entire last season, but we'd have to deliver all 22 episodes in 17 weeks -- which meant every single week involved shooting scenes from two different shows. This put everybody under the gun, with sets built within sets like Matryoshka nesting dolls, the actors having to learn multiple scripts every week, and to enable that, the prop dept hiring two people to come in for every block-and-shoot day to hold enormous cue cards with the dialog, which they held in the actors eyeline just off the two wing cameras.
But hey, we were a totally professional crew and got the job done. And of course, as you pointed out, all the above-the-liners got their full pay while we on the crew -- who did the heavy lifting all season long -- ended getting roughly 20% less by the end of that 17 week season than we'd have made working the normal one-episode-per-week multicam schedule. In other words, we got screwed.
Hollywood, same as it ever was.
I've forgotten the name of that chisling CEO, which is just as well -- because if we were ever to meet him, I'd have to restrain myself from punching that bastard in the nose.