the DON JONES INDEX…
		GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED 7/24/23... 15,027.26 7/24/23... 15,024.26
	6/27/13… 15,000.00
(THE DOW JONES INDEX: 7/24/23... 35,405.29; 7/24/23... 35,227.69; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)

LESSON for July 31, 2023 – “LABOR’S UNLIKELIEST HERO!”

Among the occasional pigeons of truth that poke their beaks through Hollywood’s bodyguard of lies, a few long-ignored, outdated historical oddities surfaced this month, compliments of the Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG) joining the Writers’ Guild on the picket lines - primarily over the issues of royalty payments for streaming content already contracte and paid for, as well as the Zip Modern prospect of both artists being replaced by AI robots.

If there is a face (and voice) to the striking performers, it’s probably the shrill, neo-Communist braying of former “Nanny” star Fran Drescher, squaring off against a stacked deck of monoclonal studio executives in sober suits (and perhaps designer sneakers, just to show off Hollywood hipster flash and maybe bag a starlet or two) who have deferred to the voluble Disney CEO Bob Iger, squaring off in a strange, three-cornered battle with Laughin’ Fran sharpening her knives to his left and, to his right, Florida’s clown prince of culture wars Ron DeSantis.

Saint Ron is hoping his jihad against the Mouse Factory will enable him to trump the Trump (Donald, that is) by trying to out-crazy the former President and current Republican front runner by slicing his alt-right baloney in narrower and narrower wedges. That does not mean he is making common cause with Franny... he has campaigned as a good, American hater of all things Hollywood – the performers, the writers, the studios, the smell of the place... everything!

Although at least one scrivener has proposed the possibility... see below.

Strange enough, but stranger things have happened before, including the last time that two of the major TV and movie unions walked off in tandem – which was in 1960 (specifically February 18th when, as then-union activist Tony Curtis, wife Janet Leigh and their little girl Jamie Lee, all of four months old, held a ginormous Hollywood house party to plot strike tactics or, to some, the demolition and destruction of the America Way). Then, as now, the underlying issue was money... the technology and the dramatis personae were different, but the cause was the payment of royalties as then-adolescent television was discovering that running old movies that the studios already owned was cheaper than hiring the actors, writers and peripherals to concoct new dreams to dazzle the masses and distract them from their increasingly empty yet stressful lives.

The studios... who privately resented their star performers even as they fawned over them in such media as would promote whatever epic or boilerplate was being spun for the peasants’ amusement and publically belittled the supporting cast, crew and creators as cattle – deserving nothing more than a bale of hay and some grass to graze upon so long as their career lives would last... were, perhaps, best represented by Spyros Skouros, head of then really 20^th Century Fox, who presaged Iger’s dismissal of the strikers’ demands by simply, saying: “Why should I pay you twice for the same job? I’ve already paid you for this job,” and threatening that Fox might “fold its tent in the U.S. for a while” and work in Europe if Hollywood was hit with a prolonged work stoppage. (Variety - see below)

So the writers and performers needed a superhero of their own, a hard-driving, milk-drinking wonderboy (even then, however somewhat aging)... a man’s man who could talk with the chimpanzees, knuckle down and drive the studios to their knees in terror of monkey justice (or, at least, shake a few coins out of their pockets) so they reached back into their own past... yanking an already-retired though comparatively youthful New Deal Democrat back into the fray as a replacement for outgoing SAG President Howard Keel. A man of unimpeachable resources and character, a dealcutter whom Donald Trump himself would study back in 1960 as he whiled away the hours in the military academy that his father had committed himself to for being somewhat of a wild boy... an avid watcher of the Nixon/Kennedy debates, where television first extended its tentacles into technology and politics...

A hero to labor and the left, who could also practice the art of the deal with the right and the right business people - whose name was...

Ronald Wilson Reagan?

Yup... hard to believe it, but the savior whom the creative castes of Tinseltown summoned back from a pleasant retirement to win them the respect (and the royalties) they believed that they deserved... the host of General Electric Theater and Death Valley Days, star of “Kings Row”, “Bedtime for Bonzo” and numerous leading, supporting and walk on roles between – a man in full, dressed to the nines and hankering to stand toe to toe with the studios and wrench out of their clerks and administrators as much gelt as he could grab. (And a Christian, too!) Most of his colleagues, at least the younger ones at that time, believed he succeeded – and thereafter parlayed his glamour (if not always his links to the working man or woman) into the Governership of California, followed by two terms as President.

Celebrating his induction into the U.S. Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor Inductees in 2017, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor Labor Secretary Alex Acosta (or his ghostwriters) proclaimed that, among other achievements: “For seven terms, Ronald Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild of America, where he negotiated groundbreaking contracts providing fair payments, health insurance, and pension benefits to members...” his enduring dream being “...one of Americans living in harmony in a ‘shining city on a hill.’ His legacy is one of hard work, spreading liberty, and principled leadership.” (Attachment One)

“Former President Ronald Reagan's time in office was motivated by two principles or ideals—freedom and the right to privacy. These two principles inspired Reagan's approach to organized labor and unions,” (Reagan.com, January 3, 2018, Attachment Two)

“As unions and the Republican Party have often come to loggerheads, Reagan took a very hard stance against unregulated unions. He ultimately believed that employers deserved the right to define their own business practices.” Thus, regulation by the government or by illegal unions (as he termed Patco) could threaten that basic ideal, Acosta told a somewhat bewildered, but largely pro-MAGA audience:“restricting companies' productivity and contribution to the American dollar.”

Contending that Reagan’s post-electoral firing of the 11,000 Patco air traffic controllers and their replacement by the military was a hard but necessary lesson; a boon to organized labor in that businesses “gleaned that threats from unionized workers do not need to go unanswered... (t)hey can take a hard line on their organizational principles and still be successful.” The move also illustrated to unions that their employers have the right to maintain productivity and cohesion, with or without their buy-in.”

Celebrating the induction, the New York Post editorial board (September 20, 2017, Attachment Three) reminded America that Reagan was also the first union member to win the White House. Indeed, as Acosta noted in remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, he “led the Screen Actors Guild during its first three strikes.”

As head of SAG, he won his members “never-before-seen concessions . . . which included residual payments and health and pension benefits.”

The Post also called out Alex Bastani, a union chief at the federal Labor Department upset that the agency is inducting former President Ronald Reagan into its Labor Hall of Fame. In a (softly) implied threat to Bastiani’s person and his personnel, the Post reminded him that reasonableness on Reagan’s tenure might be preferable to the union that had nominated him for the honor: the Sergeants Benevolent Association of New York City.

Dismissing Patco as an “illegal strike” and championing “his support for [the union movement] Solidarity in Poland... (which) prompted a flourishing of freedom that ultimately led to the collapse of communism,” the Post concluded by stating that the SBA had “nominated Reagan in part because he was a ‘turning point’ for this country. Darn straight.”

Reagan, who was an actor and a Democrat before he was a Republican politician, first led the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) from 1947 to 1952. Then, in 1959, as SAG was negotiating with movie studios, he returned to helm the actors' union—and led them in a strike, which was a "double strike" as SAG and the Writer's Guild of America (WGA), the writer's union, were on strike at the same time.

Reagan returned to lead SAG because he was an "extremely effective leader of SAG in the late '40s," writer and actor Wayne Federman explained to Slate Magazine. "At that time, he was considered a liberal Democrat, but by the time he was brought back as SAG president to lead this strike, he had had a political conversion. … I don't think he was a registered Republican at that time, but he was certainly starting to lean that way. (Town and Country, July 18, 2023 Attachment Four) “The membership liked him. They remembered that he had been this good union leader before, and when he was head of SAG in the early '50s, he helped get residuals for television actors [for reruns]."

But after he moved onward and upwards, the Patco strike and massacre soured relations between the President and organized labor and the distrust had already begun during his two terms as Governor. In his endorsement of Jimmy Carter in the 1980 contest, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said at the time, "Ronald Reagan is no friend of working people. His past record proves that fact, and we must make sure that union members have the facts to match against the glib rhetoric."

Once in office, and especially after the Patco strike, the former SAG negotiator was viewed, by many, as a traitor to the working class.

But, under the dominion of Trump and Acosta... who made his announcement at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in Simi Valley, California... the “one-time Hollywood union leader who fired 11,000 air traffic controllers and crushed their union, (would) be inducted into the Labor Department's Labor Hall of Honor.”  (CBS, August 24, 2017, Attachment Five)

Caitlin Vega of the California Labor Federation had already de-memorialized the 40th President’s 100^th birthday party (February 7, 2011, Attachment Six) contending that Reagan wasn’t just anti-union, but instrumental in changing the balance of power between workers and employers, which has directly led to the epic levels of income inequality we see today.”

That mass termination marked a new chapter in labor relations “in which workers became acutely aware that union activity could cost them thier jobs. The number of major strikes decreased dramatically, from an average of 300 each year in the decades before the PATCO strike to less than 30 per year today (19 in 2011... the figure rose to 23 in 2022 with more ongoing and on tap this year).

 Once considered “the nuclear option,” permanently replacing striking workers “quickly became standard operation procedure and helped employer after employer either face down strikes or break them.” It is no wonder PATCO had a chilling effect on workers' right to engage in collective action, and led to a major loss of leverage for workers in trying to improve their working conditions and their lives.

Today, Vega concluded, “as we are forced to sit by and watch poor children lose childcare subsidies, the disabled lose home care services, young people lose any hope of going to college, we see Reagan's true legacy. Even as budgets have been passed with deep and painful cuts to people who can least afford it, they have been accompanied by massive corporate tax breaks.”

(And this, mind you, under the guiding hand of then-President Barack Hussein Obama!)

As historian Richard Reeves explained, Reagan changed American politics by “reversing the populist political attitude of one that believed business was the villain to making government the adversary.” 

A New York Times timeline dates the founding of SAG back to 1933, when, to celebrate his first Thanksgiving as president, Franklin Roosevelt traveled to his vacation home in Warm Springs, Ga., and he invited a guest to join him: Eddie Cantor, a comedian who was then among Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Cantor was one of the founders of a new Hollywood labor union, the Screen Actors Guild, along with James Cagney, Miriam Hopkins, Groucho Marx, Spencer Tracy and others. The previous month, the union’s members had elected Cantor as their president. So Roosevelt’s invitation of Cantor was good publicity for the economic recovery bill that FDR, calling it his New Deal, hoped to kick-start a provision “giving workers a clearer right to join labor unions than they had previously had.

“Americans responded by signing up for unions by the thousands.” (New York Times, July 18, 2023 Attachment Seven) Then again, it was in the depths of the Depression.

The Business Insider, noting the (near) simultaneity of the actors’ and writers’ walkouts, found more similarities between developments in 1960 and the present... but also some differences.

Then, the job actions were motivated by money... specifically for payments, to the actors, on rerun and syndicated programming, which was just becoming an important source of (unchallenged) revenue for the studios.

Guild President Reagan had tried to tried to negotiate with producers over residuals for actors, but a lack of progress led him to call for a strike-authorization vote in February. The Insider (Attahment Eight) included a timeline on significant SAG events from 1946 (when Reagan, who had filled in as a board replacement for actors Rex Ingram and Boris Karloff, was elected Third Vice President, behind Robert Montgomery, who had replaced the actor George Murphy in September.

The war on Hitler just concluded and a new “cold war” with Russia starting up, Montgomery prodded SAG into issuing an “anti-Communist. anti-Fascist statement,” in June before going out on short strikes in July and, again, in September. At their annual meeting on the 15^th, the members strengthened their anti-collusion resolutions – sanctioning members “found to have primarily and continually the interest of an employer, rather than that of an actor” and, also, passing laws opposing “discrimination against Negroes in the motion picture industry” as well as passing other resolutions that the partisans of the time would attack as Communist-inspired – including opposition to the Taft-Hartley union busting bill which, nonetheless, passed over President Truman’s veto.

Reagan became President at the March 10, 1947 meeting, during which seven of the Guild’s most promiment board members resigned due to the conflict-of-interest provisions. During his tenure, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC – starring a young California congressman) filed charges against the “Hollywood Ten”. Reagan, along with former Presidents Murphy and Montgomery, testified before HUAC as “friendly witnesses” and he was re-elected in 1948, again and again until 1952, when replaced by Walter Pidgeon.

His terms in office also saw the Supreme Court ordering studios to “divest themselves of their theater holdings” and television begin to make inroads on their box office receipts.

Fast forwarding to 1959, the Insider took note of Reagan’s restoration as the rerun and residual issue gained prominence. After much furor, he negotiated a deal in which residuals would be paid only for films commencing after January 31, 1960, but producers' lump payment of $2.65 million would create the Guild's first Pension and Welfare Plan.

It was an early manifestation of one of the great partisan divides of the present... the Generational War. The Insider Timeline closed out on November 22, 1963.

Voices... pro, con and self-serving arose almost as soon as the ink on the contracts were dry and the membership voiced its approval. Prudence Flowers, an Austalian converser for The Conversation (July 19, 2023, Attachment Nine) exposed the dirty little secret that his appearance before HUAC in 1947 as a “friendly witness” was actually an opportunity to rat out some of those colleagues he did not like, or whose demise would be expedient towards his future. “When he became president of SAG he provided FBI agents with dozens of actor’s files.”

He saw no tension in reconciling his fading liberal beliefs, including his role leading the 1960 strike, and his nascent conservatism - exhibiting “the flexible pragmatism scholars later identified with his time in the White House.”

By 1964, he was a charter member of “Barry’s Boys”, even knowing that the GOP candidacy was doomed. He exploited his contacts, however, making dramatic speeches on behalf of AuH20, and was soon “approached by a group of influential businessmen to run as the Republican candidate for Governor of California.” His last acting role was in 1965... notably in “The Killers” as... well... a killer, a villain much appreciated in subsequent left wing movie nights who, notes Jordan Hoffman in The Messenger (7/14/23, Attachment Ten) can be seen “slapping Angie Dickinson in the face.”

Reagan may never have won any Oscars, Hoffman contends but he had “a somewhat substantial career.” He was a leading man at times, notably in the 1938 military comedy Brother Rat, (prophetic? – DJI) and if he had a peak year on screen, Hoffman opined, “it was probably 1940. That's when he starred in Knute Rockne, All American, a pretty cheesy football picture in which he played Notre Dame star George Gipp, nicknamed The Gipper. .

Political writers often referred to Reagan as The Gipper later in his career, the polite ones. Others exploited his subservient role to another mammalian biped when dissecting his Presidential actions and agenda.

“The Messenger’s” message that Reagan’s claim to Hollywood fame rests upon Bedtime for Bonzo, “in which the future leader of the free world is tasked with getting a chimpanzee to go to the eff to sleep” provokes a “considerable amount of irony.”

Find someone from the labor movement and say the name "Reagan," Hoffman asks, “and see what happens.” The man has many legacies, but for unions, his SAG heyday isn't what comes to mind. It is when, in 1981, he fired over 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers. Not only that, he declared a lifetime ban on rehiring any of the picketing workers. Bill Clinton lifted the ban in 1993

The alt-alt-right Hollywood queen bee of the fifties, Hedda Hopper, may have had Ron’s number after all!

More conservative members of SAG disagreed with the decision to strike, with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (who had once been a character actress) stating, “I don’t think it’s moral to accept money twice for a single job,” overlooking the fact that that was exactly what the major studios were doing.

In Chapter Eight on “Hollywood Babylon” of her biography “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood” (Attachment Eleven “A”), Jennifer Frost recalls Hopper’s participation in the 1960 strike as both actor (she had played a few roles in her younger days) and columnist. Hedda was not very sympathetic to Reagan... she did not exactly call him a Communist, but her nose was in the air.

(Some real Commies may well have offended Reagan’s aging, yet avid followers, by comparing him to... of all people... Donald Trump! People’s World, Attachment Eleven “B”.)

It might well have been the enmity of HH that allowed so many of the Hollywood Left to keep believing that Ronnie was one of their own for so long.

Wayne Federman (see above, below and Attachment Thirty) was interviewed by Nadira Goffe of Slate two weeks ago and they traveled back in time to the beginnings of the 1960 labor action. (Attachment Twelve)

Nadira Goffe: What were the circumstances that led to the 1960 SAG strike?

Wayne Federman: “So the SAG strike was about one issue, and that issue was motion pictures made by the studios that were now being played on television. That started around 1948. [The union] kept wanting to talk about this issue, and [the studios] kept kicking the can down the road, year after year, negotiation after negotiation. So, eventually, the membership of SAG were like, We have to deal with this issue. It was very, very, very contentious. And they brought back Ronald Reagan, who had been president of SAG from 1947 to 1952, to lead the union... his movie career had kind of waned a little bit, but he was very respected by the membership, and they brought him sort of out of retirement to lead this strike. So he got elected again.”

Why did they invite him back? What was so special about him?

“Because he was an extremely effective leader of SAG in the late ’40s. At that time, he was considered a liberal Democrat, but by the time he was brought back as SAG president to lead this strike, he had had a political conversion. … I don’t think he was a registered Republican at that time, but he was certainly starting to lean that way. The membership liked him. They remembered that he had been this good union leader before, and when he was head of SAG in the early ’50s, he helped get residuals for television actors [for reruns].

“But here’s a little thing: Nancy, his wife, did not want him to take this job, because now you’re going up against the people that can hire you. You’re the face of the industry, of these actors, and now you have to go up against the heads of Warner Brothers and MGM and all of the major studios. But he eventually said yes, and as soon as the strike was resolved, he didn’t even finish out the term. I believe he resigned after the strike was successfully negotiated...”

“On the other side, the head of 20^th Century Fox [Spyros Skouras – the template for Bob Iger]; his argument was very simple: Why should I pay you twice for the same job? I’ve already paid you for this job. I own this at this point. And that was basically the position of all of these studio owners.”

Federman credited the settlement to his agent, Lew Wasserman, who thought the end inevitable. “If it wasn’t going to happen in 1960, it might happen in ’65.”

What about residuals for films made before the strike in 1960? (The only real demand that Reagan bartered away to secure the settlement.)

“There (were) more A pictures making their way onto television. And so [the studios are] thinking, In the age of television, what do we do for all of these movies that were made between 1948 and 1960? They decide, All right, instead of residuals for any of those movies made between 1948 and 1960, we’re going to give you a few million dollars to start. This is the first health fund for actors, which is where I get my health insurance and pension.”

(But there were) “there are no residuals for any movie made before 1960. There were people who worked in the ’30s and ’40s, like Mickey Rooney and Bob Hope, who were upset at this. They were like, Why do we strike? I thought I’d get residuals for Road to Morocco or whatever. In a way, Reagan was selfless because most of the movies he made were in pre-residual times.

“What are the circumstances leading to this current SAG strike and how do they differ from or resemble the circumstances in 1960?”

“For this strike, before we even negotiated, we already had strike authorization from the membership. In 1960, they didn’t. The 1960 strike was really about one issue, and this strike is about multiple issues. This is about how residuals, specifically for streaming entertainment, are being calculated...

“And then there’s this A.I. situation...”

How are you feeling? You’re in both unions.

Yes. How am I feeling? Well, mixed is how I’m feeling, to tell you the truth. Most of my friends are like, Eff those guys, look at how much so-and-so makes, these faceless internet oligarchs that own all the content, eff those guys, let them feel a little pain. That’s kind of what a lot of my peer group is like. But I’m a little more like, “We’re in this together. Does it have to get to this, where there’s a work stoppage?” I’m super sympathetic to people who aren’t in the union that rely on film production to make their living—caterers and all of those people. I feel terrible for them...”

“It’s a complicated issue. It’s like Reagan. It’s complicated.”

Crisis 1960

The SAG-WGA Double Strike of 1960 was born at that house party held by Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis as noted above and in an undated Variety chronicle by Cynthia Littleton (Attachment Thirteen).

The WGA strike had begun Jan. 17, 1960, against most of the major studios and large production companies and would run for 155 days on the TV side and 147 days on the film side, longer than the actors’ strike. Then again, there were more heavy hitters among SAG.

Reagan and “legendary SAG national executive Jack Dales” addressed a “tough crowd” of “100 stars including John Wayne, Debbie Reynolds, Shirley MacLaine, Glenn Ford and Dana Andrews. None other than David Niven served as chair of the meeting. Journalists were invited into the Curtis-Leigh home but were not allowed to attend the meeting itself. Per the reportage of “Just for Variety” columnist Army Archerd, Curtis popped into the reporters’ holding pen periodically to give updates a la “Lions-39, Christians-37.” Archerd also had the dish that Jack Lemmon got the time wrong and showed up just as the meeting ended. Beverly Hills police were summoned to help direct traffic around the evening gathering. Curtis and Leigh shelled out for what were described as “parking boys” to handle the cars. “It’s our contribution to the strike fund,” Curtis quipped.

The celebrity contingent swelled thirtyfold on March 14^th when the actors gathered at the Hollywood Palladium to give a standing vote of confidence to the strike. (See below)

Charlton Heston and James Garner were among the notable stars on SAG’s negotiating committee. SAG and the AMPP held bargaining sessions on and off during the strike, and ultimately came to an agreement without too much outside squabbling.

In the end, Variety reported, “the studios held the line on SAG’s demand that actors be paid 2% of the revenue received from post-1948 film sales to TV. But SAG achieved every other major contract demand, including a royalty payment system for TV licensing revenue for films produced after Jan. 31, 1960. It also secured studio money for the formal establishment of its pension and health fund.”

“Reagan was cheered at a SAG membership meeting at the Hollywood Palladium on April 18, 1960, where the pact was formally ratified by SAG members. At the event,” Variety added, “he no doubt honed the political skills that would lead him to become governor of California just six years later, followed by two terms as U.S. president in the 1980s.”

The WGA strike ended June 13^th, after the intercession of writer/actor/producer Desi Arnez, who penned a poignant letter to all parties.

(Faded, pinkish copies of Desi’s letter and other Variety cover issues can be found on the website here)

Federman still applauds the deal, but there have been dissenters – their ranks growing, over time, as Reagan’s anti-union Presidency soldiered on.

“(O)ne of the things people always say about Ronald Reagan is "Before he was a conservative, he was a union leader!" — and that's true, but he was not a particularly good union leader, opined Robyn Pennacchia in Wonkette, July 14^th, Attachment Fourteen. “In 1951, during his first term as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, he negotiated a crappy deal in which actors would forfeit residuals from films made before 1948 in exchange for mere negotiations on residuals on films made going forward.”

Flash forward nine years to Reagan’s restoration, when “movies were just starting to be shown on TV and actors felt, rightly, that they deserved compensation for this.”

The 1960 SAG strike lasted for about six weeks, “with Reagan eventually coming to another very bad deal for the actors — they would forfeit residuals not only from before 1948, but also from before 1960 in exchange for residuals going forward and the studios contributing $2.65 million to the Guild's first Pension and Welfare Plan, which was about half of what they were asking for.

This crap negotiation was the crux of a 1981 lawsuit filed by Mickey Rooney against eight studios on behalf of himself and other actors (including Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, Glenn Ford, Lana Turner, Van Johnson, Dana Andrews, Jane Powell, Shelley Winters, Barbara Stanwyck) who felt they deserved compensation for the movies they made before 1960. (Side note: This is interesting because he was deeply shitty to Lana Turner .) The suit was thrown out a year later, which was pretty unfortunate for a whole lot of actors who hadn't been as big as those stars and also had to watch as other people made piles of money off of their old films (including in commercials).”

Wonkette also launched a lance from the left against Mister Jane Fonda (Ted Turner), whose TCM has piled up a lot of money from pre-1948 classics. Effusive in its praise of Fran Drescher, author Pennacchia now expresses home that, although America is a “celebrity-obsessed culture” where the stagehands and caterers and bit players have far more to gain than already-wealthy superstars, “the SAG-AFTRA union taking a stand is something that is going to have a much wider impact than just on how much actors get in residuals. Not only will it prevent the normalization of replacing people with technology, but it will demonstrate the power of a union and hopefully inspire people from other industries to unionize as well.” @a

The Hollywood Reporter (July 18^th, Attachment Fifteen – also including reproductions of pertinent old articles) contends that television residuals were (and would be) more residual-istic than old movies – stating that the syndication of filmed sitcoms like I Love Lucy, The Danny Thomas Show and Father Knows Best was already generating millions of dollars in revenue for the producer-owners; the creators and performers wanted a fair share of the windfall.

