Robber Barons and Robots

And baby's first picket line

I’m 8 years old. 

My dad takes me to see RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK at Midtown Cinemas in Ashland, Kentucky.  I’ve been dying to see this movie, partly due to the commercials with the giant boulder rolling after him. We get there a little late and miss the whole opening sequence.  I’m devastated.  My dad asks the manager if we can stick around to watch the first part over.  The manager lets us stay to watch the whole thing again.

I’m 25 years old. 

I go on a first date with the woman who would become my girlfriend.  We see the classic romantic comedy, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. We are both emotional wrecks by the end, red eyed and weepy.

I’m 15 years old. 

My high school friends and I are movie obsessed.  We learn that RAIN MAN will be premiering in Huntington, West Virginia, at the Keith Albee theater.  We buy tickets and beg one of my friend’s moms to take us.  We stand on the line at the red carpet where see Dustin Hoffman, my first real movie star experience.

I’m 21 years old. 

I skip class in college to see the very first showing of PULP FICTION at a theater in Norwood.  I love it so much that I arrange a huge crowd to go back and see the midnight screening.  My friends and I quote the movie for years afterward.  We dress up as the characters for Halloween and do scenes from it in our acting classes.

I’m 47 years old and there’s a global pandemic. 

My girlfriend and I are sequestered in our house and shut off from the world and things are scary and sad, but we turn on TED LASSO and not only does it make us laugh and cry and cheer, it gives us an escape from the ongoing heartbreak.

I’m 3, and 37, and 49, and every year in between, and I have memories just like this where I came together with friends and family and created a memory thanks to movies and TV shows.

I got into this business because I love telling stories.  I have always believed that stories have the power to change the world, but over the pat year or so I’ve been obsessed with the idea of them as social infrastructure.  They are points of connection, places for us to meet and build relationships, part of a shared language. 

As I was talking about my memories maybe it triggered some of your own.

With every movie or every TV show you’ve ever loved, at some point a writer sat down to face a blank piece of paper or a blinking cursor.  With their imagination they dreamed up entire worlds, characters, great lines, moving moments, and they laid the foundation for the hundreds of artists and craftspeople who set out to make it a reality.

The Writer’s Guild of America is the Union that protects these writers and right now we are on strike. There are a number of major issues that all add up to one big concept: compensation.  Things like shorter episode orders, shorter contracts, mini rooms, streaming numbers hidden behind a digital curtain, so you’re not sharing in the success if you create a hit show for a service like Netflix or Amazon.

There’s also the potential for the studios to introduce artificial intelligence into the workflow, cutting more writers out in favor of technology like ChatGPT.

On many of these points the studios refused to counter or even engage in discussion.

(If you want to read specifics, check this out!)

Taken as a whole, this has led many writers (including me) to use the term “existential” when describing this fight.

A couple of weeks ago, one of the founders of Netflix, Marc Randolph, wrote a thread about how at one point they tried to sell the company to Blockbuster for 50 million dollars.  Blockbuster turned them down, and the last couple of tweets in Randolph’s thread were something of a victory lap.  He said:

“Today, the company that Blockbuster could have purchased in 2000 for $50 million, has a market cap exceeding $150 billion. And that company with 9000 stores? Now it’s got just one.”

This is the tech company model: Disrupt.  Destroy. Dance on the ashes.

Winners take all, losers get nothing. 

Some people make billions, some people lose everything.

These companies are trying to turn what was once a dream career where you could raise a family and buy a house in LA into the gig economy so they can squeeze every last dime from writers in pursuit of billions of dollars in profits. 

Eventually they’ll make it so that this is not a viable career path anymore. People will drop out and find other ways to be creative and instead of writers pouring their hearts into these stories the movies and television shows will be overseen by AI “prompt engineers” making less than minimum wage in content farms in other countries.

The CEO’s will be rewarded with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses for making their product ever more cheaply and the people who wrote your favorite lines will struggle to pay the rent.

They broke the system.

We’re trying to fix it.

I didn’t realize how much I’d miss Blockbuster until it was too late.

Fortunately, we took this fight on while there is still time.

And fortunately, there are countless stories about standing up to robber barons and corporate greed and saving ourselves from extinction at the hands of AI. I’ve seen them…at the cinema and on TV. Those blueprints for victory were given to us by writers. Hopefully, by winning this fight, writers will leave a blueprint for you when they come to “disrupt” your industry. And make no mistake, they will.

I joined my first picket line this past Tuesday and attended my first union rally on Wednesday night. And I have to say… I think they fucked up by letting us meet on the line like this. After the past few years of feeling isolated and on the outskirts of the industry, even when I had a job, marching with my fellow writers reminded me that I’m part of a super smart, super creative, beautifully diverse community. We’re in the long haul of this fight, together.

To those of you who stopped me to say hello and tell me you read the newsletter, you have no idea how much that means to me. What you didn’t see was me swallowing the giant lump in my throat. I’m looking forward to crossing paths with you again.

I’ll write more about my time on the picket line in the next issue, and tell you what I’m focusing on in terms of creative work in this time. I say this often, but this newsletter is meant to be a real-time, honest reflection of what’s going on with my career. Well… this is my job right now. Fighting for the future of the profession.

Also, I’m behind on responding to the very kind messages from the last issue.  I’ll be back up to speed soon.  #WGAstrong

Thank you!