View the full episode transcript.
Hollywood is no stranger to changes brought on by technology. But KQED’s Rachael Myrow says that for writers and actors currently on strike, this moment is existential — thanks in no small part to Silicon Valley.
Many KQED staffers are also members of SAG-AFTRA, but journalists have a different contract from Hollywood actors.
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, and welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you r ooted. Writers in Hollywood have been on strike since May, demanding better wages and working conditions. And last month, thousands of actors joined them. This standoff between the Writers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is likely to drag on for a while. And behind these calls for improved working conditions is an entire business model changed in large part by none other than Silicon Valley.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: The entire business model has been changed by streaming digital air. This is a moment of history. That is a moment of truth. If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Hollywood is no stranger to big changes brought on by technology. But for writers and actors on strike right now, this moment is existential. Today, how Silicon Valley changed Hollywood and why this strike has everything to do with big tech.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, my first question, Rachel, I understand you actually come from a Hollywood family. So am I in the presence of Hollywood royalty right now?
Rachael Myrow: I wouldn’t call it royalty, but I come from a long line of composers.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Rachael Myrow is senior editor of KQED’s Silicon Valley Desk.
MUSIC: [“You Make Me Feel So Young” by Frank Sinatra]
Rachael Myrow: Both my father and grandfather worked in Hollywood. My grandfather worked for 20th Century Fox in the studio system during the 1940s and fifties. He’s probably best known today for two songs. “You Make Me Feel So Young” and “Autumn Nocturne.”
MUSIC: [continues]
Rachael Myrow: You know, you make me feel so young was was part of a sort of a boiler plate musical of the kind that Hollywood used to churn out back then and would probably have been buried in that movie, except for the fact that a number of years later, Frank Sinatra decided to do a cover. Oh, my gosh. I don’t know. That’s that sounds like royalty to me.
MUSIC: [continues]
Ericka Cruz Guevarra:: Well, I guess what did you come to learn about how Hollywood works from like this point of view or this perspective?
Rachael Myrow: There’s always been this war dance, if you will, between labor and the production companies. New technologies always been new technologies, disrupting things. And there’s always been this sort of gap between the experimental phase of a new technology being rolled out and that moment when the unions catch on and demand a piece of the action for their members in the next contract talks. So whether you’re talking about the shift to television or videotape rentals, remember those or foreign residuals? You know, there’s a little lag and then the unions catch up.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: You know, we’re talking about the strike. All these actors, producers, writers demanding higher wages and better protections. But what is that? What does any of that have to do with big tech and Silicon Valley?
Rachael Myrow: This wouldn’t be the first time Big Tech has essentially gone up against Big Labor in California, Right? These are very well-established unions. The Writers Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA. The gig economy has disrupted all sorts of labor markets. Right. And in really stark terms, because the shift to part time work with minimal employer provided benefits has taken money out of the pockets of rank and file workers and shifted it to the pockets of executives and investors. And again, in Hollywood, you know, the executives have always looked out for themselves, for sure. But what’s happening now is that these companies don’t mind sharing the wealth with the top 1%, the superstars, the the showrunners. But everybody else appears to be treated as expendable in much the same way that you see very carefully delineated stratification of the labor market in Silicon Valley. So, you know, Hollywood was already gig ified by the time Silicon Valley arrived. But Silicon Valley has perfected the business model in a very kind of dark and foreboding way.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And that is in big part because of the fact that streaming has really sort of changed the game. Right. You talk about the role of streaming in all this and Netflix sort of changing the landscape for many of these these folks.
Rachael Myrow: Netflix introduced the concept of streaming. Netflix has also changed the name of the game in terms of transparency or lack thereof. You know, it was always hard to know exactly what was happening under the hood, financially speaking, with a show that you’re involved in producing. But Netflix tells you nothing. Even if you were the one making this the show and people who have been very successful on these programs report that they’re not making the kind of money you would think you would make if you were involved with a hit. My God, I’m going to be so rich.
News Anchor That was Kimiko Glenn, who played Brooks Soso on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black. She earned just $27 on that residual check. You saw it there. Her frustration being echoed by many of her costars.
Rachael Myrow: Which makes you ask the question, who knows how much Orange is the New Black is actually making, and who stands in for the actors inside Netflix arguing for them to get a fair amount of money?
News Anchor Leah DeLaria telling The New Yorker, I got $20. I would love to know how much money did Ted Sarandos make last year? Well, here’s the answer. Sarandos, who’s the CEO of Netflix. According to the company’s financial statements last year, he received $20 million in base salary, more than $50 million, if you include the stock and the options…
Protesters [chanting]
Rachael Myrow: The people I talked to on the picket lines outside of Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos. These people, Ericka, they can connect the dots. They watched what happened to gig workers in other industries. They saw what happened to musicians. My grandfather made a comfortable living on contract with 20th Century Fox, now owned by Disney. My father, on the other hand, died young, in large part from the stress of the ups and downs of working as an independent, a creative gig worker before we knew what that meant. But then you get to someone like Rajiv Shah, right? He’s from Los Gatos. He’s a member of SAG-AFTRA, the Screen Actors Guild slash American Federation of Television and Radio Artists for more than 20 years.