Reporter Thomas Doherty lionized Reagan (despite his role as an “off-the-books FBI informant and his participation in “clearance” procedures, whereby actors accused of ideological malfeasance would have to explain or recant before a star chamber of industry apparatchiks” (i.e. “rat” – DJI) and the contention by Glenn Ford, speaking for a group of 40 dissidents, that: “Actors are not morally justified in striking and causing backlot workers to be laid off,”) – reporting that Tony Curtis had responded: “If Glenn Ford feels our union didn’t do a good job, let him join the butchers’ union.”

At the other end of the partisan spectrum, the indomitable Ms, Hopper asked: “Isn’t it coincidental that at a time when some of the more liberal producers are hiring Communist writers that this strike came up?”

Aside from the new issue of AI, are the old issues of royalties for reruns, now resurgent in streaming and other technologies, still relevant?

When the HollyMob gathered at the Palladium (noted above) on March 14^th, the Los Angeles Times reported that: “What was probably the most star-studded union meeting in history convened last night at the Hollywood Palladium as Screen Actors Guild members discussed their strike against major film studios. A standing vote of confidence was given to the strike. The motion was made by actor Warner Anderson and seconded by Cornel Wilde.

“The meeting was presided over by Reagan, who was elated by the actors’ (initially) overwhelming support for the strike.” (Hadley Meares in LA First, published Jul 20, 2023, Attachment Sixteen)

But, for some in high and low places, the cheers turned to jeers as the details wormed their way out of the box Reagan and the studios had put them in.

Many SAG members felt Reagan, increasingly involved in big business, had brokered a bum deal in terms of the residuals deal. According to Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob, actors called the deal “The Great Giveaway.”

According to SAG-AFTRA's website, the work stoppage concluded after the Guild "agreed to forego residual payments on films made prior to 1960," instead receiving residuals for films made starting in 1960 and thereafter. Even though actors didn't end up winning residuals for their prior films, producers agreed to make a one-time payment of $2.25 million to the Guild, which was subsequently used for health insurance and a pension plan.  (Insider, above)

The writers ended their strike on June 12, 1960. Per the WGA's website, wins from the 1960 strike included "the first residuals for theatrical motion pictures, paying 1.2% of the license fee when features were licensed to television; an independent pension plan; and a 4% residual for television reruns, domestic and foreign." The WGA was also able to “win” a pension fund (a point of contention over Reagan’s negotiating ability and/or tactics) and the right to participate in an "industry health insurance plan." 

SAG members overwhelmingly chose to return to work (6,399 to 259 votes) after being sold the following agreement: Actors would receive residuals only for films beginning production after Jan. 31, 1960; as for movies made between August 1948–January 1960, in lieu of paying residuals the studios would disburse a one-time lump sum of $2.65 million (far less than the originally proposed $4 million) for the creation of the guild’s first Pension and Welfare Plan.

But what about movies made before August 1948? asks Alt Film Guide (Attachment Seventeen)

Since, back in 1951, SAG, then also under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, “forfeited any royalties on movies that went into production before August 1948 in exchange for the promise of negotiations for royalties on movies made after that date – “negotiations” that would ultimately lead to the 1960 strike.

“In sum: Apart from specific contracts, actors seen in big-screen releases prior to August 1948 – e.g., Gone with the Wind, King Kong, It Happened One Night, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Mrs. Miniver, Casablanca, Meet Me in St. Louis, Going My Way – were never to receive a penny in compensation from the major studios for the selling or licensing of their movies to television (or other future media ).^[1]

As for the 1960 deal, apart from specific contracts, those who had worked between summer 1948–early winter 1960 had better be satisfied with the pension fund because that would be all they would ever get.”

@a18

Comedian and movie star Bob Hope was incensed, since he would not receive a penny from the films he made before 1960. (LA First, above)

“The pictures were sold down the river for a certain amount of money,” Hope said, per Prindle. “I made something like sixty pictures, and my pictures are running on TV all over the world. Who’s getting the money for that? The studios? Why aren’t we getting some money?”

Former child star Mickey Rooney was blunter. “SAG screwed us,” he said, “and I’m mad about it.”

Town and Country reminded us that Reagan would later joke that negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, over arms reduction “was nothing in comparison to having to negotiate with the studio heads," but Iwan Morgan, author of Reagan: American Icon, pointed out, however, that Reagan shouldn't have led SAG negotiations because at the time, he was also a producer—a conflict of interest. "There was a feeling from some of the old stars that Reagan had not pushed harder," he said. (noted by Emily Burak, July 18^th, Attachment Four, above).

In a study of power, Jean Magram (altfg, Attachment Eighteen) alleges that the most despised (non-Hollywood) legacy media moguls – at least for non-fascists – are indisputably Fox Corporation Chairman of the Board Rupert Murdoch and his CEO son Lachlan Murdoch. The most despised social media mogul is undoubtedly Tesla/Twitter’s Elon Musk, with Meta/Facebook’s (and now Threads’) Mark Zuckerberg a close second. “On to Hollywood, where the most despised mogul is hands down Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.” (Others might disagree… contending that it’s Bob Iger, but Zaslav is also a wannabe union buster, too.

Zaslav’s primacy over Iger, Magran contends, is largely due to his reputation as a bully and a crook… specifically in his pressuring GQ to kill a critical article by freelance film critic Jason Bailey, which provided several reasons as to why Zaslav’s tenure at Warner Bros. Discovery – the company formed in April 2022, when AT&T subsidiary WarnerMedia was merged with Discovery, Inc. – “has been such an abhorrent disaster.”

For illustrative purposes, Bailey compared Zaslav to Brian Cox’s Rupert Murdoch-inspired ogre Logan Roy in Succession and to Richard Gere’s corporate raider Edward Lewis in Pretty Woman. The author also reminded his readers that Zaslav’s Discovery reign was marked by the company’s increased focus on “reality slop” like Naked and Afraid, Dr. Pimple Popper, and My 600-lb Life, and that the CEO’s current imperial edicts show him to be “only good at breaking things.”

Unions?

Not on Magran’s radar… but it’s doubtful that he’s a fan of Nanny Fran.

“The union boom in Roosevelt’s day depended on changes in federal law. Two years ago, the House of Representatives passed a bill to protect union organizing, and President Biden favored it, but it lacked the support in the Senate to pass. Until that changes,” Timester David Leonhardt (above) contends, “strikes like those in Hollywood are likely to remain rare events — and income inequality is likely to remain high.”

The Guardian UK’s Steven Greenhouse disagrees... contending that “(l)abor is increasingly militant after years of inaction, energized by star power from the actors’ and writers’ strikes,” not to mention the Teamsters, the teachers, baristas and other participants in what GUK calls “strike summer”. (July 26, Attachment Nineteen)

(Two days later, the UPS strike was averted as the company increased its offer and the union declared victory in what could be a significant win for the labor movement. In announcing the settlement, Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters’ general president, said: “This contract sets a new standard in the labor movement,” adding that UPS “has put $30bn in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations”.

Maite Tapia, a professor of labor relations at Michigan State, told the GUK: “It’s not just a hot, labor summer – we’re in a protest and strike wave. It’s fascinating and inspiring to see how these workers are leveraging their power against massive corporations.”

“In the wake of the Patco strike, companies saw strikes as opportunities to weaken unions or even break them. That’s not the case today. Today there’s no fear that calling a strike will result in disaster,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a longtime labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“Today there’s a sense that unions are on the offensive,” Lichtenstein continued. “Take the (2023) actors. They say they don’t want just a good contract. They want a transformative contract.”

Still, the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers is now playing the equality cards by saying said it “offered historic pay and residual increases”, adding that the actors’ union, by striking, “has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry”.

“When these actors go on strike, it has a huge impact way beyond their numbers; everyone knows who these people are,” said Lichtenstein. “It’s extraordinarily important when a star like Harrison Ford – 3 or 4 billion people know who he is – says I’m for unions. I back the strike.”

GUK also poked its nose into the economics of streaming, and found that royalty cheques of one cent, no cents... even negative cents!... don’t make sense at a time when the price of everything else is going up. (Stuart Heritage, July 17^th, Attachment Twenty)

Mr. Heritage cites that, like writers having to make ends meet by cleaning apartments and waiting tables, a recent feature in the New Yorker detailed the “miserable compensation” received by cast members on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. Kimiko Glenn, who played Brook Soso, posted a video to Instagram in which she opened a Sag-Aftra foreign-royalty statement and, despite starring on a huge, award-winning series that helped pave the way for the current glut of streaming originals, discovered she had been paid just $27.30 (about £21). Another cast member, Matt McGorry, replied to the post revealing that he had to keep his day job throughout filming, because he couldn’t support himself on his acting salary. A further star, Beth Dover, revealed that, after deducting travel expenses, she lost money on the show.”

At issue here – and what is driving the Sag negotiations – is the lack of residual rates (similar to TV royalties) offered by streaming services. “Previously, a guest star on a series could expect a cut of the money whenever an episode was re-aired anywhere, and this could help sustain them through the leaner times that most actors experience. But streamers such as Netflix don’t re-air episodes because all their content is constantly available to be watched by anyone around the world whenever they want.” So, as the New Yorker reports, Emma Myles can still make hundreds of dollars a year for a few spots on the traditionally broadcast Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but only $20 a year for OITNB, which she worked on for six years.

Other streaming horror stories include payments of $86 for fifty residuals, as well as the one cent and negative sense payments now common.

Of particular interest... not only to the background and bit players but demonstrable Hollywood icons... is the requirement that Sag-Aftra health insurance, requires an actor to earn $26,470 from acting or residuals each year. “It has been claimed that 75% to 90% of members are not able to reach this threshold. Even household names can fall foul of this; two years ago, Sharon Stone lost her union health coverage after earning $13 less than the minimum figure.”

And, with the emergence of AI and scanning technology, “a background performer “will make the equivalent of £142 a day, for insecure, irregular work. But even that is being chipped away at. Sag claims that background artists are now having their likenesses scanned when they sign on for a project, with studios apparently reusing them in other work without consent or compensation.”

One immediate consequence of the strike has been the delay of the Emmy Awards... the first time since the Nine Eleven postponement, according to WashPoster Samantha Chery (Attachment Twenty One, updated July 28, 2023), who added that “(a) person familiar with the delay, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter before an announcement has been made,” told WaPo that the 75th annual ceremony will be pushed back from its originally scheduled air date of Sept. 18. Other sources disagree. “The Los Angeles Times reported that the show has been rescheduled for January, but The Post could not confirm that. Variety previously reported that the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which presents the awards, wanted to push the ceremony to November, while the broadcaster, Fox, preferred a longer delay.

Among this year’s contenders for top awards is the HBO drama “Succession,” about a dysfunctional family of billionaires,” Chery noted, adding that iIts co-star, Brian Cox, raged against studios at a solidarity rally in London last week, saying that low pay and the encroachment of artificial intelligence technology has put actors “at the thin edge of a really horrible wedge.”

And, according to the Hill, (July 27^th, Attachment Twenty Two), California Governor Gavin Newsome has offered himself up as mediator to the parties. Neither side found this worth their trouble.

What are the “lessons from 1960?” To Tom Doherty of the Hollywood Reporter (July 28^th, Attachment Twenty Three), the connecting thread is “the upheaval wrought by a new communications technology. In 1960, the disrupter was TV; today, it’s digital streaming. In both instances, the new revenue source for the producers makes the old terms of service for the talent look like a pact with the devil. Then, as now, the artists seek a bigger slice of the pie, or crumbs really, parceled out in decimal points, from a cash flow unimagined when they signed the original deal. “To the guild[s], this is extra pay for extra use and perfectly proper,” observed the trade weekly Broadcasting in 1960 in an apt summary of the battle lines. To the producers, “this is double pay for the same job and completely improper.

Since 1960, however, the contents of actors’ and creators’ pockets are leaner, the tenor of the times is meaner and the whelps and warbles both sides are voicing about destroying the other as well as themselves, are uncleaner. Back in Reagan’s time, the prospects for an expeditious settlement “were facilitated by an adherence to a set of social norms not yet shattered by social media. Looking back, one is struck by the moderate tone and measured language from the representatives on both sides. John L. Dales, national executive secretary of SAG, criticized the “shortsighted, belligerent attitude” of the producers and chided them for giving the “impression that the guild proposals are new and revolutionary, whereas the truth is that these principles are well established and accepted,” but he didn’t resort to insult.

“Charles S. Boren, the executive vp in charge of industrial relations for the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP), the precursor to the AMPTP, made a point of speaking more in sorrow than anger. “We deeply regret the Screen Actors Guild action in calling a strike, thus imperiling thousands of jobs in the industry as well as the institutions of the industry,” he said, expressing hope that a prompt resumption of negotiations would “preserve the jobs of many innocent bystanders.”

“On April 8, when SAG and the AMPP announced a tentative agreement, SAG president Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston, a member of the SAG negotiating committee, and Columbia vp B.B. Kahane and Boren shook hands for the cameras. The men are beaming, all smiles; you can imagine them all going out for a drink after. Throughout the negotiations, producers weren’t so callous as to publicly wish that the screenwriters be left destitute and homeless; no actor responded with 12-letter epithets,” Doherty recalls.

“Unfortunately, the 2023 strikers confront a wholly new threat — namely, the ghost in the machine that Hollywood itself has been warning us about since 2001: A Space Odyssey, artificial intelligence, which judging by the proposals put on the table by the producers seems to have already achieved singularity in Hollywood. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher was not being a Luddite when she warned that “we’ll all be replaced by machines,” but it might actually be worse than that. Automation can take your job; AI wants your soul. (The AMPTP’s July 21 characterization of its AI proposal was that it favors “a balanced approach based on careful use, not prohibition.”)

In this sense, Doherty contends, the picketers are at the leading edge of “a battle that the ranks of labor — indeed, the entire U.S. body politic — needs to attend to. The fight for a better residual contract is a matter of dollars and cents, a deal can be cut, differences can be split. The right to your own self is non-negotiable, what the Founding Fathers called “unalienable” — meaning a right so fundamental to what it means to be human that it cannot be “alienated” — that is, relinquished or surrendered.

“You can sign away the rights to a single performance or a screenplay, but no matter how desperate for a gig, you cannot sign away your self. “We had faces,” says Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. “We want your faces now — and your voice and body” is what the talent fears the producers are saying. That’s not a bargaining chip; it’s a deal-breaker.”

And, when the studios gain their victory and humans are replaced by machines... whether the cute but clunky 1950s and 60s models like the “Lost In Space” robot or the sleek, sinister 2050 “Terminator” androids... will the audiences stay tuned? (If they’ve had to endure a year or more of mindless game shows and reality ordeals – probably yes,)

In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) wanders through crowded city streets, bumping past sailors and women in red dresses, before learning that they aren’t real people, but instead simulations.

In some future Keanu Reeves movie, Time’s Andrew Chow surmises (July 26^th, Attachment Twenty Four), “it’s possible that everyone around him might be simulated, too. On July 13, Hollywood producers advertised a “groundbreaking AI proposal” involving the “use of digital replicas or…digital alterations of a performance.” The SAG-AFTRA union lambasted the proposal, accusing the studios of simply trying to replace background actors with AI. Studios could scan an actor, pay them for a day, and then simply use AI to insert them into the rest of the film. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers responded that this characterization was inaccurate and that they would “establish a comprehensive set of provisions that require informed consent and fair compensation when a ‘digital replica’” or similar AI technology is used.”

Before AI tools were available, Hollywood artists used CGI—or traditional computer graphics techniques—to change actors’ appearances. Carrie Fisher, who died in 2016, appeared posthumously as Princess Leia in subsequent Star Wars movies thanks to expert VFX teams performing digital wizardry upon archival footage of the late actor. More recently, The Flash contained scenes with Christopher Reeve's Superman, who was depicted via a similar blend of film and technology. 

Studios can already use AI to render scenes of packed nightclubs or sprawling battlegrounds—and do so more cheaply than paying for dozens of actual actors, AI experts say.

But even those AI experts, who believe that AI technology will eventually be a net good for creators and workers in film, believe that replacing background actors with AI is a bad idea.  “That is a great example of a terrible way to use AI in the industry,” says Tye Sheridan, an actor and entrepreneur who co-founded the AI start-up Wonder Dynamics. “We need to come together as a community to know where it poses its threat, and where it can potentially launch the next great artists of our generation.”

Some fringe and indie producers look forward to the day with hope, not dread. Filmmakers around the world have already begun testing the abilities of AI to create on-screen characters, “with eye-popping success,” opines Chow. “It took the Berlin-based director Martin Haerlin about three days to create a now-viral video in which he seamlessly transforms from a wealthy British aristocrat into a talking ape into a female MMA fighter with a snap of his finger. 

Haerlin, who mostly directs commercials and music videos, started playing around with the AI tools Runway and Elevenlabs in the midst of a sharp decrease in advertising budgets this year. Haerlin filmed himself at his house, and then input the footage into Runway, asking the AI to transform him into various historical or sci-fi settings. “This was a revelation for me and an empowerment, because all of a sudden, I could tell stories without the pressure of the crew, of a producer, of being chosen by a client or an advertising agency,” he says.  

And Jahmel Reynolds, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, is currently working on a short film, Helmet City, created entirely in collaboration with AI, which fuses sci-fi and hip-hop aesthetics. 

Actor Tye Sheridan, who starred in the 2018 metaverse sci-fi film Ready Player One, co-founded Wonder Dynamics with Nikola Todorovic in 2017 precisely to aid small-scale filmmakers like Haerlin and Reynolds. Wonder Dynamics’ AI-driven software allows users to film a scene, then replace the on-screen actor with another character, who then mimics the actors’ motions and even facial expressions. 

“The goal of Wonder Dynamics technology, its creators say, is to empower independent sci-fi filmmakers to dream bigger, and to create worlds like Avatar or Ready Player One without needing massive studio budgets,” contends Chow.

In other words, cartoons.

Haerlin says that production companies have already started soliciting him to create AI videos to cut down on costs and the number of actors involved. “They all think AI is like a magic wand; that now there's one person who can replace everything, and can make a video very easily,” he says.  According to Collider, studios have already been using AI technology to render background characters and in April, the Marvel director Joe Russo predicted that AIs will be able to create movies within two years.

And... of Paramount (or Foxy, or Universal or Disnified) importance... cheaply.

Fran Drescher, the SAG-AFTRA president, says that the movie studios want to use AI technology in lieu of paying actors full-time. (On July 21, the studios released a chart refuting this characterization.) The scenario Drescher describes seems not so different from the dystopia depicted in a recent episode of Black Mirror, “Joan is Awful,” in which a streaming service instantaneously creates emotionally manipulative content featuring AI replicas of the actors Salma Hayek and Cate Blanchett. 

“Our livelihood is our likeness—the way we act, the way we speak, the gestures we make, that’s what we’re selling,” Drescher told TIME in an interview. “And that’s what they want to rip off.”  

At this juncture, AI-driven upheaval in film seems inevitable. Haerlin predicts that “many, many jobs will be lost during the next months or years.” But he hopes that actors will be protected—and that analog and AI movies will be able to exist side by side and serve different purposes. “It’s maybe comparable to rugs, “ he says. “You can buy a rug from IKEA that is machine-made. And then you can buy a handmade rug, which is maybe more beautiful and sophisticated, but it's way more expensive.”

Perhaps the economics of aesthetics might result in a revival of cheap grindhouse cinemas, where the unwashed and unmonied masses can slink in, enjoy some stale popcorn and watch some poorly drawn AIctors and cluttering machines perform an AI knockoff of “Taming of the Shrew” for a $3 admission fee ($2 for matinees). The swells and swell cognoscenti among is, on the other hand, can park their butts in patent leather recliners, dine on oysters and champagne and consume real actors portraying real characters, and all for the modest fee of only $125.00 (2023 money, higher later).

Screaming from the wilderness, GUK’s Hamilton Nolan defined the issue in existential terms... not only in terms of actors and writers’ livelihoods, but delineating the souls of consumers worldwide.

“The thousands of strikers are at the frontlines of two key battles: against a future controlled by AI, and against suffocating inequality,” he begins, with a wink and a nod to the climate heat, flooding and smoke from the burning of forests from Canada to Greece. (July 19, Attachment Twenty Five)

“It’s hot. Tempers are short. The whole entertainment industry is out of work and angry and ready to lean into class war. It feels a little scary. It feels a little giddy. It feels like anything might happen this year.

This is good. If there wasn’t a huge fight happening right now, the implications would be much, much worse.

“It can be tempting to demonize Hollywood as the source of all of society’s ills. The right hates them for being decadent limousine liberals undermining traditional values, and the left hates them for being decadent limousine liberals spreading America’s pernicious capitalist myths worldwide. But what is happening right now should be understood as Hollywood’s redemption.”

“Look around,” Nolan pleads. “Do you believe that the divided US government is going to rouse itself to concerted action in time to regulate this technology, which grows more potent by the month? They will not. Do you know, then, the only institutions with the power to enact binding rules about AI that protect working people from being destroyed by a bunch of impenetrable algorithms that can produce stilted, error-filled simulacrums of their work at a fraction of the cost?

“Unions.”

“And that brings us to the second underlying battle here,” Nolan mounts his soapbox and appeals... “the class war itself. When you scrape away the relatively small surface layer of glitz and glamor and wealthy stars, entertainment is just another industry, full of regular people doing regular work. The vast majority of those who write scripts or act in shows (or do carpentry, or catering, or chauffeuring, or the zillion other jobs that Hollywood produces) are not rich and famous. The CEOs that the entertainment unions are negotiating with make hundreds of millions of dollars, while most Sag-Aftra members don’t make the $26,000 a year necessary to qualify for the union’s health insurance plan.

“In this sense, the entertainment industry is just like every other industry operating under America’s rather gruff version of capitalism. If left to their own devices, companies will always try to push labor costs towards zero and executive pay towards infinity.”

“Malarky,” the troglodytes spit (or more likely some epithet more vulgar and threatening. The strike, the actors, the concepts of unionization itself are weaponized in a culture war that... seeing no essential difference between Bob Iger and Fran Drescher, resorts to the old trope: “Kill them all and let God sort out his people.”

God, like Hedda Hopper, doesn’t like fancy-assed Hollywood perverts parading their deviance onscreen, and really despises those who take it to the street.

Not even in New York City!

The New York Post, concurring with Reagan.com (Jan. 3, 2018, Attachment Twenty Six) agreed that former President Ronald Reagan's time in office was motivated by two principles or ideals—freedom and the right to privacy. “These two principles inspired Reagan's approach to organized labor and unions. As unions and the Republican Party have often come to loggerheads, Reagan took a very hard stance against unregulated unions. He ultimately believed that employers deserved the right to define their own business practices. Thus, regulation by the government or by unions could threaten that basic ideal, restricting companies' productivity and contribution to the American dollar.”

The plaudits heaped on Reagan were not out of the ordinary... voters, after all, elected him by a wide margin over incumbent Jimmy Carter, and re-elected him by an ever wider margin over the pathetic Walter Mondale.

Another Post correspondent... that’s the New York Post... deduced that Hollywood “has been its own worst enemy,” (Dan McLaughlin, July 14, Attachment Twenty Eight) asking and answering some troublesome questions and, at least insinuating, that perhaps some writers and actors should be replaced by robots.

“Moviegoers like superhero movies, name-brand franchises and Pixar cartoons?

“Inundate them with so many sequels, of such declining quality, that viewers tune out.

“#MeToo scandals reveal the industry is overrun with sexual predators protected by an insular liberal elite?

“Overcompensate by turning casting and programming decisions into a festival of “representation”-focused identity politics and ham-fisted leftist agitprop.

“If your creative class is churning out content this devoid of creativity and alienating half the audience in the process, you may as well replace them with machines.

“At least, that seems to be the thinking of Hollywood bigwigs, who have pushed the writers and actors to accept a greater role for artificial intelligence.

“Say what you will about AI,” McLaughlin proposes: “It doesn’t grope its co-stars, vanish on coke binges, send ill-advised tweets or promote polarizing political causes.

“Machines work cheap, they’re always in shape, they don’t care about race or gender, they never ask to renegotiate and they don’t have a union.

“If the unions want a role model,” McLaughlin concludes, “they should look to a leader from their past: Ronald Reagan.

“Reagan won in part by dividing his adversaries, cutting a deal first with Universal.

“But he also understood both sides...

“Today’s Hollywood could use more like him.

“But it will need human intelligence, not the artificial kind, to learn that.

And the tenor of the Peanut Gallery reactions to Mister McLaughlin’s take on the actors’ and writers’ strikes, then and now, indicates that something else is at work here (or not working). The issue is not money, it’s cultural.

