Hollywood’s Expendables
It’s not worth dying over. And yet, people do. Even if they don’t physically die, they are the living dead, the walking wounded, expected to drive trucks and lift metal and operate heavy equipment on demand despite significant cognitive decline. They fitfully nap in their cars between shifts; they are given thirty minute notice that they will be required to work an additional hour on top of the 14 they have already worked. They could refuse, I suppose, but not only would they be placing their jobs at risk, they’d be making things significantly more difficult for their co-workers, with whom they have trauma bonded.
If you are drinking a Red Bull at 4AM to get through the last hour of your 16-hour overnight shift, something is wrong. If you are drinking a Red Bull at 4AM, you are unable to sleep when you get home at 7AM. When do you sleep? The answer is, you do not. You cannot see your family, you cannot fuck your boyfriend, you can’t even go to the goddamned grocery store. You have no life. If you have no life, you may as well be dead.
And what, you may ask, are these people sacrificing their lives in service of? Why, the facilitation of almighty content, the hours of film and television most viewers idly put on in the background while staring at their phones, exhausted from their own debasing professions. Said content cannot be made without these people, yet virtually no respect and dignity trickles down to them from the upper echelons of production. They are made to work inhumane hours under impossible conditions for sub-living wages, and no one seems to give one iota of a fuck.
In a matter of hours, the entire entertainment industry could (and should) shut down. Yet you will find nothing about it on the homepage of the New York Times, or even the Los Angeles Times. Nor is it “trending” on the homepage of industry trade publications like The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Deadline. If the majority of the tens of thousands of below-the-line film and television workers that comprise the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees decline to ratify a proposed agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and strike, it would be the first time the IATSE has done so in its 145 year history.
Their initial strike authorization passed with a 99 percent vote, but the deal the IATSE heads negotiated with the AMPTP (which, by the by, was done in secret, depriving union members of transparency and leaving them to find out the particulars of what had been hashed out via the trades) still favors those in positions of power. Said deal, which the president of the IATSE lauded as “groundbreaking” and a “Hollywood ending,” would only increase wages by 3% over the next three years (inflation raised 5.4% last year in Los Angeles alone) and doesn’t even ask for 12 hour workdays (the deal provides for a 10-hour “turnaround”). Producers can, and will, still get away with paying negligible penalties in lieu of giving workers meal and bathroom breaks — it behooves them to do so, as they have more money than God, enough to skirt labor laws. With infinitely filled coffers, they have no qualms against making low level-employees work over 100 hours a week.
The primary issue is that streamers (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu et al), while now being worth more than traditional studios, are still considered “new media,” and thus don’t have to adhere to the same rules as traditional productions. They don’t have to contribute as much to pensions and can operate with shorter turnaround times (workers on streaming productions are currently only given eight hours off between shifts as opposed to ten, which is still grossly unethical). Post-pandemic, on-set time crunches have become even more concentrated, as production heads claim they need to make up for all the content that wasn’t made over the past year (let the record show, however, that streamers also made enormous profits during Covid, as more and more people subscribed to and binged their services). Below-the-line workers are not asked to do the impossible, they are told to do the impossible, expected to do the impossible.
The overwhelming majority of unionized tradespeople work a minimum of 70 hours a week, not including travel to and from set. Many are driven to exhaustion, falling asleep behind the wheel when driving home after egregiously long shifts. If, in the process, they crash their cars and injure themselves, they are not covered by worker’s comp, as their injuries didn’t technically occur at the workplace.
And these are the souls fortunate enough to be in a union — countless others, who do the same jobs, are not. Six union camera crew members walked off the set of the low-budget production Rust after their safety concerns went unaddressed; they were immediately replaced with non-union crew. Six hours later, the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, was accidentally shot and killed.
A film can be so low budget, there isn’t even an armorer on set to attempt to prevent needless death. The other day, a grip on the film I have been shooting for the past three weeks (a job I find so exhausting I couldn’t even write last week’s newsletter, and I’ve “only” been working 60-hour weeks) told me about a low budget horror film he worked on in which people were chasing each other around with real knives. I have heard many similar tales of horror over the past month, as I spend almost every minute I am not doing a take with the crew. I am told this is unusual — generally speaking, actors don’t fraternize with below-the-line workers. Generally speaking, actors are generally standoffish, choosing to be “in character,” which insulates themselves from the people who make this shit. It’s perplexing to me why the people who play people wouldn’t want to learn about people — good acting, after all, is just a replication of human behavior — but hey, I didn’t go to fucking Tisch.
Not having the strength of a union (even a shitty one) behind you makes you more susceptible to wage theft, lack of overtime, and inhumanly long hours. Production Assistants, which are the backbone of any production, have no union at all. Despite their importance, they are considered to be completely expendable, which is why, fearing reprisal, they don’t speak up when they are exploited; after all, there is always some starry-eyed kid from the Midwest willing to do their job, and for cheaper, in order to try and claw their way to the top.
When I slogged away at the clickbait mines for VICE, much ado was made about their employees unionizing — this was all well and good for them, but I was never an employee, only a freelancer, and therefore received none of the benefits of their unionization. I was afforded zero protections, healthcare, sick leave or pension by an employer who was more than eager to exploit my alcoholism for clicks but, when my editor asked if I needed anything and I said that some rehab would be nice (hell, I could even write about the experience), he replied that only thing he could offer, on behalf of the corporation, was “moral support” (at the time, the private-equity firm TPG had recently invested $450 million in the company, placing VICE’s valuation at $5.7 billion). Perhaps my own dalliances with exploitation have made me more empathetic toward the exploitation of others. Perhaps I’m not a real actor. All I know is that, if you are capable of empathy, a film set is a disturbing place to visit.