Rajiv Shah: This is full time for me. So, I mean, I do a lot of work in L.A. and here I’m also a writer, so I do a lot of work with that. And we actually have a production company that does a lot of work for, you know, small businesses and things like that. So it’s all creative. You know, what I’ve been doing.
Rachael Myrow: And like many creatives, he’s a hyphenate. He’s working a diversified portfolio of gigs. And I think I mentioned he’s from Los Gatos, right? He gets the tech has eaten Hollywood.
Rajiv Shah: But I think what everybody understands is this is setting a precedent for what’s going to come in the future because, you know, tech is only going to grow. You know, streaming is only going to grow. So all we’re asking is that we grow with it.
Rachael Myrow: You know, But this is Labor’s moment, right? Maybe the last opportunity it has to fight for a share of the pie that allows people like Shah to survive economically.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, Rachael, big tech has also been notoriously anti-union, right? I mean, just sort of thinking about how Uber and Lyft, for example, have been some of the biggest champions of gig work as opposed to full time work with benefits. How does that play into this? Like has. Have you seen this sort of anti-union, I guess, energy trickling down into Hollywood?
Rachael Myrow: The companies coming from tech. They don’t have this history of hashing things out every few years with the writers, the directors and the actors. Many of them are not union in the slightest, not even a portion of their employee base. It’s a different ballgame. We’ve seen Hollywood executives say some pretty dark things about willing to watch the writers and the actors bleed. You lose their homes. And, you know, it’s not that the companies aren’t at risk of losing a lot of money, but a lot of their entertainment services are are kind of loss leaders, to borrow a phrase from retail. If you’re Amazon, it doesn’t matter if prime, you know, at least the entertainment part of prime makes money. The whole point is to give people a reason to sign up for prime. Right. To to have the diapers delivered to your doorstep and to keep you engaged with Prime to continue re-upping every year. So that’s what Prime video is there for if you’re Apple. You don’t need to make money from Apple TV, right? This it’s just one unit. And in truth, you could say, well, yeah, those other media behemoths, they’re also made up of multiple units, many of which they talk about selling to each other. So so there’s some of that. But the big media companies, they have to succeed in entertainment versus for tech companies. I don’t think they have to.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: There’s so much talk now about A.I. in big tech. How do you think that might further reshape the landscape of Hollywood?
Rachael Myrow: This is the question on everybody’s lips, and there’s a lot that really nobody really knows yet. You’ve probably noticed the companies are busy hiring specialists just to figure out what’s possible. Right. And what kind of intellectual property rights are protectable because nobody owns as much creative content as these companies. Right. But already it doesn’t take a software engineer to see that visual special effects people are in big trouble and actors are in big trouble. I don’t know if you saw the latest Indiana Jones movie. There’s a big chunk at the beginning, which is starring a fairly believable younger version of Harrison Ford, but that’s Harrison Ford. So he gets to make bank off that project, right? $25 million. Now, imagine that you’re an extra or the kind of actor who makes a little money here and there for big roles. People might recognize your face or the kind of character you usually play. There are legions of people like this in Hollywood and really all over the world, because there are all sorts of film sets all over the world. Right, including the Bay Area today. Nothing protects these actors from having their likeness recorded on the one or two days. They’re brought on to a set and then used for perpetuity. They’re never going to get called back.
Harley Ford: There’s places for A.I., but let us do the work.
Rachael Myrow: So actors like. One woman I met outside of Netflix in Los Gatos, Harley Ford, she can see the writing on the wall. She knows where this is going.
Harley Ford: We’re the ones that, you know, have felt those emotions. And how can a robot put a tear behind something that doesn’t know what a real feeling is? It doesn’t know love. It doesn’t know respect or kindness. It doesn’t know fear.
Rachael Myrow: Harley understands something that I think if you can appreciate that spark of creativity, the way that that only a human can speak to the emotions within us, like some some computer driven retread just can’t. Get to that. Looking ahead here, where does the, I guess, strike stand now? Are the actors and writers any closer to reaching a deal? At this moment, it’s just the writers back at the bargaining table. But I. I can’t read the tea leaves on this one because for one thing, we’re not getting a lot of public information about what they’re talking about. But also, I think that all three core issues for the writers especially are existential, right? Who gets paid and how? Who works and how much and who gets a say in how generative AI is used. And I should say it’s existential for the actors, too. I just think this is this is a moment, perhaps the last moment when when these two unions have the strategic capacity to drive the conversation. I go back to the idea, Erica, that Silicon Valley has eaten Hollywood, eaten the production model, eaten the economic model, and, you know, seems to be well on its way to eating the creative model. We might not see so many picket lines up here in the San Francisco Bay Area. But I’ll tell you, when you see those actors and writers yelling into the cameras on social media, they are yelling at us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Rachel, thank you so much.
Rachael Myrow: Thank you.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Rachael Myrow, senior editor of the Silicon Valley desk for KQED. Many KQED staffers are members of SAG-AFTRA. But broadcast journalists have a different contract than the Hollywood actors. This 40-minute conversation with Rachel was cut down and edited by senior editor Alan Montecillo. Producer Maria Esquinca scored this episode and added all the tape. If you liked this episode or learn something, tell someone about it. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, thanks for listening to The Bay. Talk to you next time.
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