Detractors of the strikers, their objectives and even their corporate antagonists, dismiss them all with a snarl and a sneer. And most are not studio executives, themselves, nor bankers, nor any of the Hollywood elite... in fact, they’d rather see the whole “entertainment” industry go away except, maybe, for NASCAR and the occasional pertinent remarks on Fox News.

Some of the Post gape nuts gape and gawk at the prospet of not looking at movies or TV... and it doesn’t bother them much, if at all. While a few commentators do express sympathy for all the non-“creative” (i.e. non-ideological working stiffs making scenery, security and snacks for the superstars, many others are just satisfied to see that they’ve gone away... and, hopefully, aren’t coming back.

“Sanitation workers go on strike is a problem,” one contends. “Nurses on strike is a problem, subway train drivers on strike is a problem. Hollywood writers and actors on strike is not a problem. To hear them talk one would think actors and writers are working in coal mines in the 1880s.”

Calculated indifference is one reaction to the striking writers and actors. “Glad I’m not the only one who doesn’t care,” posts another. “Stay on strike, for a very long time.”

That the stars, at least, are overpaid for “work” that is of questionable benefit to this large slice of Americans does, in some cases, draw class and economic distinctions. “Stop conflating,” cries a peanut who might even be a liberal, or at least a moderate. "Woke Hollywood" is mostly comprised of rich studio execs. They're NOT union; they're management.”

Others contend that the country is better off if they forget their dreams of fame and fortune and concentrate on their day jobs... the house cleaners, taxi drivers, because, of course... “Most are more talented as servers waiting tables, which the restaurant industry needs.

“Thankfully many will be back at their real jobs filling that void.”

And a few copy-peanuts chimed in... “Now they just have to act like better waiters,” one advising while another opens the peephole to let partisanship shine in, recalling: “As O'Dumbo said after the '08 crash - some jobs will never come back, so people will have to take on new career training!”

Explicit political content is also paramount (almost universal, seldom foxy). “I hate to see anyone out of work because odds are they are Dems, by the tens of millions, and I pay (not pray) for them.” And hypocrisy becomes an issue to the poster who calls himself “Leftistsarehypocrites” (it being statistical, but not universal practice that the gender scale tips towars masculinity. “It's funny, AI is going to take over actors roles but when outsourcing happens to the average American worker, they don't care. So I simply don't care about them either if they are out of work nobodies anymore. Most are just overpaid leftists who don't do anything useful for society anyway.”

We do have at least one gender exception: a “Mrs. M” advocates tearing down the house. “I pray it will be a permanent break and the end of Hollywood. Hollywood has done enough damage to this country. Enough is enough. I pray this is the end of the end for the entire industry.”

And, aside from the party and the gender gap, generational conflict also comes into play as we have noted before. “The latest generation has no talent and no imagination. They have not brought out anything new in years, everything is a remake and it is much worse than the original. All of Hollywood is living in LALA land and they are ruled by the woke. Can you image running programs like Sanford and Son, All in the Family (and the cranky old fellow goes on and on at the URL above).”

That the movies and television... along with plenty of other things... distract the working class from their daily struggles to meet the rent and feed the family by providing spectacles that keep them docile and supportive of their political, economic and cultural masters is an old, old saw that some of the peanuts resent losing. “There has been no funny stress relieving content in decades,” one laments the demise of the Hollywood shell game. “Woke unoffensive screenplay is not realistic nor funny, therefore it’s unwatchable. Hollywood has destroyed itself. Good! Bye.”

“It is sad, as escaping into a good movie or series helps release stress and pressure from one's mental state at various points throughout life,” a respondent agrees. “However, nowadays, there seems to be more stress and pressure from just watching some of these shows. Time to turn OFF the power button on your screen.”

And then there are the others – those who wallow in the pleasure that promoting stress and hate on some pretext and against some “them”, be it political, cultural or just for the helluvit offers. The nihilists: “Stop(s) Broadway too, I believe, and they can't afford to shutdown with the shows flopping...But Tourists are not exactly filling the spaces either. Let's thank the Illegals, The Addicts the Muggers for this wonderfulness as NYC keeps going down. and all this courtesy of "No Crime" Bragg and "Nightlife" Adams.” And a few personal targets: “Lay down with "Bob" DeNiro and his rancorous "victimless crime is no crime at all" buddies, and wake up with...an hour to get to your kid's funeral. Anything still goes, Bob? Gonna push prosecution, or is drug dealing an act of "economic necessity?" Did the poison come through your open border? Sad.”

And, finally, the great American divide that nobody says they practice, but everyone seems to have something to say about – recommendations to make. “(C)ancel yourselves because you fostered this toxic atmosphere. I hope Hollywood goes bankrupt and crashes into oblivion. Good riddance losers. Go to Zimbabwe and make movies over there and see how much better things are.” Which, of course, leads to the peanut who said of the strike and the clouds about it: “...the best news I've heard out of "Hollywood" since Disney released "Song of the South".

Or, perhaps, “Birth of a Nation.”

But, writing in The Atlantic on the occasion of Reagan’s induction of the Labor Hall of Fame, (November 14, 2011, Attachment Thirty), Wayne Federman (above) sensed “a growing consensus that Reagan was, for better or worse, a significant president. Personally I am convinced that he is vastly underrated, and I have more than seven billion reasons to support my argument, though not a single one of them is related to his eight years as U.S. president.

“Let me explain.” Federman continues.

“In the fall of 2000 I was hired to act in the film Legally Blonde. I portrayed a member of the admissions board that voted to admit Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) into Harvard Law School. I had four lines and my lone scene took just a few hours to shoot.

“Eleven years later, in October 2011, I received a check from the Residuals Department of the Screen Actors Guild for the amount of $48.40. This was just the latest in a series of "Legally Blonde" residual checks that I and the other cast members have regularly received since the film's theatrical release in 2001.

“Reagan joked that he was simply "trying to negotiate for the right to negotiate."

Still a working actor and SAG member, as opposed to an angry MAGA-outlier, Federman acknowledges that film actors who worked primarily in the '30s, '40s, and '50s (including, it should be noted, Ronald Reagan) didn't benefit directly from the 1960 residual agreement. “But, to label the compromise a giveaway is to miss the brilliance of the deal. By convincing the major studios to accept the concept of paying film residuals, Reagan opened the gates to an expanding revenue stream that continues to benefit thousands and thousands of film actors—and their heirs.

At a meeting of the SAG membership in April of 1960 Reagan said, "I think the benefits down through the years to performers will be greater than all the previous contracts we have negotiated, put together." Reagan's prediction was right on the money.

“These days, with the prevalence of cable, DVDs, satellite, Netflix, pay-for-view, rentals, streaming, and downloads, residual payments are now massive. In fact, since SAG first began issuing residual checks, more than $7.4 billion have been distributed directly to actors. Many are middle-class actors like me. Again, this payout is in addition to the original compensation.

“Looking back from the vantage point of 2011, the residual agreement seems altruistic, optimistic, and visionary. One might call it Reagan-esque.

“And, thanks to Reagan and the strike he engineered in 1960, working actors are also eligible for both health insurance and a pension.”

Federman, former head monologue writer for NBC's Late Night Night with Jimmy Fallon as well as an actor and SAG members does say he “has no home” in the Republican Party—I'm pro choice, drug legalization, and gay marriage. But, without mentioning the PATCO strike, he maintains that he still holds “a deep appreciation for the leadership and savvy negotiating skills of the seventh president of the Screen Actors Guild, and fellow actor, Ronald Reagan.”

In Reagan’s era, contends Peter Bart in Deadline (July 20^th, Attachment Thirty One) Hollywood was ruled by a club – one that has since become extinct. “The tech companies now in control haven’t a care or a clue about the entertainment business,” as Barry Diller puts it.

The unions and the studios fought bitterly over residuals in 1960, but the personal enmity was minimal (except in the case of a few older actors whose pre-1960 work was shunted aside for a health insurance deal, and those who worked before 1948… scumped entirely. But, whether out of decency or self-interest, cordiality was usually the rule – even when money was on the table.

The Club, gathered ‘round that table, had grown up together in the industry and “understood the obstacles ahead. Not only was the box office fading but the antitrust crusaders had suddenly decreed that the studios must exit the distribution business.

“At the same time, Hollywood stars were adding a new word to their vocabulary: residuals. It became Reagan’s mission as SAG president to persuade the studios that residuals were now a key to future peace.”

Clubmember Lew Wasserman, Universal’s president, had formerly been Reagan’s agent, so “gentlemanly bargaining” could ensue. “Wasserman could steer residuals to the stars while SAG could reciprocate with important concessions that would help Universal. It was all within club rules.”

And both could benefit… the studios from the new medium of television, Reagan himself from the publicity and contacts that would launch his political career.

The agendas of today’s media companies like Apple, Amazon or even Netflix are “not in sync with those of today’s studio power players”… let alone the talent. “Leaders like Bob Iger or David Zaslav have dropped comments triggering the sort of “class warfare” tensions reminiscent of 1930s, not the 2020s.” And to be fair, Nanny Fran has engaged in a big of the old class warfare rhetoric herself.

Perhaps a “Hollywood Miracle”… a blockbuster hit or a string of Top Guns and Barbenheimers might awaken the combatants to the issues at hand and their importance.

“Hollywood veterans remember vividly the extraordinary impact of Titanic in reversing a major sag in the late ‘90s. Earlier, in the 1960s, surprise indie hits like Midnight Cowboy and The Graduate silenced doubters who’d feared that the 40% defection of filmgoers would be a permanent phenomenon,” Bart recalls, and there would again be plenty of cash to go round.

“So could a few hits once again remind the community of Reagan’s miracles? Another CEO who declines to be quoted believes: “The writers and actors strikes will likely choke off a possible resurgence. The stars will have to sit on the sidelines and the festivals will perish.”

Mutual self-destruction is the way of today, whether in Hollywood or the world beyond.

But wait! asks a crazy person… could the strange circumstances that allowed Ronald Reagan to step up as a hero of labor and settle the 1960 strike be replicated in another bizarre alliance?

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project and publisher of the monopoly-focused newsletter BIG proposes the strangest of strangest alliance in the July 28^th Politico (Attachment Thirty Two).

“One of the more unusual dynamics in American politics,” has popped out of the rabbit hole this year – as both the left, in the form of an actors’ and writers’ strike, and the right, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, are fighting with the giant Disney corporation.

The GOP presidential candidate and the striking Hollywood creatives may not agree on much, Stoller believes, “but both are aggrieved by Disney’s raw use of power, and perhaps the broader dynamic of corporate monopolies in general. If the right and left join forces, they might be able to take on the entertainment behemoth — and even push to break up the company. Doing so may sound like a fantasy, but it would actually mark a return to the kind of market structure that once characterized the industry, while delivering better results for the broader public.”

“Disney is a different firm than it was just a few decades ago, and its change reflects a broader transformation in America. The studio is no longer just Walt’s playground but “imperial” Disney, in the words of film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, a colossus formed after a deregulatory push in the 1990s paved the way for a series of mergers and acquisitions that placed huge amounts of intellectual property — from Lucasfilm to Marvel to Pixar to the Muppets to Fox — in the hands of just one company. It now has roughly a quarter of the nation’s theatrical box office take, despite making fewer films than it used to.

“CEO Bob Iger, who ditched the beloved Mickey Mouse ties his predecessor wore, made it clear in his biography that his strategy wasn’t to do great storytelling, which is what Americans loved about Disney, but to build a portfolio of brands and extend its power into direct distribution to 160 million homes. In addition, it is now a global empire and has to protect its significant investments in China by offering obsequious gestures to the Chinese government.”

As Disney goes, so go the other studios… especially in their hunger for the huge Chinese market for their “by the numbers” stuff.

DeSantis may be a clown and a bigot… paradoxically more free to do the unusual or the unthinkable as his Presidential ambition fades, so, as Disney’s creative energy dissipates with “an endless surfeit of Marvel movies” it becomes less a set of businesses trying to sell products than “a giant financial institution organized around acquiring and maintaining market power.” In other words, the fury directed at the House of Mouse isn’t about Disney, per se; it’s about the end of antitrust enforcement and regulations designed to keep markets open, a shift that’s happened across industries.

As movie studios consolidated power over the film industry, Stoller recalls, “the heirs to these populists broke them up after a fight that ended in a landmark 1948 Supreme Court case, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. After the big three TV networks — NBC, CBS and ABC — gained virtually unfettered control of the market, and began really enriching themselves through their syndication policies, anti-monopolists at the Federal Communication Commission effectively broke them up in 1970.

The right and left disagree on much, but both think Disney is too powerful.

“Despite their mutual suspicions, the right and left will need to work together if they have any hope of securing real change,” Stoller concludes.

“And perhaps there is more in common than we might think. At the end of the day, no one really likes the endless stream of mediocre Marvel and Star Wars movies — except the financiers who prefer controlling markets to great American storytelling.”

Could another Ronald become labor’s latest, unlikeliest hero?

Then again, Bob Iger and his followers are clever, dedicated and he, at least doesn’t care if Americans wholly STOP going to cinemas or even watching television. He can erect virtual Disneylands (how long before they become Igerlands?) and in cahoots with Marvel and a few others, can develop new diversions and programming starring robots or CGI animals or cartoons... whatever works cheaper.

The networks, broadcast, cable streaming, however, will still need programming to induce the sheep to keep paying fees and patronizing their advertisers... the stopgap remedy of reruns and reality shows will grow tiresome, over time... but there IS a way that home marketeers can save money, keep the watchers watching and smoosh the writers, actors (and, what the hell, the little people too) forever. And even win glowing reviews from their pet print, electronic and social apps in the process.

Can you guess what this is? Check out next week’s Lesson! (Unless, of course, breaking news like a nuclear war, climate catastrophe or further Trump indictments occur...)

	Our Lesson: July Twenty Fourth through Thirtieth, 2023
Monday, July 24, 2023 Dow: 34,585.35	Thousands of tourists and resident Greeks evacuated as the wildfires consume the isle of Rhodes and take root in Corfu, nineteen thousands evacuated to Athens (where it’s 118°). TV climate scientist Michael Mann says global warming will linger long after carbon emissions drop to zero and, if they don’t and temperatures rise by 3°C, humanity is doomed. Here, the heat dome spreads north to the previously balmy Great Lakes where its 98° in Minnesota, 100° in Montana and the zome dome migrates east toward D.C. and Gotham. As the strike rolls on, Hollywood’s collateral damage include the craftspeople (not) working on things and stuff from props to costumes to the caterers and, beyond the gate, small businesses who depend on the patronage of the genres. (See above) Israel’s Knesset votes to redlight its judiciary and, in effect, make Bibi Netanyahu (suffering from an “undisclosed illness”) a dictator. Riots ensue. Jews in America take sides.
Tuesday, July 25, 2023 Dow: 34,951.93	It’s National Veterans’ Day. Trevor Reed, the former soldier arrested and detained in Russia and eventually traded for a Russian crook, goes back to Ukraine to get revenge against Putin’s troops. He is wounded in action, sent back to America. President Joe has a good day and it gets better when the Teamsters (representing UPS drivers) and the company reach a settlement. 340,000 stay on the job and the economy averts a multi-billion dollar disaster. Nonetheless, House Speaker K-Mac starts proceedings for having Biden impeached. The reason? No matter, they can do it, so they do it. Bad weather and staffing shortages cause delays and cancellations at airports all acoss America. LabSec Pete Butt tries to reassure Don Jones that everything is hunky dory and the malarkey is of no account.
Wednesday, July 26, 2023 Dow: 35,061.25	Happy birthday to Mick Jagger. He’s 80, twice the age of the career of Madonna who... after 40 years... plans to release a new album. Fathers and sons are in the news: Bronny, son of LeBron James has a cardiac arrest on the (basketball) court and is revived by USC medical staffers. Hunter, the President’s son criminally arrested and in court (legal) to work out a plea deal gets rejected by Trump judge Mariela Norieka, and that prompts KMac to begin to impeach his father (presumably for having raised such a larcenous boy). Don Junior and Eric are behaving, Daddy set to meets with Jack Smith on the One Six. Bad policemen face the People’s Justice: lady officer who parks prowl car on the railroad tracks with a suspect inside and... oops... and another who tases a suspect who falls into the highway and is run over and the K-9 cop who sicced doggie on a surrendering truck driver with a missing mudflap. Bad doggie: White House pooch Commander has bitten either 7 or 10 secret service agents in four months – is he headed to join Major in Delaware exile? In rare bipartisan votes, the Senate passes bills to aid military spouses and (by 95-2) to crack down on debt collectors who prey on soldiers being deployed overseas. (The two military haters are @ and @.) The Fed, as expected, raises interest rates and Chairman Powell says he’ll do it again in September.
Thursday, July 27, 2023 Dow: 35,235.18	It’s National Intern Day... (Bill Clinton among the celebrants) Partisan newsthings line up for or against Hunter Biden... political commentator Dan Abrams says that when it comes to Hunter, “anything can happen.” Senate Leader Mitchy freezes onstage and has to be led away into a cloakroom by colleagues. Djonald UnIndicted (on One Six, at least, not yet) holds “productive” meeting on the insurrection with Smith, who then gets sandbagged with more Docs indictments - which also ensnare the janitor at Mar-a-Lago who disposed of surveillance videos. Singers and celebrities pay tribute to controversial Sinead O’Connor, RIP at 59. Lady Gaga still mourns Tony Bennett, but everybody else going gaga over Barbenheimer after its one-two opening week. Sponse and Re-sponse... asshole on waterboat plow into manatee orgy in Florida to, of course, take a selfie. (It’s mating season for the endangered beasts.) Revenge or not, sea lions attack surfers, swimmers and sunbathers. And, oh yes, record temperatures, flooding, Canada smoke, Sahara dust and heat deaths in Phoenix (up to 25) are all Groundhog Day, over and over again;
Friday, July 28, 2023 Dow: 35,495.29	Special Counsel Jack Smith throws a beanball curveball against Djonald UnReady... hosting an alleged meeting on the One Six charges that goes nowhere, solves nothing and then, while Trump’s back is turned, stabs him with more Mar-a-Lago documents charges. Also named are “body man” Nauta, the head of the Mar-a-Lago janitorial staff and an unidentified Number Four, who turns out to be a ringer, carrying stories and tapes off to Jack containing nuggets of guilt like the underthings responding to orders from The Boss that send them roaming dark tunnels with flashlights, seeking and destroying surveillance tape. Faced with his own legal woes, President Joe (letting SecPress Jean-Pierre carry the weight and the water) intimates that he will not pardon Hunter if the boy has to go to jail, now that his deal has failed. Boy aside, Biden concludes a good week with news that the GDP rises from 2% to 2.4% (wagging tongues crediting a proliferation of Beyonce/Swiftie concerts), $345M in military aid to Taiwan, leaving the GOP and its nemesis, China, both helpless and fuming. The Chinese and Russians go to NoKo where Dictator Kim shows off his newest nukes and they enjoy a parade of goose-stepping soldiers. And it’s still hot.
Saturday, July 29, 2023 Dow: (Closed)	Preliminary campaign finance results show that Djonald UnBrained is splitting his PAC money between the campaign and his lawyers and it’s becoming clearer and clear that the accusations are the campaign as he turns over one victim card after another. But he can’t cash in on his $495 defamation lawsuit against CNN for calling his attempt to fix the 2020 election that “big lie.” Saint Ron, still cutting staff, and the rest of the Republican wannabees are running around in Iowa looking for votes and money, finding little of either. Weary Americans are starting to resign themselves to a squalid rematch of 2020 – as well as to the heat and the high gas prices engendered by sweaty refinery workers on the Gulf off Texas and Louisiana. And this despite the hurricane season stalling. Overseas, the Ukrainians and Russians are swapping missile strikes on civilian, Haitian gangsters are kidnapping Americans and Biden urges the coup leaders in Niger to release President Bazoo. Nearby Kenya volunteers to lead an international contingent to bring law and order back to Port au Prince. Friends, relatives and rockers mourn Eagles’ bassist and “Take It to the Limit” vocalist Randy Meisner.
Sunday, July 30th, 2023 Dow: (Closed)	Preliminary reports show Trump’s campaign has diverted $40M to his legal team... Sunday talkshow talkers say it’s squalid, but probably legal. Wannabee nominees roaming Iowa call Djonald a coward for skipping the first debate next month, he doesn’t care. ABC Roundtable panelist Jonathan Martin (Politico) says that The Donald is sucking all of The Air out of his rivals’ campaigns by dominating the news media. Liberal Donna Brazile says his campaign is no longer about MAGA, it’s about keeping him out of prison while TVlawyer Rikki Klieman says that he faces “tens and tens of years” (later editred to eighty) years in prison if convicted. At least he’ll have Secret Service protection in the Big House. Stumping Iowa, Trump tells his loyal followers that “(the Government) is not indicting me, they’re indicting you!” He also tells his adoring base that if he’s elected, he’ll cut off aide to Kiev and let the Russians take over Ukraine, then Poland and the Baltics, Germany, France, then the U.K. Weatherpeople predict weeks, if not months, of more torrid heat, horrid storms and tornadoes and say that July was the world’s hottest month ever with average temperatures of 62.5° smashing the old record of 61.9°. Cultural warriors prep for 2024. Montana bans drag shows. Arkansas passes a law that will lock up any librarians who speak up about “harmful” books. The lucky Powerball lotto winner has not come forward, and the Mega Millions jackpot swells into the billion plus with no winners. Next draw is Tuesday.
The Don, this week, was more or less of a wash... small gains and losses based, primarily, on things that did not happen (like an extended UPS strike or another Trump indictment). Beginning this Lesson, we are amending our “Terrorism” Index (below) to include war stories.

THE DON JONES INDEX

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

See a further explanation of categories here…

ECONOMIC INDICES (60%)

CATEGORY	VALUE	BASE	RESULTS			SCORE		OUR SOURCES and COMMENTS
INCOME	(24%)	6/17/13 & 1/1/22	LAST	CHANGE	NEXT	LAST WEEK	THIS WEEK
Wages (hrly. Per cap)	9%	1350 points	6/19/23	+0.28%	8/23	1,444.97	1,444.97	https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages   28.83
Median Inc. (yearly)	4%	600	7/24/23	+0.03%	8/7/23	609.48	609.67	http://www.usdebtclock.org/   35,940 951
Unempl. (BLS – in mi)	4%	600	5/8/23	- 2.78%	8/23	633.65	633.65	http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/  3.6
Official (DC – in mi)	2%	300	7/24/23	- 3.59%	8/7/23	266.86	266.86	http://www.usdebtclock.org/      5,967 nc
Unofficl. (DC – in mi)	2%	300	7/24/23	- 0.99%	8/7/23	322.66	325.84	http://www.usdebtclock.org/     9.934 877
Workforce Particip. Number Percent	2%	300	7/24/23	+0.039% +0.02%	8/7/23	305.29	305.35	In 163,374 438 Out 99,864 864 Total: 263,302 http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 62.07
WP % (ycharts)*	1%	150	2/27/23	nc (4 mos.)	8/23	151.19	151.19	https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate 62.60 nc
OUTGO	15%	Biggest jump: used cars
Total Inflation	7%	1050	5/22/23	+0.2%	8/23	985.95	985.95	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.2
Food	2%	300	5/22/23	+0.1%	8/23	277.66	277.66	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.1
Gasoline	2%	300	5/22/23	+1.0%	8/23	255.40	255.40	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm    +1.0
Medical Costs	2%	300	5/22/23	nc	8/23	296.97	296.97	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     nc
Shelter	2%	300	5/22/23	+0.4%	8/23	274.37	274.37	http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.4
WEALTH	6%
Dow Jones Index	2%	300	7/24/23	+0.76%	8/7/23	287.80	289.99	https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/ 35,495.29
Home (Sales) (Valuation)	1% 1%	150 150	5/1/23	-3.26% +3.56%	8/23	130.20 301.09	130.20 301.09	https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics Sales (M):  4.16 Valuations (K):  410.2
Debt (Personal)	2%	300	7/24/23	+0.031%	8/7/23	276.02	275.93	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    73,409 432
NATIONAL	(10%)
Revenue (trilns.)	2%	300	7/24/23	+0.06%	8/7/23	395.80	396.97	debtclock.org/       4,722 725
Expenditures (tr.)	2%	300	7/24/23	+0.14%	8/7/23	327.00	325.53	debtclock.org/       6,286 295
National Debt tr.)	3%	450	7/24/23	+0.27%	8/7/23	413.86	412.71	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    32,610 669 (The debt ceiling... now kicked forward to 1/1/25... had been 31.4)
Aggregate Debt (tr.)	3%	450	7/24/23	+0.19%	8/7/23	397.43	396.68	http://www.usdebtclock.org/    101,396 588
GLOBAL	(5%)							362
Foreign Debt (tr.)	2%	300	7/24/23	- 0.083%	8/7/23	345.29	345.58	http://www.usdebtclock.org/   7,240 234
Exports (in billions)	1%	150	5/22/23	-0.76%	8/23	153.48	153.48	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 247.1
Imports (bl.)	1%	150	5/22/23	+0.315%	8/23	172.26	172.26	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 317.1*
Trade Deficit (bl.)	1%	150	5/22/23	+8.12%	8/23	287.16	287.16	https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/current/index.html 69.0

SOCIAL INDICES (40%)
ACTS of MAN	12%
World Affairs	3%	450	7/24/23	-0.4%	8/7/23	453.51	451.70	Israel pivots towards dictatorship. Military coup in Niger overthrows President Bazoo (sp?) while gangs in Haiti kidnap Americans, prompting evacuation order and Dubai arrests American “influencer”.
War and terrorism	2%	300	7/24/23	+0.3%	8/7/23	290.44	291.31	Taiwan troops and US advisors begin training drills to fight expected Chinese invasion as we gift them with $375M of military hardware. Drones bomb Moscow, Ukes deny responsibility but say “it’s been a good day.” Former Russian hostage Trevor Reed joins Uke army, wounded in action.
Politics	3%	450	7/24/23	-0.2%	8/7/23	479.54	478.58	Polls show Trump far ahead in Iowa and New Hampshire despite (or, to the base, because of) the 4 cases that could send him to prison. Saint Ron purging staff and his motorcade crashes. Mitchy M freezes onstage and has to be led away, prompting appeals to retirement for him and DiFi too. KMac escalates impeachment plans?
Economics	3%	450	7/24/23	+0.5%	8/7/23	428.33	430.47	Mickey D accused of exploiting child employees. UPS and Teamsters settle – economy breathes a sigh of relief. Fed raises interest rates as inflation bounces back... gas prices up due to refinery closing for bad weather. Spotify raises rates – just because it can. Ford and Facebook/Meta profits go up, up, up... (Tranny) Bud and Twitter/X go down, down, down. Congresspeople start wearing sneakers to work – critics say this “youth movement” harms American image.
Crime	1%	150	7/24/23	-0.2%	8/7/23	253.52	253.01	Madman Madden accused of sex crimes with his OB/Gyn patients. Circleville K-9 cop fired for siccing dog on missing mudflapper... K-9 Commander, accused of biting seven (ten?) Secret Service agents perhaps facing exile in Delaware along Biden’s first dog? Ten innocent dogs die in truck with failed air conditioning stuck in traffic jam. Mass gunners shoot 5 in Washington supermarket, 12 in Muncie, Indiana and too many to count in Chicago.
ACTS of GOD	(6%)
Environment/Weather	3%	450	7/24/23	-0.4%	8/7/23	405.54	403.92	Heat wave prolongs record streaks in Phoenix, Miami and El Paso and crawls north... NYC temperatures hit 98°, as Florida ocean temperatures top 100°, killing fish, coral and tourism. Governors ask for FEMA money to fight the heat (shoot it?). Meteorologists predict weeks, if not months, of more torrid temps, horrid storms, floods, tornadoes and avalanches after July sets world’s hottest month record, recording 62.5 ° and smashing old record of 61.9° (including day and nighttime, northern & southern hemisphers, polar and tropical climes).
Disasters	3%	450	7/24/23	-0.1%	8/7/23	435.48	435.04	Filipino ferryboat capsizes, 25 lost. Mother Nature claims American victims: two hikers in the Valley of Fire, a former Obama chef in Martha’s Vineyard paddleboat drowning, heart attacks, skin cancers and concrete burns for people and pets. But Gothamites survive NYC crane collapse with only minor injuries as do North Carolinians after another crane collapse over a busy highway. Family says woman eaten by a bear was “doing what she wanted to do.”
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX			(15%)
Science, Tech, Educ.	4%	600	7/24/23	nc	8/7/23	632.87	632.87	Harvard “legacy admissions” draw opposition from blacktivists and the Dof Ed. Elon Musk called obsessed with “X” as unfortunately monikered Liberty Lobby fights high tech. “So, we’re all X-ing now?” wags ask. Tik Tok joins X/Threads war – mobilizing its Chinese spies.
Equality (econ/social)	4%	600	7/24/23	-0.3%	8/7/23	616.08	614.23	Montana bans drag shows and Arkansas passes law to jail librarians who display “harmful” books. Gov. Abbott (R-Tx) says drownings, dunkin’s, denial of water and razor wire shreddings have reduced illegal migration by 30%
Health	4%	600	7/24/23	+0.5%	8/7/23	470.15	472.50	Researchers say AI isn’t all bad, it might help cure paralysis. Vegetarians hail the Alpha Gal tick-borne virus that creates allergies to red meat. Bronny (son of LeBron James) saved by USC medics after cardiac arrest. Olive oil said to retard dementia. Trader Joe recalls almond cookies when the “almonds” turn out to be rocks.
Freedom and Justice	3%	450	7/24/23	-0.1%	8/7/23	470.58	470.11	Old cold cases keep on truckin’: Gilgo Beach arrestee probed for nationwide killing spree, Carlee Russell admits her kidnapping was a hoax, and media furor escalates after another girl, abducted (maybe) at 14 returns four years later and an 11 year old copycat also fakes it. Hunter Biden plea deal cancelled by Trumpish judge after disclosures he blew nearly 3M payoffs on drugs, so the trial resumes. Pundit Dan Abrams: “When it comes to Hunter, anything can happen.”
MISCELLANEOUS and TRANSIENT INDEX					(7%)
Cultural incidents	3%	450	7/24/23	+0.2%	8/7/23	501.29	502.29	Lionel Messi scores 2 goals for unbeaten Miami while US women tie Netherlands in World Cup rematch. Fred McGriff and Scotty Rolen inducted into MLB hall of fame. Woke pressure-ers pressure Jason Aldean to censor his small town pro MAGA song. Mick Jagger turns 80, “All in the Family” producer Norman Lear 101. Keven Spacey exonerated, going back to work again? RIP controversial singer Sinead O’Connor, Eagles’ vocalist/bassist Randy Meisner
Misc. incidents	4%	450	7/24/23	+0.1%	8/7/23	484.77	485.25	Roman Emperor Nero’s personal theater discovered and dug up. A booking venue for Taylor Swift? (Or Alice Cooper?) Somebody else finds pieces of Beethoven’s skull. Florida asshole on watercraft rams manatees, breaks up their orgies... perhaps in revenge, SoCal seals attack beachgoers and tourists. (Or perhaps mistaking them for sharks?) Great white sharks gather off Cape Cod, not-so-great white skunks in Iowa.

The Don Jones Index for the week of July 24th through July 30th, 2023 was UP 3.00 points

The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan, Administrator. The CNC denies, emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers (including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.

Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com.

ATTACHMENT ONE – From the U.S. Department of Labor

HALL OF HONOR INDUCTEE: RONALD REAGAN

Ronald Reagan (1911 — 2004)

"America depends on the work of labor, and the economy we build should reward and encourage that labor as our hope for the future."

For seven terms, Ronald Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild of America, where he negotiated groundbreaking contracts providing fair payments, health insurance, and pension benefits to members.

As the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan took bold action to increase opportunity for the American workforce. President Reagan expressed his thoughts on the American workforce in his first Inaugural Address when he spoke of workers as "heroes."

Throughout his career, President Reagan worked to expand freedom for Americans and for those living abroad under repressive communist regimes that curbed the right to belong to a free trade union.

President Reagan’s enduring dream was one of Americans living in harmony in a “shining city on a hill.” His legacy is one of hard work, spreading liberty, and principled leadership.

ATTACHMENT TWO – From Reagan.com

RONALD REAGAN’S APPROACH TO UNIONS & ORGANIZED LABOR

JANUARY 03, 2018

Reagan: IN HIS WORDS

Former President Ronald Reagan's time in office was motivated by two principles or ideals—freedom and the right to privacy. These two principles inspired Reagan's approach to organized labor and unions. As unions and the Republican Party have often come to loggerheads, Reagan took a very hard stance against unregulated unions. He ultimately believed that employers deserved the right to define their own business practices. Thus, regulation by the government or by unions could threaten that basic ideal, restricting companies' productivity and contribution to the American dollar.

Background on Reagan's Union and Organized Labor Stance

During Reagan's presidency, organized labor was on the rise as workers mobilized to pursue more active roles in the management of their companies. In some cases, those efforts led to work stoppages and put companies' security at risk as well as workers' livelihoods. As a result, one of the nation's most well-known union crises began during Reagan's presidency.

Shortly after Reagan took the helm of the country, more than 13,000 air-traffic controllers went on strike after the collapse of contract talks between their union and the Federal Aviation Administration. The workers sought higher wages and reduced working hours in a package that totaled more than $770 million. The strike grounded thousands of flights, stranding travelers across the country just as the summer travel season was at its height.

Reagan's Response to Unions and Organized Labor

Reagan ordered the federal workers back to their posts, but they ignored his mandate. In an unprecedented decision, the president fired more than 11,000 of the workers on strike. Non-striking workers were joined by military personnel to man the vacant posts, and air travel was quickly restored.

Reagan's bold pronouncement sent an unparalleled message to the private sector. Businesses gleaned that threats from unionized workers do not need to go unanswered. They can take a hard line on their organizational principles and still be successful. The move also illustrated to unions that their employers have the right to maintain productivity and cohesion, with or without their buy-in.

The president continued to reinforce that message throughout his tenure, demonstrating that while the rights of individual workers are important, the overall bottom line of a company also must be respected. This is a concept that encouraged both competition and workforce development for decades to come.

President Ronald Reagan's tenacity in responding to the crisis is still honored today. During this time, Reagan held firm to his principles of freedom and privacy, the two underlying values that inspired Reagan.com. At Reagan.com, we also believe in personal privacy and security. Join Reagan.com today and sign up for our private email service to communicate in a way that honors Ronald Reagan's conservative principles.

And this, from a dissenting Peanut:

Two gate projects, weakening every laborer’s (electrician, plumber, elevator, iron worker, carpenter, Sheetmetal worker, Concrete worker, Mason, Laborer…) position to negotiate a living wage! Not get rich bankrupting companies that enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship as signatory with Unions. We are a better, safer, & stronger nation thanks to unions. 7 day workweek the weekend! Negotiated on the behalf of ALL laborers union or not - we establish the prevailing wage and pay our dues to do so thankfully, glad to see it benefit Everyone who works for a living, commutes long distances to support the one company they will always work for~ Family. Sisters and Brothers United thank Ron Reagan for the good work he did supporting Union work, we have done well repairing the damage done later by him and are Stronger than ever. Why work in unsafe, unsupported conditions for the federal minimum- alone just you against an entire company? Hoping they don’t get taken over and the pension fund liquidated…support union in everything you do - thank you

ATTACHMENT THREE – From the New York Post

YES, RONALD REAGAN WAS A LABOR HERO

By the Post Editorial Board September 20, 2017 6:49pm

Alex Bastani, a union chief at the federal Labor Department, is upset that the agency is inducting former President Ronald Reagan into its Labor Hall of Fame. He’d be wise to call up the union that nominated him for the honor: the Sergeants Benevolent Association of New York City.

MORE ON:RONALD REAGAN

· Woke Hollywood cuts the nation a break — and cancels itself

· Washington Post CEO Fred Ryan steps down over 'decline in civility' and 'toxic' politics

· How Reagan's California turned blue — and how GOP can take it back

· Ron DeSantis gives America the chance to move on from its punch-drunk stupor

Bastani, the head of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 12, wrote Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to express his “shock and disappointment,” since President Reagan in 1981 famously fired 11,000 air-traffic controllers who’d gone on strike.

Thing is, it was an illegal strike — and one that plainly showed contempt for the safety of the American public.

And Reagan was also the first union member to win the White House. Indeed, as Acosta noted in remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, he “led the Screen Actors Guild during its first three strikes.”

As head of SAG, he won his members “never-before-seen concessions . . . which included residual payments and health and pension benefits.”

And, as US president, “his support for [the union movement] Solidarity in Poland prompted a flourishing of freedom that ultimately led to the collapse of communism.”

The SBA nominated Reagan in part because he was a “turning point” for this country. Darn straight.

ATTACHMENT FOUR – From Town and Country

THE LAST TIME WRITERS AND ACTORS WENT ON STRIKE AT THE SAME TIME, RONALD REAGAN WAS SAG PRESIDENT

Decades before he was the 40th U.S. president, Reagan led the Screen Actors Guild in a five-week strike.

BY EMILY BURACK PUBLISHED: JUL 18, 2023

In a weird twist of history, the last time actors went on strike at the same time as writers, Ronald Reagan led the strike.

Reagan, who was an actor and a Democrat before he was a Republican politician, led the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) from 1947 to 1952. Then, in 1959, as SAG was negotiating with movie studios, he returned to helm the actors' union—and led them in a strike, which was a "double strike" as SAG and the Writer's Guild of America (WGA), the writer's union, were on strike at the same time.

As screenwriter C. Robert Cargill tweeted ahead of the current double strike, "To give you a context of how historic a WGA/SAG strike would be, the last time this happened together not only was Eisenhower still president, but the actors union was lead by noted organizer and socialist, Ronald Reagan."

Reagan returned to lead SAG because he was an "extremely effective leader of SAG in the late '40s," writer and actor Wayne Federman explained to Slate. "At that time, he was considered a liberal Democrat, but by the time he was brought back as SAG president to lead this strike, he had had a political conversion. … I don't think he was a registered Republican at that time, but he was certainly starting to lean that way. The membership liked him. They remembered that he had been this good union leader before, and when he was head of SAG in the early '50s, he helped get residuals for television actors [for reruns]."

Reagan authorized a strike, one that resulted in residual payments for films, among other victories for the union. The eventual deal in 1960 "was overwhelmingly approved by the membership," Iwan Morgan, author of Reagan: American Icon, told The Washington Post. "They were very keen to get back to work and make money." Morgan added, "He was a pretty good negotiator, there's no doubt about it. Reagan would later joke that negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, over arms reduction was nothing in comparison to having to negotiate with the studio heads." Morgan pointed out, however, that Reagan shouldn't have led SAG negotiations because at the time, he was also a producer—a conflict of interest. "There was a feeling from some of the old stars that Reagan had not pushed harder," he said.

Reagan resigned from SAG presidency in June 1960. Six years later, he would run for California governor, and win. By the 1980 presidential election, his union roots were not part of his political platforms. AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said at the time, "Ronald Reagan is no friend of working people. His past record proves that fact, and we must make sure that union members have the facts to match against the glib rhetoric." During his presidency, he was hostile to organized labor, notably firing striking air traffic controllers in 1981, which dealt a serious blow to the American labor movement.

ATTACHMENT FIVE – From CBS News

UNION LEADER AND BUSTER RONALD REAGAN TO BE INDUCTED IN LABOR HALL OF HONOR

AUGUST 24, 2017 / 11:55 PM / AP

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. -- Former President Ronald Reagan, a one-time Hollywood union leader who fired 11,000 air traffic controllers and crushed their union, will be inducted into the Labor Department's Labor Hall of Honor. 

Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta made the announcement Thursday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in Simi Valley, California.

The honor is for Americans who improved working conditions, wages and quality of life for families.

Acosta noted that as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s and '50s, Reagan led the union through three strikes and negotiated health and pension benefits and residual payments for members.

However, as U.S. president in 1981, Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers, banned them from government jobs for life and decertified their union. A new union was only formed years later.

ATTACHMENT SIX – From the California Labor Federation

THE TRUE LEGACY OF RONALD REAGAN

by Caitlin Vega February 7, 2011

Last Friday would have been Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday. I really didn’t want to write about Reagan. I know at this point we are all supposed to say that whether or not we agreed with him, we admired his optimism, his skillful communicating style, and his bold vision. Once considered deeply divisive, Reagan is now showered with bipartisan praise every year on his birthday and who am I to rain on that parade? 

Sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. I was four years old when Reagan was elected. At the age of 10, when my parents got divorced, I had no doubt that Reagan was to blame. I know, it sounds silly. But I grew up in a union family and my parents believed in The Labor Movement (yes, with caps) like it was a religion. The reality is that Reagan’s presidency was devastating for union workers.

It wasn’t just that Ronald Reagan was anti-union. As most people know, he headed up the Screen Actors Guild before getting into politics. But Reagan was instrumental in changing the balance of power between workers and employers, which has directly led to the epic levels of income inequality we see today.

For most, this can be summed up in one word: PATCO. In 1981, almost 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization walked off the job to protest their working conditions.  President Ronald Reagan called the strike illegal and did the unthinkable: he fired all the workers who participated in the strike. When 13,000 people lose their jobs in one fell swoop, workers across the country pay attention. The message was heard loud and clear.

That mass termination marked a new chapter in labor relations in which workers became acutely aware that union activity could cost them thier jobs. The number of major strikes decreased dramatically, from an average of 300 each year in the decades before the PATCO strike to less than 30 per year today. No one underestimates how devastating strikes can be, especially for the workers involved. But strikes are also how most major victories for workers have been won.

PATCO introduced workers and employers to the idea that a strike could result in permanent replacement workers.  It didn't matter how many years a worker had been there or how justified the demands. Once considered “the nuclear option,” permanently replacing striking workers “quickly became standard operation procedure and helped employer after employer either face down strikes or break them.” It is no wonder PATCO had a chilling effect on workers' right to engage in collective action, and led to a major loss of leverage for workers in trying to improve their working conditions and their lives.

It wasn't just that Reagan did what he did to the striking air traffic controllers. What really broke my parents' hearts was that even after what happened to the PATCO workers, even after de-industrialization that destroyed urban America, even after the loss of manfacturing jobs sent overseas, even after the eviceration of the social safety net, Reagan was re-elected in a landslide. 

So maybe it wasn't Reagan who broke them up so much as the American voters.

But what's important about Reagan is not the laundry list of accomplishments or offenses. As historians evaluate his legacy, we see the crucial role he played in creating the world — especially the California — that we live in today. As historian Richard Reeves explained, Reagan changed American politics by “reversing the populist political attitude of one that believed business was the villain to making government the adversary.” 

Today, as we are forced to sit by and watch poor children lose childcare subsidies, the disabled lose home care services, young people lose any hope of going to college, we see Reagan's true legacy. Even as budgets have been passed with deep and painful cuts to people who can least afford it, they have been accompanied by massive corporate tax breaks. 

That's why PATCO mattered. Because without unions, we are a state and a nation of haves and have nots; rich getting richer, poor getting poorer and a vanishing middle class.

ATTACHMENT SEVEN – From the NY Times

GOOD MORNING. WE’RE COVERING THE HOLLYWOOD STRIKES, HEAT IN THE SOUTHWEST AND TAYLOR SWIFT.

By David Leonhardt July 18

From Groucho to Now

To celebrate his first Thanksgiving as president, Franklin Roosevelt traveled to his vacation home in Warm Springs, Ga., in 1933, and he invited a guest to join him: Eddie Cantor, a comedian who was then among Hollywood’s biggest stars.

The invitation wasn’t simply a politician's attempt to associate himself with a celebrity. It also came with a political message. Cantor was one of the founders of a new Hollywood labor union, the Screen Actors Guild, along with James Cagney, Miriam Hopkins, Groucho Marx, Spencer Tracy and others. The previous month, the union’s members had elected Cantor as their president.

The Guild’s formation was part of a surge in union membership in the 1930s. During Roosevelt’s early flurry of legislation, he signed an economic recovery bill that included a provision giving workers a clearer right to join labor unions than they had previously had. Americans responded by signing up for unions by the thousands.

Cantor was a symbol of this right. Hollywood stars were obviously not typical workers, but they were famous. By inviting Cantor to join him for Thanksgiving, Roosevelt reminded Americans of the central role that labor unions played in a healthy capitalist economy. The president was subtly encouraging other workers to consider joining a union at their own workplace.

Rising approval

Ninety years later, Cantor’s union (now known as SAG–AFTRA) is in the news again, after going on strike last week. Its members still are not typical workers, and the strike’s outcome will have little direct effect on most Americans. By comparison, the recent attempts to form unions at Starbucks and Amazon probably matter much more to the future of the U.S. economy.

But Hollywood continues to have symbolic importance. Actors are familiar figures to many Americans. Over the past few days, people have seen these familiar figures — including George Clooney, Rosario Dawson, Mandy Moore, Margot Robbie and Jason Sudeikis — walking picket lines and arguing for fair wages.

“The eyes of the world and particularly the eyes of labor are upon us,” Fran Drescher, the current union president and former star of “The Nanny,” said in a fiery speech last week. “What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor.” The eeyes of labor are upon you!

She added, “I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us!”

The actors’ strike, along with a simultaneous Hollywood writers’ strike, has become one more way in which labor unions are a subject of newfound interest and attention. More than 70 percent of Americans say they approve of labor unions, according to Gallup, up from 54 percent a decade ago. Unions have their highest approval rating since 1965.

This interest in unions is economically rational for many workers. Collective bargaining gives employees leverage that they tend to lack when they negotiate on their own. Unionized workers typically make 10 percent to 20 percent more than similar nonunionized workers, as I’ve explained before. The extra pay often comes out of executive salaries or corporate profits, reducing income inequality in the process.

Still, a surge in unionization resembling that 1930s surge seems unlikely today. Forming new unions remains extremely difficult. Many companies go to extremes to keep out a union, including firing the workers who try to organize one, usually with little legal penalty.

The union boom in Roosevelt’s day depended on changes in federal law. Two years ago, the House of Representatives passed a bill to protect union organizing, and President Biden favored it, but it lacked the support in the Senate to pass. Until that changes, strikes like those in Hollywood are likely to remain rare events — and income inequality is likely to remain high.

More on the strike

• Hollywood’s two traditional sources of income, movie theaters and television, are both broken, Brooks Barnes writes.
• A key issue in the strike: The rise of streaming has allowed studios to write new rules about how actors are paid for old episodes — in a way that gives them less.
• The union also worries that artificial intelligence could automate the work of background actors, The Verge reports.
• Mergers have helped entertainment companies grow much larger in recent years, increasing their leverage over actors and writers, Jennifer Rubin explains in The Washington Post.
• Go back in time: “Actors Threaten Strike in Movies,” The Times reported in 1933.

ATTACHMENT EIGHT – From Insider.com

HOLLYWOOD'S WRITERS AND ACTORS ARE ON STRIKE TOGETHER. THAT'S ONLY HAPPENED ONCE BEFORE, 63 YEARS AGO— HERE'S HOW IT WENT DOWN THEN

The national board for SAG-AFTRA (the Screen Actors' Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) voted on Thursday to order a strike — the first time actors have participated in a work stoppage since 1980. 

SAG-AFTRA's decision to strike after their contract with the AMPTP (American Motion Picture and Television Producers, representing various Hollywood production companies and studios) expired on Wednesday comes as the Writers Guild of America (WGA) continues to withhold labor after calling a strike in early May. 

While the demands of both SAG-AFTRA and WGA are historic (the unions are concerned about wages, residual pay, and rapidly-developing AI technology, among other issues), this isn't the first time the two unions have been on strike together.

Here's what happened the last time SAG and WGA both withheld their labor at the same time —back in 1960. 

Much like the current work stoppage, the WGA went on strike first

The guild went on strike on January 16, 1960. At that time, the writers were also concerned about residual payments. In today's media landscape, residuals tend to be paid out when a writer or actor's work appears on a streaming service. But back in 1960, writers were concerned about their work being shown on television or via television reruns without payment to the creatives behind said projects. 

Several months later, on March 7, 1960, SAG members — led by guild president Ronald Reagan — walked off the job as well. Reagan had reportedly tried to negotiate with producers over residuals for actors, but a lack of progress led Reagan to call for a strike-authorization vote in February. 

Just a few weeks later, the industry's first double strike was underway. 

The strike ended in April 1960 for SAG, and in June for the WGA

According to SAG-AFTRA's website, the work stoppage concluded after the Guild "agreed to forego residual payments on films made prior to 1960," instead receiving residuals for films made starting in 1960 and thereafter. Even though actors didn't end up winning residuals for their prior films, producers agreed to make a one-time payment of $2.25 million to the Guild, which was subsequently used for health insurance and a pension plan. 

The writers ended their strike on June 12, 1960. Per the WGA's website, wins from the 1960 strike included "the first residuals for theatrical motion pictures, paying 1.2% of the license fee when features were licensed to television; an independent pension plan; and a 4% residual for television reruns, domestic and foreign." The WGA was also able to win a pension fund and the right to participate in an "industry health insurance plan." 

As actor and writer Wayne Federman noted in his 2011 Atlantic article about the first SAG strike, some stars, including Mickey Rooney and Bob Hope, criticized Reagan for not holding out for residuals for past films. But Federman pointed out that the SAG's win in 1960 has made it possible for actors to continue receiving residuals for projects — a historic win that's only become more important as streaming services continue to dominate the industry. 

Here’s the SAG/AFRA timeline of the Reagan years:

1946

· Robert Montgomery elected SAG president in September, succeeding George Murphy. Ronald Reagan elected 3rd VP. Reagan will soon impress Guild board with his handling of the CSU strike situation.  Reagan, had been chosen as temporary board replacement for actor Rex Ingram on February 11, and for horror film star Boris Karloff in March.

· Ken Carpenter, nationally-known announcer, based in Los Angeles succeeds Lawrence Tibbett as AFRA national president.

· AFRA Treasurer and Assistant Executive Secretary George Heller succeeds Emily Holt as National Executive Secretary.

· Communism: California Legislature's Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities attempts to prove CSU leader Herb Sorrell is a Communist Party member.

· Communism: March 5: Winston Churchill makes famous "Iron Curtain" speech.

· Background actors/extras Screen Extras Guild Certified by NLRB.

· June 17: SAG issues anti-Communist anti-Fascist statement, originally proposed by President Robert Montgomery, in press release.

· CSU strikes for three days in July.

· CSU strikes resume in September.

· “Conflict-of-Interest,” Diversity: new SAG resolutions proposed at annual meeting September 15. SAG  membership votes in favor of adopting conflict-of-interest bylaw, which will end up reducing the number of stars on the board starting in March 1947: "Whereas, the Screen Actors Guild is about to start negotiations with the producers for a new basic contract, [the 1937 contract was for 10 years, with modifications at intervals] and to forestall any reflections upon the good faith of the Guild negotiators, now therefore be it resolved that no actor or actress who becomes a motion picture producer or director and who, in the judgment of the Board of Directors after a hearing and full examination of the facts, is found to have primarily and continually the interest of an employer, rather than that of an actor, shall hold office in the Screen Actors Guild." Resolution passes 756 to 210. Guild also adopts resolution to use its power to “oppose discrimination against Negroes in the motion picture industry” and set up a committee to meet with the Screen Writers Guild, Screen Directors Guild and Motion Picture Producers Association to establish a policy “presenting Negro characters on the screen in the true relation they bear to American life.”

1947

· Ronald Reagan, Warner Bros movie star and SAG 3rd VP, becomes Screen Actors Guild president at March 10, 1947 SAG board of directors meeting, after resignation of Robert Montgomery. Reagan nominated for presidency by Gene Kelly. Secret ballot vote by the Board of Directors sees Reagan emerge as the choice to replace Montgomery over the two nominees, Kelly and George Murphy. Reagan informed of his election after he arrives at the board meeting from an American Veterans Committee meeting he had been attending.

· Ken Carpenter re-elected AFRA national president.

· Before commencement of the 1947 negotiations, seven of the Guild's most prominent board members also submit their resignations, due to the conflict-of-interest by-law enacted in September of ‘46: James Cagney, Franchot Tone, Dick Powell, Harpo Marx, John Garfield and Dennis O'Keefe.

· Taft-Hartley: Edward G. Robinson and other stars appear on AFL radio show, opposing anti-union aspects of Taft-Hartley law.

· Taft-Hartley passed, over labor’s opposition and President Truman's veto.

· Taft-Hartley: SAG and AFRA officers sign notarized non-Communist affidavits — a requirement of the new Taft-Hartley law.

· HUAC: The latest House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings begin in Washington, D.C. The chairman is New Jersey congressman J. Parnell Thomas, a Republican, and future U.S. President Richard M. Nixon is also a committee member. A year later, Thomas will be indicted on payroll fraud charges, convicted and sent to prison in 1949.

· HUAC/”Hollywood Ten”: SAG 1st Vice President Gene Kelly, Board members Marsha Hunt and Humphrey Bogart, and others fly to HUAC hearings in support of the "Hollywood Ten." Originally dubbed the "Unfriendly 19," the group was whittled down to 10. All of the Ten were current or former members of the American Communist Party: Alvah Bessie (screenwriter, drama critic for New Masses magazine); Herbert Biberman (playwright, screenwriter, director, a founder of the Screen Directors Guild, married to actress Gale Sondergaard. Both were party members); Lester Cole (screenwriter, was running for re-election to executive board of Screen Writers Guild when subpoenaed); Edward Dmytryk (director, Tender Comrade, Murder My Sweet, Crossfire, who withdrew from the party in 1945 after brief membership, married to actress Jean Porter); Ring Lardner, Jr. (screenwriter, son of writer Ring Lardner. Co-wrote Tracy/Hepburn classic Woman of the Year); John Howard Lawson (screenwriter, playwright; former president of Screen Writers Guild, head of Hollywood branch of Communist Party); Albert Maltz (writer, screenwriter, O. Henry Award winner for short stories, contributor to Marxist periodicals); Sam Ornitz (screenwriter, playwright, novelist); Adrian Scott (screenwriter-producer; produced Crossfire and Cornered, both with Dmytryk, and Murder My Sweet). Dalton Trumbo (screenwriter; novelist, Tender Comrade, Johnny Got his Gun; Kitty Foyle; Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes).

· HUAC: SAG President Ronald Reagan and former presidents George Murphy and Robert Montgomery testify before HUAC as "friendly witnesses.” 

· HUAC: Ronald Reagan, acting president since March 10, is elected SAG president on November 16. Within a month his wife, board member Jane Wyman, asks for a separation.

· HUAC: November 24: Hollywood Ten found guilty of contempt of court.

· HUAC/Blacklisting: Studio heads fire Hollywood Ten for refusing to cooperate with HUAC.

1948

· Ronald Reagan re-elected SAG president.

· Clayton “Bud” Collyer, announcer and voice actor including as Clark Kent/Superman in radio’s The Adventures of Superman, elected AFRA national president.

· Television becomes major AFRA and SAG jurisdictional issue

· Communism/Russia: Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia

· Hollywood Studio System: May 3: Death of Hollywood studio system begins as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Paramount Decision orders the major studios to divest themselves of their theater holdings. The decision was the culmination of more than 20 years’ pursuit by the U.S. government to end various monopolistic practices in the motion picture industry. All major film producers and distributors were involved in this antitrust suit, including Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, Universal, 20th Century-Fox, Columbia, United Artists, Loew’s Inc. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) and the American Theatres Association. RKO was the first to agree to divorce its film exhibition business from the production and distribution side, including the selling off of interest in over 200 theatres. Paramount acquiesced in 1949, and the others were forced to follow.

· Studio contract players drop to 463 in 1948, a 37 percent decline

· Communism/Russia: Soviet Union blockades U.S.- controlled West Berlin

· SAG 1948 theatrical agreement with producers includes "stop-gap clause," for negotiations on wage scales and working conditions on films made-for-TV, and eventually on residuals for feature films they may later license for TV broadcast.

· Television: Kenneth Thomson, SAG co-founder and first executive secretary, returns to SAG employment in newly-created position of TV administrator.

1949

· Ronald Reagan re-elected SAG president.

· Bud Collyer re-elected AFRA national president.

· Jurisdiction problem over television will draw edge between SAG and AFRA.

· Merger/TV jurisdiction: Filmed TV jurisdiction becomes major SAG issue, as Screen Actors Guild and Screen Extras Guild decline joining the newly-created Television Authority (TVA) of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America. SAG announces it will organize filmed television on its own. Unions joining TVA are Actors’ Equity, Chorus Equity, AGVA, AGMA – and AFRA. George Heller, AFRA executive secretary, chosen to head the Television Authority (TVA) of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America, December 7.  Heller declares he looks at TVA as “…a dress rehearsal for merger.”

· Communism/Russia: Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.

· SAG membership drops to lowest level since recognition: 6,533

· Communism/China: Communists, led by Mao-Tse-tung, declare victory in mainland China.

1950

· Ronald Reagan re-elected SAG president.

· Knox Manning, voice actor and narrator in film and radio elected AFRA national president.

· TV jurisdiction: SAG and AFTRA’s parent organization, the Associated Actors and Artistes of America adopts resolution vesting ALL TV jurisdiction in its "trusteeship" the Television Authority (TVA)

· Korean War begins as Communist North Korean forces invade South Korea

· Blacklisting: Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio And Television is published in June

· Communism: McCarran Act passed, requiring Communists, and Communist-front organizations to register with the US Attorney General

· Communism: Richard Nixon becomes senator, defeating former actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, accusing her of pro-Communist leanings. He calls her "The Pink Lady." She calls him "Tricky Dick"

· At NLRB hearings in LA, SAG claims right to motion picture TV jurisdiction, stating "...motion picture actors are motion picture actors whether they appear in films for theatres or films for television, and the Guild is the only logical bargaining agent for motion picture actors, no matter where their films may be exhibited."

1951

· Ronald Reagan re-elected SAG president

· Knox Manning re-elected AFRA national president

· HUAC: House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings, chaired by Georgia congressman John S. Wood, a Democrat who succeeded the disgraced J. Parnell Thomas in 1949,  held in Washington, DC

· HUAC/Blacklisting: Gale Sondergaard (wife of "Hollywood Ten" member Herbert Biberman, and first winner of a "Best Supporting Actress" Academy Award) writes SAG Board of Directors requesting support before appearing in front of HUAC on March 21 in Washington, D.C. Larry Parks and Howard DaSilva will appear the same day.

· HUAC/Blacklisting: SAG board member Anne Revere appears before HUAC April 17, resigns Board seat next month

· First commercial color TV program debuts on June 25, from CBS Studio 57 in New York

· Contracts/sound recordings: AFRA negotiates the first Phonograph Recording Code for singers with the major recording labels.

· Alliance of Television Film producers founded (in 1964, will merge with Association of Motion Picture Producers to become the Association of Film and TV Producers).

1952

· Walter Pidgeon, MGM film star, elected SAG President, succeeding Ronald Reagan, who returns as a member of the board of directors.

1953 – 1958

Reagan keep his fingers in the union pie, but concentrates on his own career.

1959

· Former SAG president Ronald Reagan (1947-1952), who has been back on the board of directors since the end of 1952, elected SAG President, succeeding Howard Keel.

· Virginia Payne, radio drama star, elected first female AFTRA national president, succeeding Bud Collyer, becomes first female president of any national entertainment union.

· Residuals: SAG TV residuals increase 33% over 1958

· Governance/firsts: : SAG Board representation becomes national, as Board of Directors is increased from 39 seats to 52, allowing branch representation (New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco) for first time

1960

· Reagan: Ronald Reagan resigns SAG presidency for production interests. George Chandler, prolific TV character actor and SAG treasurer since 1948 succeeds him.

· Virginia Payne re-elected AFTRA national president.

· Contract negotiations: Three SAG contracts expire this year: Theatrical, television, and commercial

· Blacklisting: Exodus director, Otto Preminger publicly announces his script is by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the "Hollywood Ten" and that Trumbo will receive screen credit

· Strikes/Residuals: Third SAG strike called: primary issue is post August 1, 1948 residuals for feature films sold/licensed/released  to TV - small "dissident" group opposes striking

· Strikes/Residuals: SAG theatrical strike March 7-April 18 halts 8 major productions, including Elizabeth Taylor's Butterfield 8, Gina Lollobrigida's Go Naked in the World, Jack Lemmon's The Wackiest Ship in the Army and Marilyn Monroe's Let's Make Love

· Strikes/Residuals:  SAG theatrical strike settlement results in residuals only for films commencing after January 31, 1960, but producers' lump payment of $2.65 million creates the Guild's first Pension and Welfare Plan

· Merger: David L. Cole's recommendations on merging SAG & AFTRA rejected by the SAG board.  Membership votes to back the board’s decision and support an alternative: “positive cooperative action between S.A.G. and AFTRA, including joint negotiations and administration in the fields of TV commercials and taped TV entertainment.” [add AFTRA results]

· Actors' Equity strikes, wins pension plan

· Diversity: at annual meeting, SAG Executive Secretary Jack Dales tells membership about meetings investigating "alleged racial discrimination in hiring practices in the motion picture production industry."

· Contract negotiations/firsts:  SAG and AFTRA conduct first joint negotiations, in Commercials contracts.

1961

· George Chandler re-elected SAG president

· Art Gilmore, announcer and voice actor including radio, TV and movie trailers elected AFTRA national president, succeeding Virginia Payne.

· SAG health plan takes effect Jan. 1

1962 – AFTRA’s 25th Anniversary year

· George Chandler re-elected SAG president

· Art Gilmore re-elected AFTRA national president

· SAG pension plan begins paying benefits starting Jan. 2

1963

· Dana Andrews, film and TV leading man, elected SAG president succeeding George Chandler

· Vicki Vola, voice artist and actress in radio, television and stage becomes AFTRA’s second elected female national president. From 1939-1952 she was nationally known to radio, later TV, audiences from her featured role on crime drama Mr. District Attorney.

· Diversity: SAG attacks discrimination, producers agree to add "American Scene" clause, which reads: "The parties mutually affirm their policy of non-discrimination in the treatment of any actor because of race, creed, color or national origin. In accordance with this policy, the producer will make every effort to cast performers belonging to all groups in all types of roles, having due regard for the requirements of a suitability for the role, so that, for example, the American scene may be portrayed realistically"

· Harry Belafonte, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, SAG  2nd VP Charlton Heston and other SAG and AFTRA members join Dr. Martin Luther King in civil rights March on Washington

· President John F. Kennedy assassinated, Lyndon Johnson assumes presidency.

ATTACHMENT NINE – From The Conversation

How Ronald Reagan led the 1960 actors’ strike – and then became an anti-union president

By Prudence Flowers Published: July 19, 2023 9.37pm EDT

Disclosure statement

Prudence Flowers, Senior Lecturer in US History, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Flinders University, has received funding from the South Australian Department of Human Services. She is a member of the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition.

Production on US film and television sets has ground to a halt as Hollywood actors have joined writers in walking off sets. At issue are residuals (or royalties), streaming services and the use of artificial intelligence.

The last time there was a “double strike” was 1960, when future United States President Ronald Reagan was head of the powerful Screen Actors Guild (SAG).

Reagan made his film debut in 1937. He was a quintessential B-movie star of the Hollywood Golden Age, acting in low-budget “second feature” movies.

Over his career he churned out over 50 films, appearing in Westerns, thrillers, war films and romantic comedies, as well as famously co-starring with a monkey called Bonzo.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Reagan was a self-proclaimed “New Deal Liberal” and a proud supporter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Reagan became a SAG member within a month of moving to Hollywood. In 1941, his then wife Jane Wyman, a member of the union’s board of directors, suggested him for a vacancy on the board.

Reagan was nominated for the SAG presidency by movie star Gene Kelly. He would go on to serve two stints as union head, from 1947–1952 and 1959–1960.

The year he first became SAG president he was part of the Second Red Scare, an anticommunist witch hunt that saw Americans fired, jailed and blacklisted over accusations of communist affiliation.

Hollywood – seen as rife with communist activity – was targeted amid fears it might produce socialist propaganda.

Reagan was fiercely anti-communist. In 1947, he appeared as a “friendly” witness for Congress, blaming industrial unrest and strikes in Hollywood on “subversive” elements.

Classified documents subsequently revealed Reagan was a confidential informant for the FBI. (See more on Attachment Twenty Six, below! - DJI) When he became president of SAG he provided FBI agents with dozens of actor’s files.

Leading the strike

Much like today, in the early 1950s a major issue facing Hollywood actors were residuals. During his first tenure as SAG president, Reagan was lauded within the industry when he helped secure the first residual payments for television actors.

With movie attendance plummeting and films increasingly aired on television, film actors also wanted residuals. They faced strong opposition from the movie studios.

In 1959, after negotiations ground to a halt, Reagan was asked to return as SAG president. He called for a strike in February 1960.

Actors walked off sets in March, joining the Writers Guild of America, which had been on strike since early January 1960. The actors’ strike lasted six weeks, paling in comparison to the 21-week writers’ strike.

Reagan ultimately won an agreement that residuals would be paid to actors for films produced from 1960 48?. He also won a lump sum payment for the union of US$2.65 million, used to create SAG’s first pension and health plan for members.

Reagan was cheered by SAG members when the deal was ratified. It was approved by an overwhelming majority of members, although some Golden Age stars saw it as a betrayal.

Reagan resigned from the SAG presidency two months after the strike concluded. Unbeknown to most in the industry, he had a significant conflict of interest, working as both an actor and a producer.

A shift to the right

While Reagan had been a registered Democrat, over the course of the 1950s his ideological views moved rightward.

He saw no tension between these beliefs and his role leading the 1960 strike, exhibiting the flexible pragmatism scholars later identified with his time in the White House.

In the 1964 presidential election, he campaigned vigorously for Republican Barry Goldwater, a staunch conservative rejected by party moderates.

Goldwater opposed taxation and the social welfare state, voted against the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds, and viewed nuclear weapons as part of tactical warfare. Lyndon Johnson, his opponent, summarised the views of Democrats and many Republicans when he jibed of Goldwater, “In your guts you know he’s nuts”. Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide.

Yet 1964 proved to be the beginning, rather than the end, of the modern American right.

One of Reagan’s televised fundraising speeches for Goldwater, titled A Time for Choosing, catapulted him onto the national stage as the new conservative heir apparent.

Despite having no political experience, Reagan was approached by a group of influential businessmen to run as the Republican candidate for Governor of California. His last acting roles were in 1965.

Reagan’s conservative gubernatorial campaign was sharply critical of the counterculture and student protests, emphasising law and order. He won decisively and served two terms, from 1967–1975.

An anti-union president

From the mid-1970s, Reagan had his eyes firmly set on the White House. He articulated a politics that incorporated economic conservatism, hawkish anticommunism and moral traditionalism, including opposition to legal abortion. He also described “big labor” as a major problem for the US.

Reagan’s polish, charisma and sunny optimism made once politically extreme views palatable and attractive to ordinary Americans.

After a hard fought but failed bid for the Republican nomination in 1976, Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, easily defeating Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter.

After leading the actors’ strike 21 years earlier, in August 1981, in office just six months, Reagan fired 11,500 striking air traffic controllers.

He barred them from working in their old jobs or anywhere in the Federal Aviation Administration for the rest of their lives. His administration also formally decertified their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO).

Reagan’s response to the PATCO strike was unprecedented in the post-World War II period. It had a chilling effect on the fortunes of unions and working conditions, contributing to ongoing wage stagnation and the loss of various forms of leave and entitlements.

Reagan is the only union leader to serve as US President. Paradoxically, he was also one of the most aggressively anti-union presidents of the 20th century.

@A

ATTACHMENT TEN – From The Messenger

SAG STRIKE FLASHBACK: HOW RONALD REAGAN WENT FROM GUILD PRESIDENT TO UNION BUSTER

Though it may sound counter-intuitive due to some later moves, the last time SAG struck alongside the WGA, The Gipper was steering the ship

By Jordan Hoffman Published 07/14/23 03:04 PM ET

It's a weird time in Hollywood right now. SAG-AFTRA and the WGA are on strike against the AMPTP, and while that may read like I just threw an open box of Alpha-Bits at your screen, this is a pretty big deal. 

The last time the performers' and writers' unions picketed simultaneously was in March and April of 1960, when, as is the case with the current action, SAG joined an already striking WGA. A deal was settled between the studios and actors after six weeks. While the writers had to fight on a bit longer, there was a nice stretch of genuine unity between the two guilds. 

A little footnote to this, which sometimes surprises people who aren't too schooled in mid-century American history, is that the President of SAG at the time of the 1960 action would later make a far bigger mark in world affairs. He was an Illinois-born actor who got into politics: Ronald Wilson Reagan. 

That's right, if you are old enough to remember the 1980s, you might recall that some critics scoffed at the concept of "an actor" becoming a president. (Today, we'll gladly take someone who can complete a full sentence! I kid, I kid.)

Read More

· Hollywood Actors Hit the Picket Lines: See Jason Sudeikis, Fran Drescher and More Go On Strike

· SAG-Aftra Negotiating Committee Votes Unanimously to Recommend Actors Strike

· Fran Drescher Slammed for Partying With Kim Kardashian in Italy Amid SAG Talks

· Actors Avoid Strike For Now As SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP Agree to Extend Negotiations

· SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher Was Willing To Strike Over Hollywood’s Covid Vax Mandates: Report

Reagan may never have won any Oscars, but he had a somewhat substantial career. He was a leading man at times, notably in the 1938 military comedy Brother Rat, and if he had a peak year on screen, it was probably 1940. That's when he starred in Knute Rockne, All American, a pretty cheesy football picture in which he played Notre Dame star George Gipp, nicknamed The Gipper. Political writers often referred to Reagan as The Gipper later in his career, which in retrospect is a little odd considering the player's main claim to fame was dying of pneumonia at 25.

Also in 1940, Reagan was fourth billed for the role of George Armstrong Custer in Santa Fe Trail, a historical Western about the abolitionist John Brown (Raymond Massey) that co-starred Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. It's actually a pretty watchable movie, though its depiction of slavery, seen from the viewpoint of 2023, does not make for what you might call a progressive picture. (Historians also hate it for a slew of inaccuracies.)

In 1942 he was part of the large ensemble in the successful melodrama Kings Row with Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings and Claude Rains. It was a bit controversial in its day because the book upon which it was based had all sorts of ribald content, most of which was bleached from the movie. Reagan's final film role of note was in Don Siegel's adaptation of the Hemingway short story The Killers, in which you can see him slapping Angie Dickinson in the face. Not a good look for a future politician! (John Cassavetes at least does the right thing and bops Reagan right after.)

But let's face it: if Ronald Reagan is going to be remembered for his work on film, it is right and just and fair that it should be for the idiotic caper Bedtime for Bonzo, in which the future leader of the free world is tasked with getting a chimpanzee to go to the eff to sleep.

If The Gipper was a nickname, Reagan-boosters used later on, Bonzo (even though he didn't play Bonzo, Bonzo played Bonzo) was one his detractors enjoyed. Case in point, when Joey Ramone (a Jewish-American born Jeffrey Hyman of Queens, New York) saw President Reagan visit a German war cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where many of Hitler's SS were buried in 1985. It inspired the Ramones' tune "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg," which is actually more melancholy than angry. It's something of a beautiful song. 

Anyway, Reagan was the head of SAG from 1947 through 1952, then again from 1959 through 1960. It was Gene Kelly who first nominated him. Nancy Davis (who would later become Nancy Reagan) was a SAG board member from 1950. From 1967 to 1975, he was Governor of California, then he beat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election and moved into the White House for eight years. While in office, he never forgot his Hollywood roots and tried to launch the weirdest expansion of the Star Wars franchise.

Though Reagan wasn't steering SAG's ship during the entire period, the union's website calls the years 1946 through 1960 "among the most vast and complicated" and cites as specifics the "first entirely new contract since 1937; passage of the labor-weakening Taft-Hartley act; the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings and the blacklist era; a severe decline in Hollywood film production, largely caused by both the exploding popularity of television and the 1948 'Paramount decree' which would bring an end to the 'studio system'; the fall of mainland China to communism; the explosion of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union; the Korean War; jurisdictional struggles over television; the MCA waiver; the Guild's first three strikes (1952-53, 1955, and 1960); the first residuals for filmed television programs; first residuals for films sold to television; and the creation of the pension and health plan."

There is a considerable amount of irony to all this. Find someone from the labor movement and say the name "Reagan," and see what happens. The man has many legacies, but for unions, his SAG heyday isn't what comes to mind. It is when, in 1981, he fired over 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers. Not only that, he declared a lifetime ban on rehiring any of the picketing workers. Bill Clinton lifted the ban in 1993. 

But getting back to today's news, the current president of SAG (now SAG-AFTRA, thanks to a merger), Fran Drescher, is already proving to be impressive during this collective action. Here she is giving the AMPTP the what for with music from Twin Peaks backing her up. The way the key changes on the word "changed" is

ATTACHMENT ELEVEN “A” – From JStor

HEDDA HOPPER’S HOLLYWOOD: CELEBRITY GOSSIP AND AMERICAN CONSERVATISM

By Jennifer Frost, Published by NYU Press

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Chapter Summaries…

1 The Making of a Celebrity Gossip (pp. 17-43)

On October 22, 1939, Hedda Hopper broke a story that made the front page of the Los Angeles Timesand her career as a gossip columnist. In an “exclusive” interview with James Roosevelt, eldest son of the sitting president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a producer and executive vice president at Samuel Goldwyn Studios, Hopper confronted “Jimmy” about the state of his marriage. “Is it true,” she asked, “that you and your wife are going to be divorced?” Roosevelt “refused to deny or affirm” the truth of Hopper’s question, giving her the answer, or rather non-answer, she wanted, and her story...

2 Readers, Respondents, and Fans (pp. 45-65)

“My dear Mrs. Hopper,” wrote one of Hedda Hopper’s respondents. “Since I am a reader of your column, one of the few I consider worth reading pertaining to Hollywood, I would like to take some of my time and also some of yours to give you some views my friends and I have reached concerning movies, etc.” She then went on to describe herself. “I am 25 years old, married 9 years, and the mother of 3 children … just an average housewife who used to like to go to the movies.” This letter was characteristic of those d by...

3 Hopper’s Wars (pp. 67-89)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gzpz1.8

In the late 1930s, as a syndicated gossip columnist with a radio show and a growing and eager audience, Hedda Hopper became a national public figure, allowing her to participate in, and pontificate on, the world of politics beyond Hollywood, particularly the politics of war. In the years before the United States entered what came to be called World War II, Hopper fiercely embraced isolationism at a time when her own Republican Party divided on the issue. “Settle our home problems,” she urged in 1939, “and stop trying to run the rest of the world!” Hopper’s stance against intervention can...

4 Cold War Americanism, Hopper Style(pp. 91-111)

“My dear Miss Hopper,” wrote one of her readers in September 1953. “Every morning my husband, who is 90 years of age, and a very young fellow at that, says to me—read me Hopper.” The reader went on to praise Hedda Hopper’s honesty and added, “We like your way of speaking out against subversion and policies detrimental to our form of Government.” “I want to thank you,” she finished, “for being pure grass roots American.”¹ In describing Hopper as a “pure grass roots American,” this reader used exactly the terms Hopper herself would have chosen. She presented herself as...

5 Blacklisting Hollywood “Reds”(pp. 113-137)

In September 1947, Hedda Hopper planned to appear on a radio broadcast to debate the topic “Is There Really a Threat of Communism in Hollywood?” The very next month HUAC would hold its first post–World War II hearings to investigate Communism and subversion in the motion picture industry. These October hearings would feature the “Hollywood Ten” and lead to the establishment of the Hollywood blacklist to ensure that no persons espousing or supporting leftist, or even liberal, political ideas and efforts were employed in the motion picture industry. The months preceding the hearings were part of the “prelude to...

6 Representing Race in the Face of Civil Rights(pp. 139-163)

When Hedda Hopper appeared in the Women for Nixon commercial during the 1950 U.S. Senate race, she not only used the Republican Party’s Red-baiting campaign tactics and advanced the party’s electoral prospects. She also revealed her conservative racial attitudes. In planning for this radio broadcast, Hopper wanted a black actress involved. Until the 1930s, the majority of African Americans able to exercise their voting rights—mostly those who lived in the North—cast their ballots for Hopper’s Republican Party. By the 1950s, however, most enfranchised African Americans fell into the Democratic column, making Hopper’s task more difficult. She first asked...

7 “Family Togetherness” in Fifties Hollywood(pp. 165-189)

On December 12, 1949, Hedda Hopper was notably scooped by Louella Parsons, who announced that Ingrid Bergman was pregnant and by a man, Italian director Roberto Rossellini, who was not her husband. “I spent the day of the announcement rubbing egg off my face,” Hopper recalled, “because six months before I’d interviewed Bergman at the scene of the crime.” She had traveled to Rome, where Bergman and Rossellini were living while making Stromboli (1950), to confront Bergman about newspaper reports of a pregnancy. Bergman denied them. “Hedda, look at me. Do I look like I was going to have a...

8 Taking on “Hollywood Babylon”(pp. 191-217)

In January 1962, the filming of 20th Century-Fox’s costlyCleopatra(1963) resumed in Rome, with scenes of Elizabeth Taylor as “the temptress-queen” and Richard Burton as the Roman general Marc Antony together for the first time. Their tumultuous affair soon began and became known to the production crew, their respective spouses (Eddie Fisher and Sybil Burton), the international press, and the wider public. “The rumors are flying again,” Hedda Hopper reported in March. “Heigh-ho!”¹ Once again, she and her readers expressed strong opinions about the latest Hollywood sex scandal. They had little sympathy for the cuckolded Fisher—“When you leave...

Conclusion: Movies, Politics, and Narratives of Nostalgia (pp. 219-224)

The scene opened onto an ornate, overstuffed bedroom in disarray with Hedda Hopper, in her mid-sixties, hatted and gloved, seated on an unmade bed, speaking rapidly into a white telephone on the nightstand. “Times City Desk? Hedda Hopper speaking. I’m talking from the bedroom of Norma Desmond. Don’t bother with a rewrite man, take it direct. Ready?—As day breaks over the murder house, Norma Desmond, famed star of yesteryear, is in a state of complete mental shock.” The film was director-writer Billy Wilder’s “pessimistic and bitter”Sunset Boulevard (1950), and the actress played herself, a movie gossip columnist determined...

ATTACHMENT ELEVEN “B” – From People’s World

REAGAN AND TRUMP, TWO PEAS IN A UNION-BUSTING POD

April 4, 2023 10:37 AM CDT  BY BERRY CRAIG

The old saying “many a truth is spoken in jest” reminds me of a sign in a Paducah union hall from 1980: “A union member voting for Ronald Reagan is like a chicken voting for Col. Sanders.”

The same goes for Donald Trump, who despite his indictment, looks like the favorite to win next year’s GOP presidential nod. (Trump says he’s still running despite the indictment and predicts “potential death & destruction” in the wake of his being charged with paying hush money to adult film star Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a. Stormy Daniels. He is facing at least three more investigations.)

Elected almost 43 years ago, Reagan was the most anti-union president since Herbert Hoover. Trump was the most anti-union president since Reagan. Yet Republicans Reagan and Trump claimed to be champions of everyday working folks.

Reagan was a con artist who talked blue collar but walked corporate. So is Trump. They differ only in style: Reagan came off as the affable “morning in America” guy; Trump is a snarling, foul-mouthed bigot. Reagan preferred the “dog whistle” in pandering to prejudice; Trump is partial to the bullhorn.

The late AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called out Trump for proving to be just another union-buster in the White House. “Broken promises are bad enough,” The New York Times quoted Trumka.

“But President Trump has also used his office to actively hurt working people. He has joined with corporations and their political allies to undermine the right of workers to bargain collectively. He has taken money out of our pockets and made our workplace less safe. He has divided our country, abandoned our values, and given cover to racism and other forms of bigotry.”

Trump didn’t lie just to workers. He lied about anything or anybody any time it suited him. He made at least 30,573 false or misleading claims while he was president, according to a Washington Post tally. Evidently, no American president lied more bigly than Trump.

His biggest lie is still the one where he claims Joe Biden and the Democrats cheated him out of a second term. But the whopper that he’s pro-union comes in a close second.

Trump loves “right to work”

If you pack a union card like I do, you know that “right-to-work” laws are some of the oldest union-busting tools around. (Unions, for good reason, call them “right to work for less” laws.)

But on the campaign trail in 2016, Trump said he was “100 percent” for “right to work.”

In right-to-work states like Kentucky, all hourly workers in a unionized workplace can enjoy union-won wages and benefits without joining the union or paying the union a fee to represent them to management. (Under federal law, if a worksite has a union, the union must equally represent all hourly workers.)

Reagan smashed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers union (PATCO) during his first year in office, a move that “was the first huge offensive in a war that corporate America has been waging on this country’s middle class ever since,” Jon Schwarz wrote in The Intercept.

While Trump avoided the draft and military service during the Vietnam War, he volunteered for the corporate war against working people. Like Reagan, he turned the U.S. Labor Department into the anti-labor department. Both presidents nominated labor secretaries who had proved their hostility to unions.

The National Labor Relations Board is supposed to protect workers’ rights to unionize. Reagan and Trump packed the panel with pro-business and anti-union appointees. (Click here to read a Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA!) report on Trump’s NLRB. The report includes a list of “50 Reasons the Trump Administration is Bad for Workers.”)

“Trump appointed fast food executive and union critic Andrew Puzder and [later] Eugene Scalia to be secretary of labor,” said Kirk Gillenwaters, a United Auto Workers Local 862 retiree and president of the Kentucky branch of the Alliance for Retired Americans. “Scalia [the son of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia] was a union avoidance attorney who had made a living fighting labor regulations and workers trying to organize.”

Added Gillenwaters: “Trump personally attacked USW Local 1999 President Chuck Jones when Jones called Trump a liar over jobs to be saved at his Indiana plant.”

Gillenwaters was a delegate to the 2017 Kentucky State AFL-CIO convention in Lexington where Jones, who headed the union at a Carrier HVAC plant in Indianapolis, was a featured speaker.

“There are few better examples of how much of a snake oil salesman Donald Trump is than the latest news of even more layoffs at Carrier,” Oliver Willis wrote in The American Independent on Nov. 9, 2017.

“The company just announced that over 200 employees will lose their jobs at the Indianapolis plant in January. That follows Carrier’s decision earlier in the year to fire 300 workers at the same facility.”

Explained Willis: “Carrier has been able to do this because Trump and then-Gov. Mike Pence put together a $7 million bribe to the company.

“Before being sworn in to the presidency and vice presidency, the two put together a sweetheart deal of tax cuts to induce Carrier to keep jobs in Indiana, where Pence was governor. After negotiating the deal, Trump patted himself on the back and claimed he had saved jobs that would be shipped overseas.

“But Trump and Pence did not secure any agreement that would require Carrier to keep those jobs. Instead, they negotiated away revenue from the people of Indiana in exchange for a few days of headlines. The mainstream press unfortunately played along with Trump’s game, and Carrier has now shown how much it played Trump and Pence for absolute suckers.

“The entire deal, playing out over the first year of Trump’s presidency, has been a microcosm of his fraudulent approach to governing.”

Jones told the convention that all along he doubted Trump’s promise to bring outsourced jobs home and to keep other jobs stateside. But he conceded that Trump’s pledge “resonated with a lot of working people.”

He recalled that on the campaign trail, Trump never said, “‘I’m going to bring my business back in this country’ or ‘I’m going to bring my daughter’s business back in this country’…I thought he was full of shit at the time, and…times went on to prove [that] without a doubt he is.” (Click here.)

In a Nov. 29, 2017, Washington Post op-ed article, Jones wrote that “Beyond Indiana, workers across the country feel like they too are victims of a false Trumpian bargain, in which they were invited to trade their votes to keep their jobs. In fact, according to new research conducted by Good Jobs Nation, more than 91,000 jobs have been sent overseas since Trump was elected, the highest rate of jobs lost to outsourcing in five years.”

The truth about Trump and unions

For more on Trump’s anti-union record click here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for proof. And here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

ATTACHMENT TWELVE – From Slate

HOLLYWOOD IS GOING ON A DUAL STRIKE FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1960. YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHO LED THE LAST ONE.

Ironically, you have Ronald Reagan to thank for SAG-AFTRA actors’ welfare.

BY NADIRA GOFFE JULY 14, 2023 3:11 PM

On Thursday, the Screen Actors Guild, or SAG-AFTRA, announced that it would join its sister union, the Writers Guild of America—who have already been on the picket line for more than 10 weeks—in a full-out strike. This news, which is the result of weeks of attempted bargaining with streaming services for better residual payments and protections against prospects like outsourcing work to artificial intelligence, marks the first time both unions have struck simultaneously since 1960. The last time both unions went on strike, SAG in particular was led by an unlikely familiar figure: Ronald Reagan. Writer, actor, and comedian Wayne Federman wrote a piece for the Atlantic in 2011 titled “What Reagan Did for Hollywood,” in which he details the unprecedented advancements that Reagan helped secure for workers in Hollywood before going on the path to become one of the most emphatically conservative presidents in contemporary American history. I called Federman to discuss the significance of the 1960 strike and its relation to the state of Hollywood today. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Nadira Goffe: What were the circumstances that led to the 1960 SAG strike?

Wayne Federman: So the SAG strike was about one issue, and that issue was motion pictures made by the studios that were now being played on television. That started around 1948. [The union] kept wanting to talk about this issue, and [the studios] kept kicking the can down the road, year after year, negotiation after negotiation. So, eventually, the membership of SAG were like, We have to deal with this issue. It was very, very, very contentious. And they brought back Ronald Reagan, who had been president of SAG from 1947 to 1952, to lead the union. He had a TV show, he had been host of General Electric Theater, and his movie career had kind of waned a little bit, but he was very respected by the membership, and they brought him sort of out of retirement to lead this strike. So he got elected again.

Why did they invite him back? What was so special about him?

Because he was an extremely effective leader of SAG in the late ’40s. At that time, he was considered a liberal Democrat, but by the time he was brought back as SAG president to lead this strike, he had had a political conversion. … I don’t think he was a registered Republican at that time, but he was certainly starting to lean that way. The membership liked him. They remembered that he had been this good union leader before, and when he was head of SAG in the early ’50s, he helped get residuals for television actors [for reruns].

But here’s a little thing: Nancy, his wife, did not want him to take this job, because now you’re going up against the people that can hire you. You’re the face of the industry, of these actors, and now you have to go up against the heads of Warner Brothers and MGM and all of the major studios. But he eventually said yes, and as soon as the strike was resolved, he didn’t even finish out the term. I believe he resigned after the strike was successfully negotiated.

What were the main union ideas behind the 1960 strike? 

Let’s say you get hired to act in a film. Basically, the person hiring you is taking the risk. They’re paying you your salary, and in return, they own that product. So, what SAG was saying was, You can play that film anywhere in the world, you can play it in Italy, you can have it dubbed—but when you put it on television, that’s a new revenue stream. Also, the argument was that that is taking work away from other actors. Because if you have this movie on, that time slot is no longer available for working actors.

On the other side, the head of 20^th Century Fox [Spyros Skouras], his argument was very simple: Why should I pay you twice for the same job? I’ve already paid you for this job. I own this at this point. And that was basically the position of all of these studio owners. At the beginning of the strike, they were like, We’re not even going to talk about residuals. It’s a nonstarter. And Reagan said, We’re “trying to negotiate for the right to negotiate.” That’s how far apart they were. It was so foreign to these guys that they would have to share their revenues with actors after they’d already paid the actors. Ultimately, one studio, Universal Pictures—believe it or not, the head of Universal, a guy named Lew Wasserman, used to be Ronald Reagan’s agent—was the first domino that dropped. I think Lew Wasserman thought it was inevitable anyway: If it wasn’t going to happen in 1960, it might happen in ’65. And then one after another [gave in], until, I think, the 20^th Century guy was the last guy, who was like, All right, I’ll give it, I’ll pay you again for something I’ve already paid you for, through clenched teeth.

As weird as it may sound now, in the old days, you could only see Paramount movies in Paramount theaters [due to vertical integration]. At that time, the studios were in a big fight with television. There was a big Supreme Court ruling called the Paramount Decree, where the studios had to give up distribution [control] of their movies. And that cost them. And then people started staying home and watching television, like I Love Lucy, and so the movie industry was hemorrhaging money. There were some studios that wouldn’t even show a television set in people’s homes. It was a real battle because they were losing so much money because television was exciting and new. So they were like, Oh my God, this is one place where we might be able to make some money. And now you’re asking us to give you a percentage of it. 

What is the importance of residuals? As you said, actors had already gotten paid.

This was kind of a new idea—that, if we take these movies and put them in this new medium, there’s a new revenue stream outside of box office gross. There was no such thing as movies on television when the industry started. There was no television. The idea of residuals started on radio, believe it or not. They would do a broadcast on the East Coast and then do another one for the West Coast, and they would get paid for both of those broadcasts. And then at one point they were like, We’re just going to tape the East Coast broadcast and then play it again for the West Coast. And that was really the start of, Well, can you pay us because we’re actually doing this again? So the idea was: Let’s see if we can get part of this revenue stream for our actors, because in a way, we’re now competing against ourselves.

And, essentially, even though it’s prerecorded and just put on a different medium, it’s technically multiple performances.

Right. And you’re also taking work away from actors who could be using that time slot, who could be hired to do an episode of Gunsmoke or The Fugitive, or something like that. Again, the residuals were so small at the time, but this was a paradigm shift in Hollywood.

What about residuals for films made before the strike in 1960?

TV really starts kicking in 1948; by 1956, they’re playing [movies like] The Wizard of Oz on television. That’s a big MGM musical. … It’s not one of these B Westerns that Republic Pictures made, or something like that. So, there are more A pictures making their way onto television. And so [the studios are] thinking, In the age of television, what do we do for all of these movies that were made between 1948 and 1960? They decide, All right, instead of residuals for any of those movies made between 1948 and 1960, we’re going to give you a few million dollars to start. This is the first health fund for actors, which is where I get my health insurance and pension. It was seed money [for] benefits for your workers. And so that’s how the pension and welfare started for SAG. … Now it’s got to be well over $10 billion, probably. I don’t even know the amount of money that’s been sent to actors who work in movies that get played on television, based on that 1960 strike.

And so there are no residuals for any movie made before 1960. There were people who worked in the ’30s and ’40s, like Mickey Rooney and Bob Hope, who were upset at this. They were like, Why do we strike? I thought I’d get residuals for Road to Morocco or whatever. In a way, Reagan was selfless because most of the movies he made were in pre-residual times.

What you’re essentially telling me is that Ronald Reagan decides to take up this liberal cause and basically secures residuals and welfare for the future of Hollywood actors. And then, very shortly afterward, registers as a Republican. Where he then becomes, well, the Ronald Reagan. 

That is correct.

What are the circumstances leading to this current SAG strike and how do they differ from or resemble the circumstances in 1960?

For this strike, before we even negotiated, we already had strike authorization from the membership. In 1960, they didn’t. The 1960 strike was really about one issue, and this strike is about multiple issues. This is about how residuals, specifically for streaming entertainment, are being calculated. Those numbers are … not really released. It’s not like a Nielsen rating. Sometimes you’ll hear something like, Oh, 1.2 million minutes of Squid Game—what does that mean? Does that mean that many people watched one minute of it, or does that mean people watched it a number of times, or … ? I don’t know why it’s all proprietary for these streamers, but that’s just where we’re at. We want a little more transparency in that, [to consider] that if we’re on a hit show, is that paid differently than a [nonhit] show? And then there’s this A.I. situation.

You said that the studios were sort of giving up these residuals through clenched teeth. Do you think that their position on that has changed?

That’s the amazing outcome of what Ronald Reagan—and other negotiators at the time—was able to do: In a way, they were changing the paradigm of how Hollywood money is divided up. They were striking for an idea: that we deserve this for A, B, C, and D reasons. You get residuals now. Not everyone; editors don’t get residuals, but directors do. I get residuals for streaming services, but they’re just not the same. They’re not as good as cable, and they’re not as good as network. When you look at the check, you’re like, OK, this doesn’t seem like a lot. But, again, you don’t know how many people are watching it.

And also, I think when we first started looking at streaming services, we were like, We want these services to thrive so that there’ll be more work for actors. So I think that’s why we were not militant about residuals for these new platforms. No one is saying, Oh, we paid you to be on this Netflix show, and we never have to pay you a residual. The problem is that it’s not as hearty as it used to be for these other mediums. But the idea of residuals … is not going away, unless [the companies] decide to try to break the unions and just use nonunion actors and not pay residuals.

This time around, do you think the WGA strike has influenced this SAG strike?

Well, I think it did. This is just one person’s opinion. But the Directors Guild of America settled with the producers, and I think that the Writers Guild felt like, Oh, that was really kind of a leverage point for us, that we would maybe be in this together. Even though legally you’re not allowed to be in it together, but wink, wink, we’re in this together. I think the actors were aware of it, and they were like, We have your back a little bit. Again, it’s a separate negotiation, and there should be a bright line. But in my opinion, being out here, I feel like the Writers Guild was hoping, OK, now we have more leverage, obviously. We have a little more power. And there’s going to be more pain inflicted. The Emmy Awards might be postponed—as an actor, you’re not allowed to promote your movie that you’ve already done.

How are you feeling? You’re in both unions.

Yes. How am I feeling? Well, mixed is how I’m feeling, to tell you the truth. Most of my friends are like, Eff those guys, look at how much so-and-so makes, these faceless internet oligarchs that own all the content, eff those guys, let them feel a little pain. That’s kind of what a lot of my peer group is like. But I’m a little more like, “We’re in this together. Does it have to get to this, where there’s a work stoppage?” I’m super sympathetic to people who aren’t in the union that rely on film production to make their living—caterers and all of those people. I feel terrible for them. I go on the line sometimes, and it’s a little bit of a party atmosphere—there’s music playing, and they do karaoke, and we get free food thanks to Drew Carey. So I’m mixed. No one’s asked me that. Thank you.

It’s complicated. If it were easy, people would be doing it all the time.

It’s a complicated issue. It’s like Reagan. It’s complicated.

USE@a

ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – From Variety

THE SAG-WGA DOUBLE STRIKE OF 1960: HOW TONY CURTIS, JANET LEIGH, RONALD REAGAN, DESI ARNAZ AND MORE GUIDED HOLLYWOOD BACK TO WORK

By Cynthia Littleton

Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis held a packed union meeting at their Beverly Hills home. Desi Arnaz poured his heart out in an open letter to the industry while Lew Wasserman worked the numbers quietly behind the scenes. And it was none other than future Oval Office occupant Ronald Reagan who led the Screen Actors Guild through the war in 1960, the last time that Hollywood experienced such a season of labor strife with actors and the Writers Guild of America on strike at the same time.

And it was already a tumultuous time for the industry. In 1959, Congress and the Justice Department were deep into their investigation of “payola” corruption involving music labels and radio station owners. Congress also held hearings that year on the notorious TV quiz show scandals (see 1994’s “Quiz Show” for a primer).

For Hollywood, the “Mad Men” era began with strike fever. Coverage of the brewing labor conflicts played out in the pages of Hollywood-based Daily Variety and the New York-based weekly Variety as contract expiration deadlines approached for SAG, AFTRA and WGA in January 1960. Then and now, the rituals around the collective bargaining process are remarkably the same.

Each union developed contract demands, created strike funds, held member meetings and floated trial balloons in order to rally around key deal-breaker issues. And verbal sparring ensued. Studio leaders pointed to the high failure rate of movies amid a changing marketplace. Page one stories in the last two issues of Daily Variety for 1959 set the tone for the coming year.

Spyros Skouras, 20th Century Fox president, vowed to wage “a struggle to the death” over the actors and writers demands in an interview published in the Dec. 30, 1959, edition. He even suggested that Fox might fold its tent in the U.S. for a while and work in Europe if Hollywood was hit with a prolonged work stoppage.

From the Dec. 30, 1959, edition of Daily Variety

The following day, Michael Franklin, executive secretary of the WGA West, shot back with an interview that drew the banner headline on the New Year’s Eve edition: “WGA to Skouras: Join ‘Struggle.’ “ Franklin’s message to management was: Take some responsibility and come to the table yourself if you want to avoid a work stoppage.

“When subordinates are doing the actual negotiating and their superiors are not involved, it becomes easy for the superior to say ‘Tell ‘em no,’ but if the company presidents were to sit down across the table from us and become aware of the problems and issues involved the results could be more fruitful,” Franklin said.

One big difference in the creative community then and now was that the collective bargaining process was far more diffuse. SAG and the WGA both negotiated separate contracts for film work and for TV work, with separate bargaining agencies for the studios. Broadly speaking, the Association of Motion Picture Producers represented the largest studios and production groups for film-related contracts. The Alliance of Television Film Producers handled duties for small-screen deals. That’s a sharp contrast to the past 40-odd years, when virtually all Hollywood union contracts flow through the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

Adding to the confusion in filmdom, unions were more likely back then to negotiate deals with individual studios and production companies, or in some cases clusters of small and medium-sized producers that banded together to negotiate as a unit. United Artists in this era served as a distributor and bargaining agent clearinghouse for numerous indie producers, hence references in Variety stories to “the UA indies.” All of that made it harder for industry insiders to keep tabs on the state of work stoppages and contract talks at any given time. While contracts that run in three-year durations are the industry standard these days, 60-odd years ago the time span of pacts seemed to range from three to six years.

When all was said and done in 1960, SAG waged a four-week walkout against major film producers (Universal was a big exception) from early March to early April. TV work was not affected.

The WGA strike began Jan. 17, 1960, against most of the major studios and large production companies. It ran for 155 days on the TV side and 147 days on the film side. Picket lines and other public demonstrations had been a factor in Hollywood’s intense strikes and labor conflicts in the 1940s, but there wasn’t much in the way of picket activity for writers and actors in 1960.

Going into talks that began on Jan. 4, 1960, SAG was clear on its two main contract priorities for its members, which then numbered about 14,000; (today, SAG-AFTRA represents more than 160,000 performers).

The union wanted to establish a pension and health fund commensurate with plans the WGA and Directors Guild of America secured in contract battles throughout the 1950s as the television industry emerged. SAG was also laser-focused on “the post-’48” — or its demand for a cut of the revenue that studios were raking in by licensing rights to movies made after 1948 to television networks. At first Hollywood studios balked at the notion of licensing their top-flight recent movies for television broadcast. But by the late 1950s the money on the table was too big to ignore for studios that were struggling. In one way or another, Hollywood’s major unions all had “post-’48” battles.

As SAG and the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP) got into what Variety called “bare-knuckle, shirtsleeve negotiations,” the industry was riveted when superstar couple Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh (mom and dad to Jamie Lee Curtis, who was about 14 months old at the time) decided to open their Beverly Hills home to an informational meeting for nervous actors.

The meeting was called by “Miss Leigh,” Daily Variety reported in the banner story of its Feb. 11, 1960, edition, because as Curtis told our reporter, “We felt there had not been enough explanation by the guild of the details of the negotiations” and that actors want more specifics on “what we are striking for.”

For SAG, the meeting was a triumph. “Actors Meeting Backs SAG 100%” was the banner on the Feb. 18, 1960, edition. Reagan and Jack Dales, the legendary SAG national executive secretary, solidified the A-listers’ support over the course of two hours and 15 minutes with a tough crowd of 100 stars including John Wayne, Debbie Reynolds, Shirley MacLaine, Glenn Ford and Dana Andrews. None other than David Niven served as chair of the meeting. Journalists were invited into the Curtis-Leigh home but were not allowed to attend the meeting itself. Per the reportage of “Just for Variety” columnist Army Archerd, Curtis popped into the reporters’ holding pen periodically to give updates a la “Lions-39, Christians-37.” Archerd also had the dish that Jack Lemmon got the time wrong and showed up just as the meeting ended. Beverly Hills police were summoned to help direct traffic around the evening gathering. Curtis and Leigh shelled out for what were described as “parking boys” to handle the cars. “It’s our contribution to the strike fund,” Curtis quipped.

Charlton Heston and James Garner were among the notable stars on SAG’s negotiating committee. SAG and the AMPP held bargaining sessions on and off during the strike, and ultimately came to an agreement without too much outside squabbling. However, the studios played hardball and used the force majeure card early on to shutter select films, even before the WGA and SAG strikes were formally called.

In the end, the studios held the line on SAG’s demand that actors be paid 2% of the revenue received from post-1948 film sales to TV. But SAG achieved every other major contract demand, including a royalty payment system for TV licensing revenue for films produced after Jan. 31, 1960. It also secured studio money for the formal establishment of its pension and health fund. SAG’s victory came just as the WGA and DGA opened the doors for members to join their hard-fought P&H benefits plan on March 31, 1960.

From the March 7, 1960, edition of Daily Variety

For SAG, the studios committed to contributing an extra 5% of all film and TV salaries into the health and pension fund. Plus, in something of an exchange for not getting a cut of the post-1948 movie revenue windfall, the studios kicked in another $2.6 million in total payments in recognition of seasoned actors’ “past service” to the industry.

Reagan was cheered at a SAG membership meeting at the Hollywood Palladium on April 18, 1960, where the pact was formally ratified by SAG members. At the event he no doubt honed the political skills that would lead him to become governor of California just six years later, followed by two terms as U.S. president in the 1980s. Reagan explained the union’s capitulation on the post-’48 revenue fight at the Palladium meeting. He did so in blunt terms that were not kind to SAG’s industry sibling IATSE.

From the April 19, 1960, edition of Daily Variety

“When one guild [IATSE] asks for double what everyone else gets, even though they admitted they had no right, we knew that to continue that demand would mean disaster for some producing companies. So, with an eye on the health of the industry, we gave up the demand,” Reagan said, as Daily Variety reported on April 19, 1960. (Two months later, Reagan would resign from his post as SAG president to avoid conflict of interest concerns after he signed a deal to produce TV shows.)

After the actors settled, the WGA stayed in battle mode on multiple fronts for about eight more weeks. The WGA’s negotiations were complicated by the fact that guild members, the WGA negotiating committee and the WGA board were at odds, and that dysfunction led to the guild to reject not one but two settlement agreements with producers. By May, Lew Wasserman, the savvy talent agent turned movie mogul of MCA/Universal fame, was working behind the scenes to find an alternative path for compensating screenwriters for the TV revenue flowing in to studios. WGA negotiating committee member Donn Mullally presented Wasserman’s complicated proposal to members as “the greatest step forward in the history of writing in Hollywood,” as reported in the May 20, 1960, edition of Daily Variety.

From the Feb. 19, 1960, edition of Daily Variety

Still, by month’s end the WGA and both bargaining entities – the AMPP and Alliance of Television Film Producers – were back to trading barbs. After a dispute over a deal term definition at the 11th-hour, producers hastily broke off talks and withdrew their latest offer entirely. Producers accused the guild of duplicity; the WGA countered that the sudden nixing of the offer was a “propaganda move” to unsettle its membership.

“The Guild as always stands ready to negotiate at the bargaining table. If the producers feel a genuine concern for this industry and for the other crafts and unions affected by this strike they will abandon these childish attempts to manipulate the Writers Guild of America membership and will come back to the bargaining table like responsible and grown up men,” the WGA said in a statement, as reported in the May 27, 1960, edition of Daily Variety.

On June 1, 1960, a heartfelt plea to both sides for movement came from producer Desi Arnaz, the co-star of “I Love Lucy” who also headed the prosperous Desilu production banner. In an open letter to writers and producers published in Daily Variety, Arnaz urged the sides to find a way forward for the greater good. The hugely successful Cuban bandleader and actor turned producer and entrepreneur made suggestions for how to get to the finish line on a deal, and he offered to host talks in the bucolic environment of his farm in Corona, Calif.

From the June 1, 1960, edition of Daily Variety

“We must find the ‘key’ and find it fast because the danger of a deadlock increases with the length of time spent in trying to break it, and with the increasing number of people becoming involved with it,” Arnaz wrote in the letter that began “Amigos.”

Arnaz’s words seemed to help grease the wheels toward the inevitable settlement. For film writers, a wrinkle that came up late in the strike was the union’s insistence that the studios restore screenwriter contracts that were suspended during the strike. Warner Bros. was the last holdout, drawing the line at reinstating its pact with Karl Tunberg, a veteran screenwriter. (It was eventually restored.)

As of June 13, 1960, scribes were free to resume work for 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia and Disney, among other shops. The WGA had already reached deals with Universal International and the UA indies in February.

A week after the film writers settled, a six-year TV contract came in for a landing with ratification by the membership. The deal encompassed minimum hikes and other gains including a commitment to assemble a “fact-finding committee” to develop formulas to allow “writers to participate in worldwide grosses,” aka international revenue, as Daily Variety reported in its June 20, 1960, edition.

A WGA spokesman brought the curtain down on a long period of chaos for the scribe tribe by hailing the significance of the deal after nearly six months of sacrifice by WGA members.

The pact that ended the strike “marks a milestone in the history of labor-management relationships. Responsible persons on both sides working toward the perpetuation of our industry, have worked out a formula beneficial to both sides; one whose concept is designed to increase revenues for writers and production companies, above and beyond present levels,” the spokesman said.

History would prove him right.

(Pictured top: Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Desi Arnaz, Ronald Reagan and Lew Wasserman)

ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – From Wonkette

BUT HOW IS RONALD REAGAN TO BLAME FOR ACTORS STRIKE? WE'RE GLAD YOU ASKED!

Fran Drescher, the flashy girl from Flushing, is killing it.

ROBYN PENNACCHIA JUL 14, 2023

At noon Pacific (3 p.m. Eastern) today, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) will be officially on strike, after negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) for a fair contract fell through.

This is the first time both actors and film and television writers from the Writers Guild of America have been on strike at the same time since the writer's strike of 1960, and the first time that SAG-AFTRA has gone on strike since 1980, so it's a pretty big deal. It's not something the union takes lightly, given how many people's livelihoods are impacted by it.

She Had Style, She Had Flair, She Was There!

SAG-AFTRA President (and fashion icon) Fran Drescher gave an incredible speech on Thursday, explaining the reasons for the union going on strike and blasting the greed of studio CEOs. "They plead poverty — that they're losing money left and right — while giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs," she said.
She was careful to be clear that the people who suffer the most from the current system are not the big time celebrities but the everyday working actors who are just trying to pay their rent.

Drescher explained that the whole business model has changed and that the compensation structure for workers must therefore change along with it.

"The entire business model has changed, by digital, streaming, AI," she said, adding that this affects all workers and not just actors, because "We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines." This line was rudely snarked on by conservative publications like The Daily Mail , which came out with the headline "SAG union president Fran Drescher says she fears striking actors could be replaced by ROBOTS ," except ... that it's true.

Indeed, in a speech of his own, the union's chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland talked about the "groundbreaking AI proposal" the film and television producers had given on Wednesday: that they should be able to pay background actors for one day of work, scan their bodies, and use their likenesses in movies and television shows forever. Because Black Mirror's "Joan is Awful" is a documentary now.

In a later interview on MSNBC, Drescher explained that it was ridiculous to expect people to be "satisfied with incremental changes from a contract that was forged in 1960 and it no longer applies, it's a completely different game."

And it was not a very good contract to begin with.

But How Is This Ronald Reagan's Fault?

Glad you asked!

So, one of the things people always say about Ronald Reagan is "Before he was a conservative, he was a union leader!" — and that's true, but he was not a particularly good union leader. In 1951, during his first term as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, he negotiated a crappy deal in which actors would forfeit residuals from films made before 1948 in exchange for mere negotiations on residuals on films made going forward. At the time, movies were just starting to be shown on TV and actors felt, rightly, that they deserved compensation for this. Those negotiations lasted until 1960, until his next term as SAG president, when actors (and writers at the time) went on strike in hopes of pushing the heads of the seven major studios at the time to come to a fair deal.

That strike lasted for about six weeks, with Reagan eventually coming to another very bad deal for the actors — they would forfeit residuals not only from before 1948, but also from before 1960 in exchange for residuals going forward and the studios contributing $2.65 million to the Guild's first Pension and Welfare Plan, which was about half of what they were asking for.

This crap negotiation was the crux of a 1981 lawsuit filed by Mickey Rooney against eight studios on behalf of himself and other actors ( including Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, Glenn Ford, Lana Turner, Van Johnson, Dana Andrews, Jane Powell, Shelley Winters, Barbara Stanwyck) who felt they deserved compensation for the movies they made before 1960. (Side note: This is interesting because he was deeply shitty to Lana Turner .) The suit was thrown out a year later, which was pretty unfortunate for a whole lot of actors who hadn't been as big as those stars and also had to watch as other people made piles of money off of their old films (including in commercials).

“What I’m angry about and will always be angry about is the terrible blow actors were dealt when our supposed union negotiated our rights away from receiving monetary compensation for all the work done before 1960. Why didn’t the union protect us? Ted Turner gets the money and the performers get an actors’ home to get sick and die in.” — Mickey Rooney, to Drama-Logue

I love Turner Classic Movies and am glad it isn't going away (so far), but these crap negotiations very definitely allowed Ted Turner to make piles of money off of people's work without properly compensating them.

The Guild would go on strike again in 1980, as Reagan was running for actual president, to demand residuals for home video and cable, which they did get under the same terms as the initial 1960 contract.

This Isn't Just About Actors And Celebrities

As Drescher repeatedly explained, this is about all workers who are in danger of losing their jobs to AI and related technologies, because if labor contracts do not keep up with the times, everyone (except the very rich) gets screwed. It would be lovely if we could all benefit from new labor-saving technologies, but our economic system is not set up that way. Labor-saving technologies only benefit those whose income is based on profiting off of the labor of others.

Now, things like acting and writing are a bit of a different animal entirely, because in those cases we're talking about careers that people want for reasons beyond just supporting themselves. The idea of watching or reading something created by AI leaves us all a little cold for that reason. It's not just about getting information or being entertained, it's about the human creativity involved in those things.

However, let's be real — for the most part, people have jobs because they need to survive. Jobs can't go away or be swallowed up by machines, because if we don't pay people to do them, then those people can't eat or pay rent. Those people don't get to benefit from labor-saving technology. It would make more sense for fewer people to work if we have something like a Universal Basic Income — or to cut down on hours but figure out a way to pay people the same. It would be incredible to figure out a way for all of us to benefit from technologies that allow us all to work less and enjoy life more, but this is the United States of America and, let's be real, it'll be a while before people are going to go for that. Work isn't so much about what we need as a society, but something to which we attach personal morality and value. It is how you prove "I am a good enough person to deserve to eat, live somewhere, and have health care."

We are also a celebrity-obsessed culture, so the SAG-AFTRA union taking a stand is something that is going to have a much wider impact than just on how much actors get in residuals. Not only will it prevent the normalization of replacing people with technology, but it will demonstrate the power of a union and hopefully inspire people from other industries to unionize as well.

@use A

ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN – From the Hollywood Reporter

THE LAST TIME ACTORS AND WRITERS BOTH WENT ON STRIKE: HOW HOLLYWOOD ENDED THE 1960 CRISIS

As in 2023, a key issue for both the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild then was residuals — artists wanted a bigger cut of the feature films that had been sold to TV along with health benefits and better working conditions.  

BY THOMAS DOHERTY JULY 18, 2023 6:45AM

In 1960, the crumbling infrastructure of the Hollywood studio system was shaken by a one-two strike launched by two essential branches of its workforce — the writers and the actors. Since neither job description was yet considered on the cusp of obsolescence, management was forced to negotiate with labor and reach an accommodation. Both sides had incentives to make a deal that shared the wealth and kept the shop floor running. In the end — and this might be the sad difference between 1960 and 2023 — they saw each other as collaborators rather than mortal enemies.  

SAG-AFTRA Strike: What Actors Can Still Work on Without Violating Union Rules

The reason for the “double strike” by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild was, of course, television, the technological menace that had transformed the business but not the fine print in the employment contracts. Both sets of artists wanted a bigger cut of the post-1948 feature films that had been sold to TV and a solid deal for profit sharing in the future. Health benefits and working conditions were also on the table.  

The key issue for both guilds was residuals — that is, payment fees for work done and recycled on film and over the airwaves. The root word implies “left over,” but by 1960, residuals were looking like the main course. Even more than the libraries of feature films on the auction block, the syndication of filmed sitcoms like I Love Lucy, The Danny Thomas Show and Father Knows Best was already generating millions of dollars in revenue for the producer-owners; the creators and performers wanted a fair share of the windfall.

(Since you ask: the history of residuals in the entertainment industry dates to the beginning the age of mechanical reproduction, with the introduction of the phonograph being an inflection point. From about 1910 onward, singers received royalties based on record sales. Radio and juke boxes complicated the rewards structure, but the American Federation of Musicians — probably the most feared of all performer unions, known for its hardball tactics — was ready to do battle with what it called “the mechanical monsters.” As early as 1932, it had obtained residual deals for the recorded work of singers and musicians broadcast over the airwaves. With the onset of television, an eventuality not foreseen in the original contracts of the artists who created and appeared in the feature films, serials and shorts that made up so much of the content of the medium in the late 1940s and ’50s, calculating payments got even more complex. Unless artists had been smart enough to negotiate a profit-sharing arrangement back in the day, they were usually shut out from additional revenue down the line. No fools, Abbott and Costello had secured a share of profits for the theatrical reissues and TV rights of their Universal films and cleaned up. By contrast, The Three Stooges got not a dime from their Columbia shorts, made in the 1930s, which were broadcast in saturation rotation in virtually every TV market in America.)

WGA and SAG sought a residual formula that would give standardization and certainty to creators and performers. The talent, a spokesman for the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists said in 1960, is “entitled to get a portion of all this money that is floating around. It is as simple as that. Where would everybody be without talent?“

The WGA threw down the gauntlet first. On Jan. 16, 1960, citing “a consistently uncompromising attitude on the part of producers,” WGA president Curtis Kenyon, a former screenwriter now toiling in television, called a “two-pronged” strike against both film and television production. Among the demands: residuals “in perpetuity” and not merely for six reruns; a cut of the profit stream from foreign distribution; and more equitable working practices, particularly involving concerning speculative or “spec” writing.  

Having stashed away a backlog of scripts, the producers figured they could bide time and wait out the writers. Thirty-nine scripts for The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis were already locked and the show remained in production.

Actors were a more visible and valuable commodity. “The walkout of the Writers Guild over the weekend does not worry the producers, but a strike of the actors because of the refusal of the studios to meet their demands would be a death blow to the business,” noted Billy Wilkerson, editor-publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, usually no friend of labor.

The actors had a formidable fighter in their corner in the person of SAG president Ronald Reagan, the former Warner Bros. star who had downsized into television and, since 1953, had served as host of CBS’ anthology series General Electric Theater. As SAG’s leader from 1947-52, when Hollywood found itself in the crosshairs of the postwar anticommunist crusade, Reagan had successfully steered the guild through its most treacherous period. In 1947, he had eloquently defended the patriotism of the motion picture industry before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, receiving some of the best reviews of his career. Today, Reagan’s actions during the blacklist era have become more controversial (heck, everything about the era is), especially his role as an off-the-books FBI informant and his participation in “clearance” procedures, whereby actors accused of ideological malfeasance would have to explain or recant before a star chamber of industry apparatchiks. Yet his peers thought enough of Reagan to draft him in 1959 for an unprecedented sixth term as SAG president. Anticipating the upcoming battle with the studios, they wanted a trusted and experienced player on the field to represent their interests. “Ronald Reagan is playing his greatest part to the least applause,” was the line going around town.

SAG proceeded carefully. On the night of Feb. 17, 1960, at the home of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, 100 members met to authorize a strike, figuring that a threatened work stoppage would put them in a better bargaining position.

Yet the Association of Motion Picture Producers, represented by executive vice president Charles Boren, refused to budge on the actors’ demands. “No payment twice for the same job,” as Variety’s Bob Chandler characterized their position. “Nothing at all, they said, and we won’t discuss it.”

On March 7, SAG called the strike. Offstage, a tense series of contract negotiations ensued immediately. At Reagan’s side, doing the heavy lifting was John L. Dales, the savvy counsel and executive secretary for SAG. Dales was the hands-on detail man who checked the contract language line by line. Unlike the strike by the WGA, which targeted both film and television production, the SAG strike was aimed at film production alone. Work on eight features — including The Wackiest Ship in the Army and Butterfield 8 — screeched to a halt.  

· The decision to strike was not universally popular with the SAG rank and file. “Actors are not morally justified in striking and causing backlot workers to be laid off,” said actor Glenn Ford, speaking for a group of 40 dissidents. “If it weren’t for the guys in the crews, we wouldn’t be actors.” Tony Curtis, getting in touch with his Bronx roots, shot back: “If Glenn Ford feels our union didn’t do a good job, let him join the butchers’ union.”

Leave it to gossip columnist and SAG member Hedda Hopper (who made frequent cameo appearances in film and TV as herself) to resurrect the specter of Hollywood past. “Isn’t it coincidental that at a time when some of the more liberal producers are hiring Communist writers that this strike came up?” she said. Hopper was referring to the recent announcements by producer-director Otto Preminger and producer-star Kirk Douglas that screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, the most notorious member of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, was to be hired under his own name for Exodus (1961) and Spartacus (1960), respectively. In terms of reading the room, she could not have been more wrong. The writers and actors had no thought of smashing the capitalist machine; they just wanted a bigger slice of the pie.  

On the night of April 4, in the middle of the strike negotiations, both sides paused to attend the 32nd Academy Awards at the Pantages. Reagan had hoped to surprise the audience with an announcement that the strike had been settled, but negotiations remained at an impasse. The MC for the evening, of course, was Bob Hope, hosting the Oscars with the ninth time. “Welcome to Hollywood’s most glamorous strike meeting,” he said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when Ronald Reagan was the only actor working.” 

Hope received a huge ovation when, to his surprise, he was presented with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. “I don’t know what to say,” he said, genuinely moved. Then he delivered a line that must have pleased the WGA: “I haven’t writers for this kind of work.” (Indulge me with one more Hope wisecrack, a line that may now seem prophetic. Introducing the five nominated songs, he said, “We wish to announce we pay for all the sheet music, buy all our own records, and none of the young ladies has been technically augmented.”)

On April 8, SAG and the Association of Motion Picture Producers came to terms. The guild dropped the demands for residuals on 1948-60 films and accepted instead a huge payment to the SAG pension fund. For films made after 1960, however, actors would receive a percentage of receipts, minus deductions for distribution expenses. Producer contributions to the guild’s health and welfare funds were also increased. Reagan, even then tax-averse, pointed out that the pension payments, unlike residuals, were tax free, whereas residuals were taxable as gross income.

Asked how he felt at the end of negotiations, Reagan said, “Very happy.” Boren of the AMPP agreed. “Very happy indeed.” (There’s a coda here: in 1981, in one of the defining acts of his presidency, Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers, who were striking in defiance of a court order. He reminded Americans that he was a union man who had led the Screen Actors Guild out on strike — a legal strike.)

On April 18, 1960, at a mass meeting at the Hollywood Palladium, more than 2,000 members voted overwhelmingly to affirm the deal. One of the few voices raised in opposition came from Hopper, still red baiting and shilling for the producers. She was hissed down by the crowd.

SAG and the producers then issued a kiss-and-make up joint statement: the agreement “is fair and equitable and will lead to stable labor-management relations in the industry.” Before the ink was dry, producer Jerry Wald had resumed production on Let’s Make Love.

With the actors back at work, the writers had less leverage. “You actors are now running the business,” admitted a depressed screenwriter to a SAG colleague. WGA leaders figured the best strategy was to use the SAG settlement as a model. Unlike SAG, however, expert negotiators were not at the table for the writers and the talks stalled. Consensus opinion in the trade press asserted that WGA was “being injured by the worst public relations program in the history of management disputes, and that amateur negotiators, no matter how hard they work, are lambs among wolves at the negotiating table.”

Not until WGA sent in its own wolf, Evelyn Burkey, executive secretary of its East Coast branch, did the writers close the deal — first with the Alliance of Television Film Producers and the Association of Motion Picture Producers (June 19) and then with the three major networks (June 25).

The WGA agreement set forth a formula for residuals tied to worldwide grosses: in addition to the original paycheck, 40 percent of same will be spread over five domestic reruns with 4 percent of the absolute gross paid out in perpetuity. Both sides agreed that the negotiation “marks a milestone in the history of labor-management relationships,” assuring “the perpetuation of our industry” and “increased revenues” for all concerned. Once all the smoke had cleared, THR columnist Mike Connolly expressed the prevailing sentiment around town. “Thank God it’s over,” he said. “Let’s go to work.”

ATTACHMENT SIXTEEN – From L.A. First

WITH REAGAN AS UNION PRESIDENT, ACTORS WALKED OFF JOB IN 1960. HOW THAT STRIKE FORESHADOWS WHAT'S GOING ON NOW

By Hadley Meares Published Jul 20, 2023 5:01 AM

The battle has been brewing for years. Massive technological advances have completely changed the rules of the game in the entertainment industry. And the losers are the creatives — the actors and writers who make Hollywood products come alive.

Sound familiar? While the scenario above accurately describes the atmosphere that has caused SAG to join the WGA in striking during this long, hot summer of 2023, 63 years ago a dual strike was called for very similar reasons.

During the rise of television in the 1950s, film studios began making an enormous amount of money licensing their movie catalogues to TV stations. While the studios made millions off these deals, actors and writers received nothing.

Throughout the decade, the Screen Actors Guild was unsuccessful in attempts to get their actors residual benefits for their work. According to actor and historian Wayne Federman, by 1959, negotiations with Hollywood producers had become so contentious that actor and future California governor Ronald Reagan (who had already served as SAG leader from 1947-1952) was convinced to run for leadership again, despite the reservations of his wife, Nancy.

Reagan is reelected and studios play hardball

Reagan was reelected at a particularly tense time. Both the actors and producers were thoroughly entrenched on their opposing sides. In an attempt to scare actors, the studios leaked that they had a backlog of 135 unreleased films to tide them over during a strike.

“Spyros Skouras, head of 20th Century-Fox and the major producers’ representative in negotiations, cried real tears when he explained to…the actors on the negotiating committee that payments of residuals would bankrupt the studios,” writes David F. Prindle in The Politics of Glamour: Ideology and Democracy in the Screen Actors Guild.

SAG was also fighting for a health and pension plan like that of other Hollywood unions. But the producers would not budge. The WGA found themselves at a similar impasse. The writers’ union went on strike on Jan. 17, 1960. A month later, 83% of SAG members gave their leaders permission to strike “if necessary.”

On Feb. 23, a SAG strike was officially called, with all motion picture actors ordered to stop working at 12:01 a.m. on March 7.

“The dreaded eventuality that the industry hoped to avert, a strike call by Screen Actors Guild, materialized yesterday,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “throwing not only Hollywood but also the exhibition field at large into something of a panic.”

Motion pictures already in production scrambled. On location in New York the cast and crew of Murder, Inc., starring Peter Falk, May Britt and Morey Amsterdam, worked nights and over the weekend in an attempt to finish production before the March 7 deadline.

A star-studded union meeting

On March 14, around 3,000 actors including Bette Davis, James Cagney, Dana Andrews, James Garner, Myrna Loy, Esther Williams, Ernest Borgnine, John Wayne, Van Heflin, and Edward G. Robinson met to discuss the ongoing strike. The Los Angeles Times reported:

“What was probably the most star-studded union meeting in history convened last night at the Hollywood Palladium as Screen Actors Guild members discussed their strike against major film studios. A standing vote of confidence was given to the strike. The motion was made by actor Warner Anderson and seconded by Cornel Wilde.”

The meeting was presided over by Reagan, who was elated by the actors’ overwhelming support for the strike.

“The motion from the floor endorses the negotiating committees’ position and it was particularly impressive because it was by acclamation,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

According to Prindle, producers and their allies in the press were quick to cast aspersions on the movie stars joining the fight, overlooking the rank and file of struggling actors who overwhelmingly made up SAG, instead lampooning the “’two handsomely dressed doormen’ who ‘parked the worker’s limousines and sports cars’ as they arrived at a membership meeting.”

More conservative members of SAG disagreed with the decision to strike, with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (who had once been a character actress) stating, “I don’t think it’s moral to accept money twice for a single job,” overlooking the fact that that was exactly what the major studios were doing.

The strike shut down eight productions, stopping work on films including Let’s Make Love, starring Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor’s Butterfield 8, and The Wackiest Ship in the Army, starring Jack Lemmon.

Why Reagan later said Gorbachev was easier than the studio heads

While some actors, like beloved comedienne Gracie Allen, refused to do allowed TV work in solidarity, other actors pivoted to television in order to make a living. The trades (who were decidedly pro-movie studios) claimed out-of-work actors were increasingly restless, with The Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Connolly claiming one actor told him, “I can’t eat principle.”

Below-the-line crew members also suffered. According to Variety, the California Department of Employment reported that 3,900 non-striking workers had been laid off due to the strike.

SAG president Ronald Reagan led negotiations with producers.

“Reagan would later joke that negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, over arms reduction was nothing in comparison to having to negotiate with the studio heads,” said Iwan Morgan, author of Reagan: American Icon, in an interview with The Washington Post.

Not everyone was happy with Reagan’s role. As many have noted, Reagan should have never been in charge of leading SAG negotiations because he was also a producer. Once a staunch progressive Democrat, he was becoming increasingly conservative, and rubbed other SAG leaders the wrong way.

“I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president,” James Garner wrote in The Garner Files. “My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That’s no way to run a union, let alone a state or a country.”

A deal is brokered

Finally, a month later, on April 8, a residuals deal was finally brokered between SAG and the producers.

“They reached a compromise,” Kate Fortmueller writes in Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production. “Residuals would be paid on films from 1960 forward, with an additional $2.5 million paid toward the SAG pension and health fund.”

The WGA strike, however, would continue until June 12, 1960. According to the WGA’s official website: “Gains included the first residuals for theatrical motion pictures, paying 1.2% of the license fee when features were licensed to television; an independent pension plan; and a 4% residual for television reruns, domestic and foreign. Also, this groundbreaking contract established an independent pension fund and participation in an industry health insurance plan.”

Many SAG members felt Reagan, increasingly involved in big business, had brokered a bum deal in terms of the residuals deal. According to Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob, actors called the deal “The Great Giveaway.”

Comedian and movie star Bob Hope was incensed, since he would not receive a penny from the films he made before 1960.

“The pictures were sold down the river for a certain amount of money,” Hope said, per Prindle. “I made something like sixty pictures, and my pictures are running on TV all over the world. Who’s getting the money for that? The studios? Why aren’t we getting some money?”

Former child star Mickey Rooney was blunter. “SAG screwed us,” he said, “and I’m mad about it.”

ATTACHMENT SEVENTEEN – From Alt Film Guide

RONALD REAGAN SAG PRESIDENT: FAILURE (OR REFUSAL) TO ‘MEET THE MOMENT’

By Jean Magner

Reagan was the Screen Actors Guild president from 1947–1952, and then again from November 1959 to June 1960. Veteran actors got screwed over during both tenures.

§ As SAG-AFTRA members get ready for a potential work stoppage – see the “prepared to strike” letter signed by the likes of Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams, and Rami Malek – we briefly remember the pivotal 1960 SAG strike and the role played by then president Ronald Reagan, who failed (or chose to fail) to meet the moment.

Contents:

1. Under president Ronald Reagan, SAG failed to meet the moment at a previous ‘unprecedented inflection point’ in the history of the American entertainment industry

1.1. 1960 Screen Actors Guild strike: Hollywood’s first paralyzing stoppage

1.2. Veteran actors (once again) stabbed in the back

1.3. Sellout Reagan

1.4. But, but …!

2. “Ronald Reagan SAG President: Failure (or Refusal) to ‘Meet the Moment’” notes

2.1. Mickey Rooney lawsuit

2.2. Unqualified ‘Ronnie’

Under president Ronald Reagan, SAG failed to meet the moment at a previous ‘unprecedented inflection point’ in the history of the American entertainment industry

Meryl Streep, Laura Linney, Jennifer Lawrence, and Glenn Close are among the hundreds of signatories of a letter sent to the leadership of the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), asserting that they are “prepared to strike” at this “unprecedented inflection point” in the history of the American entertainment industry.

In their letter, SAG-AFTRA members also demand that president Fran Drescher and her fellow board members “make history” by standing firm in their negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

Actors should be concerned. After all, more than six decades ago, at another critical juncture for the American entertainment industry, the Screen Actors Guild leadership (AFTRA was a separate union at the time), then under the presidency of former Warner Bros. contract player Ronald Reagan, failed to rise to the occasion.

Below is a cursory overview of the 1960 SAG strike.

1960 Screen Actors Guild strike: Hollywood’s first paralyzing stoppage

Like 2023, the year 1960 was an “unprecedented inflection point” for the American film industry: As movie attendance plummeted in the years after World War II – from 82–90 million weekly moviegoers in 1946 to 40 million in 1960 – television became an all-important source of revenue for the Hollywood studios.

Besides the production of small-screen fare, for over a decade the studios had been selling/licensing their old movies to TV stations across the United States (and elsewhere) without paying royalties to the talent involved in their making.

Among the actors, the fight for residuals reached an impasse in early 1960, shortly after the election of Ronald Reagan as a last-minute replacement for SAG President Howard Keel, who had resigned from his post to star on the Broadway musical Saratoga.

On March 7, SAG followed in the footsteps of the Writers Guild of America, which had been on strike since mid-January: With the exception of Universal and United Artists, which had struck provisional deals with the union, feature film production was halted at the major Hollywood studios.

Among the titles affected by the stoppage were Elizabeth Taylor’s BUtterfield 8 (Metro-Golwyn-Mayer), Marilyn Monroe’s Let’s Make Love (20th Century Fox), and Gina Lollobrigida’s Go Naked in the World (also MGM). In her autobiography, Lilli Palmer recalls The Pleasure of His Company (Paramount) being interrupted in mid-production, with no one knowing whether filming would ever be resumed.

Veteran actors (once again) stabbed in the back

Under the leadership of Ronald Reagan – who had previously held the SAG presidency from 1947–1952 – the actors’ strike lasted about five weeks, until April 18.

SAG members overwhelmingly chose to return to work (6,399 to 259 votes) after being sold the following agreement: Actors would receive residuals only for films beginning production after Jan. 31, 1960; as for movies made between August 1948–January 1960, in lieu of paying residuals the studios would disburse a one-time lump sum of $2.65 million (far less than the originally proposed $4 million) for the creation of the guild’s first Pension and Welfare Plan.

Now, what about movies made before August 1948?

Back in 1951, SAG, then also under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, forfeited any royalties on movies that went into production before August 1948 in exchange for the promise of negotiations for royalties on movies made after that date – “negotiations” that would ultimately lead to the 1960 strike.

In sum: Apart from specific contracts, actors seen in big-screen releases prior to August 1948 – e.g., Gone with the Wind, King Kong, It Happened One Night, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Mrs. Miniver, Casablanca, Meet Me in St. Louis, Going My Way – were never to receive a penny in compensation from the major studios for the selling or licensing of their movies to television (or other future media ).^[1]

As for the 1960 deal, apart from specific contracts, those who had worked between summer 1948–early winter 1960 had better be satisfied with the pension fund because that would be all they would ever get.

Gary Merrill in All About Eve, with Bette Davis (Merrill’s wife from 1950–1960). As found in Kathleen Sharp’s Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood, Merrill denounced the 1960 SAG deal, affirming that Ronald Reagan “sold us down the river.” Gene Kelly, for his part, griped, “Reagan didn’t pump for residuals at all.”

Sellout Reagan

Those who – whether stupidly or dishonestly – praise Ronald Reagan for his leadership during the 1960 negotiations highlight the fact that most SAG voters accepted the deal and that residuals are still being paid to actors featured in movies made after January 1960.

What these people choose to ignore are the inconvenient facts.

For instance, two months after selling the deal to his fellow performers, Reagan resigned from the SAG presidency. Shortly thereafter, he also resigned from the SAG board to join forces in a production deal with the multi-tentacled Music Corporation of America (MCA) and its subsidiary Revue Studios.

As it happens, Reagan’s agent had been Lew Wasserman, MCA president since 1948, and a socially and politically influential figure – perhaps the key player in the 1960 strike negotiations – who, back in the mid-1950s, had found Reagan, fast on his way to has-beendom, a steady gig as the host (and eventual co-owner, which made Reagan a de facto producer) of MCA’s television anthology series General Electric Theater (1953–1962).

There’s more: In 1952, also during Reagan’s SAG presidency, MCA had received a unique waiver allowing it to act as both producing company (via Revue) and talent agency.

And let’s not forget that after shelling out $50 million in 1958, MCA became the owner of the vast majority of Paramount’s residuals-exempt film library from 1928–August 1948. That turned out to be a hugely lucrative investment: By 1965, MCA had earned $70 million from the television sales/licensing of these 750 titles.

But, but …!

Oh, but Ronald Reagan’s big-screen work also came out before 1960! He wouldn’t have acted in a manner that would have harmed his own interests, would he?

But he didn’t.

To the contrary. After all, whether in the early 1950s or in the early 1960s, Reagan had far loftier ambitions than the receipt of mere residuals for a movie career that mostly consisted of stuff like Smashing the Money Ring, Tugboat Annie Sails Again, and Bedtime for Bonzo.^[2]

The ones who had to pay for his ambition (possibly mixed with a dose of incompetence) and for the acquiescence of most of SAG’s negotiating committee members were Hollywood’s veteran actors – the very same stars and supporting players that classic movie aficionados enjoy watching on Turner Classic Movies (TCM).

“Ronald Reagan SAG President: Failure (or Refusal) to ‘Meet the Moment’” notes

Mickey Rooney lawsuit

^[1] In 1981, the year after the second general SAG strike – actors wanted residuals for home video releases – four-time Oscar nominee Mickey Rooney (Babes in Arms, 1939; etc.) filed a class-action lawsuit against eight Hollywood studios, demanding residuals for his film work prior to February 1960.

As per Rooney, also joining him in the lawsuit were “several hundred” veteran movie actors, among them Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, Glenn Ford, Lana Turner, Van Johnson, Dana Andrews, Jane Powell, Shelley Winters, and Barbara Stanwyck.

The suit apparently didn’t go very far, as years later Rooney was voicing his disgust to the Los Angeles-based theatrical weekly Drama-Logue:

“What I’m angry about and will always be angry about is the terrible blow actors were dealt when our supposed union negotiated our rights away from receiving monetary compensation for all the work done before 1960. Why didn’t the union protect us? Ted Turner [who had acquired the RKO, Warrner Bros. (pre-1950), and MGM (up to May 1986) libraries, and later founded TCM] gets the money and the performers get an actors’ home to get sick and die in.”

Unqualified ‘Ronnie’

^[2] In his 2011 autobiography, The Garner Files: A Memoir (written with Jon Winokur), James Garner says that “Ronald Reagan wasn’t qualified to be governor [of California from 1967–1974], let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That’s no way to run a union, let along a state or a country.”

Be that as it may, Reagan clearly got what he wanted.

And it must be noted that, as found in Kathleen Sharp’s Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood (see below), James Garner, Dana Andrews, Walter Pidgeon, Rosemary DeCamp, Leon Ames, Conrad Nagel, and Charlton Heston – among other SAG board members, some of whom belonged to SAG’s negotiating committee – were also represented by MCA.

---

Here are this article’s key sources regarding the relationship between Lew Wasserman and Ronald Reagan, the 1951 and 1952 Screen Actors Guild agreements, the 1960 SAG strike and Reagan’s role in it, and the sale of Hollywood feature films to television:

§ Thomas W. Evans’ The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (Columbia University Press, 1994).

§ Douglas Gomery’s “Television, Hollywood, and the Development of Movies Made-for-Television,” from Regarding Television: Critical Approaches – An Anthology, edited by E. Ann Kaplan (University Publications of America, 1983).

§ Michele Hilmes’ Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (University of Illinois Press, 1999).

§ Hollywood in the Age of Television, edited by Tino Balio (Routledge Library Editions, 1990).

§ Dan Moldea’s Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (Viking, 1986).

§ Kathleen Sharp’s Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003).

Additionally, details about Ronald Reagan and his labor and political activities in the late 1940s can be found in Salon’s “Ronald Reagan: Informant,” excerpted from Seth Rosenfeld’s Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

U.S. weekly movie attendance figures via Encyclopedia.com, citing the U.S. Census Bureau.

Mickey Rooney’s Drama-Logue quote via Alvin H. Marill’s Mickey Rooney: His Films, Television Appearances, Radio Work, Stage Shows (McFarland, 2004).

See also: GQ cravenly pulls article critical of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. See below…

ATTACHMENT EIGHTEEN – From altfg.com

DAVID ZASLAV DEMANDS ‘CORRECTIONS,’ GQ EDITORS CRAVENLY ACQUIESCE

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Following complaints from David Zaslav, editors at the Condé Nast-owned GQ magazine have removed an article exposing the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO to – however well-deserved – ridicule. So far, it remains unclear whether the decision was merely craven or downright corrupt.

But not to worry: GQ’s David Zaslav article has been preserved for posterity elsewhere online.

By Jean Magner 

Contents 

1. Bowing to Power, GQ editors chose to remove a critical opinion piece from the magazine’s website rather than offend Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav

1.1. There’s more…

1.2. Why the past tense?

1.3. Why would GQ editors opt to destroy their publication’s journalistic reputation?

1.4. It’s all interconnected

1.5. GQ article aside, David Zaslav is doing just fine

1.6. Piranha eats piranha

1.7. It’s a depraved, depraved, depraved, depraved world

1.8. The killer touch

2. “David Zaslav Demands ‘Corrections,’ GQ Editors Cravenly Acquiesce” notes

2.1. The Streisand effect

2.2. Save TCM uproar

Bowing to Power, GQ editors chose to remove a critical opinion piece from the magazine’s website rather than offend Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav

The most despised (non-Hollywood) legacy media moguls – at least for non-fascists – are indisputably Fox Corporation Chairman of the Board Rupert Murdoch and his CEO son Lachlan Murdoch. The most despised social media mogul is undoubtedly Tesla/Twitter’s Elon Musk, with Meta/Facebook’s (and now Threads’) Mark Zuckerberg a close second. On to Hollywood, where the most despised mogul is hands down Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.

In his July 3 GQ piece “How Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Became Public Enemy Number One in Hollywood,” freelance film critic Jason Bailey provided several reasons as to why Zaslav’s tenure at Warner Bros. Discovery – the company formed in April 2022, when AT&T subsidiary WarnerMedia was merged with Discovery, Inc. – has been such an abhorrent disaster.

These ranged from the murder of Batgirl and the drowning of Scoob!: Holiday Haunt for tax purposes and the various idiotic missteps at what used to be HBO Max (now downsized to just Max in the U.S.) to the recent wholesale firings at the beloved U.S. cable channel Turner Classic Movies^[2] and the proposed sale of (unspecified) rights to nearly half of Warners’ film and television music catalog.

For illustrative purposes, Bailey compared Zaslav to Brian Cox’s Rupert Murdoch-inspired ogre Logan Roy in Succession and to Richard Gere’s corporate raider Edward Lewis in Pretty Woman. The author also reminded his readers that Zaslav’s Discovery reign was marked by the company’s increased focus on “reality slop” like Naked and Afraid, Dr. Pimple Popper, and My 600-lb Life, and that the CEO’s current imperial edicts show him to be “only good at breaking things.”

There’s more…

Surprisingly, left unmentioned was the torpedoing – in terms of both ratings and reputation – of the already battered cable news network CNN, which Zaslav’s handpicked man, Chris Licht (finally given the boot last month), wanted to turn into a more right-wing-friendly outlet.

And had the article been written this past week, Bailey might have included the social media panic that has ensued after the Watch TCM app stopped updating movies on July 1. Is David Zaslav killing it?

(According to TCM’s Twitter account, an outage – or “error” – has prevented the addition of new titles to various Warner Bros. Discovery apps, which has led to social media speculation that Zaslav’s indiscriminate cost-cutting actions are to blame.)

Why the past tense?

Now, wasn’t GQ’s David Zaslav piece published just recently? Why use the past tense?

Yes, Bailey’s article was published less than a week ago. However, it’s no longer available on the GQ website. In fact, hours after its July 3 publication, the article was gone. Hence the past tense. (A copy can be found here.)

What happened?

As first reported by Roger Friedman at Showbiz411.com, and later in more detail by The Washington Post’s Will Sommer, it looks like David Zaslav didn’t like to see himself compared to Logan Roy and Edward Lewis. Or to be labeled a creator of “reality slop.”

As a result, GQ editors got to work on “How Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Became Public Enemy Number One in Hollywood,” either rewriting or removing the passages that Zaslav found unflattering. The end result was something that might as well have been retitled “How Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Became Number One in Hollywood.”

After seeing the changes, Bailey requested that his name be removed from the article. Without a byline, GQ editors pulled the piece.

Why would GQ editors opt to destroy their publication’s journalistic reputation?

As per GQ – believe them at your own risk – Bailey’s article was worked on because it had not been “properly edited before going live.” Shifting the blame to the author, the GQ spokesperson added, “GQ regrets the editorial error that [led] to a story being published before it was ready.”

As per Warner Bros. Discovery, Bailey had never contacted the company for comment (never mind the fact that he didn’t have to, as he was writing an opinion piece) and all they wanted was that “numerous inaccuracies be corrected.” Like, apparently, David Zaslav being compared to Logan Roy. Or a Julia Roberts line from Pretty Woman being used in reference to corporate fiends like Zaslav and Gere’s Edward Lewis, “So [what you do is] sort of like stealing cars and selling them for the parts, right?”

But why would GQ risk its journalistic reputation by bowdlerizing and then pulling a story because it personally offended a powerful media mogul?

The answer may be a simple one that has nothing to do with either journalism or “inaccuracies.”

It’s all interconnected

First of all, bear in mind that GQ owner Condé Nast is itself owned by Advance Publications, which, as it happens, is a major Warner Bros. Discovery shareholder.

And then there’s the report by Variety’s Tatiana Siegel, asserting that GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch was involved in the post-publication editorial work done on Bailey’s article and its eventual removal. Minor detail: Welch is a producer on the movie The Great Chinese Art Heist at … Warner Bros.

With Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights filmmaker Jon M. Chu attached to direct and (co-)produce, the high-profile Chinese art heist thriller is based on a 2018 GQ article by Alex W. Palmer.

As per one of Variety’s Warner Bros. Discovery sources, “no one at the corporate level was aware of Welch’s ties to the movie studio.” Be that as it may, Welch himself surely knew of his own Warner Bros. ties. As of this writing, he remains at his GQ post.

GQ article aside, David Zaslav is doing just fine

A little extra context: Under David Zaslav’s leadership, Warner Bros. Discovery has lost half its stock value ($12.54 per share on July 7) since its April 2022 formation. At the end of this year’s first quarter, the company owed a whopping $49.5 billion. (In March 2022, Deadline.com explained that Discovery had raised $30 billion “in senior unsecured notes in a debt offering to raise cash for its merger.”)

That gaping hole has not been attenuated by recent costly box office bombs like DC’s The Flash and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and, even if on a lesser scale, Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike’s Last Dance.

Hence Zaslav’s decision to get rid of a significant chunk of the staff at TCM and other Warner Bros. Discovery cable television properties, not to mention the earlier decimation of a quarter of the workforce at Warner Bros. Television, in addition to 14 percent of the HBO/HBO Max programming staff and hundreds of CNN employees.

But no need to fret over Zaslav’s financial well being. Between 2018–2022, the CEO earned the sum of $498,915,318 (including stock options and other forms of compensation) – or, as per CNBC, about 384 times the average pay of a Hollywood writer. In 2022 alone, Warner Bros. Discovery shoved $39.3 million Zaslav’s way.

Also doing just fine are Warner Bros. Discovery’s top executives, who, after all the thousands of layoffs, received millionaire bonuses for their efforts.

Piranha eats piranha

Now, where will David Zaslav and his top executives be next year?

Who can say?

The corporate leadership at another obscenely powerful conglomerate, Comcast (which owns NBCUniversal), have had their eyes on Warner Bros. Discovery.

So far, Zaslav has vowed that his company is not for sale. Feel free to believe him.

It’s a depraved, depraved, depraved, depraved world

In sum, the socially, economically, and culturally disastrous WarnerMedia and Discovery merger is the perfect illustration of the depravity of a system set up to gratify the insatiable greed and power lust of the ultra-wealthy, no matter how destructive the consequences.

And never forget: Those who continue to allow that to happen – the (however victimized) human rabble that chooses to either look the other way or remain blissfully unaware of the reality around them – are no less depraved.

Ah, did you know that Warner Bros. officially turned 100 this year?

With his own personal touch, David Zaslav is celebrating the centenary of one of the most iconic media brands the world has ever known.

The killer touch

P.S.: One piece critical of David Zaslav is still up at its original location. That’s former GQ correspondent Drew Magary’s “David Zaslav kills everything he touches, including GQ” at sfgate.com.

A couple of brief passages:

“Not only is this man a terrible CEO, but he’s also an imperious coward who’s more than willing to swat down anyone who dares question his authority. Our worst kind of rich person.”

“He’s a parasite: a terrible CEO, an enemy to artists, and a lousy, horrible graduation speaker to boot.[*] I hope he’s strapped to a chair and forced to watch The Flash on repeat for the rest of his pathetic little existence.”

* Back in late May, David Zaslav was booed while speaking at a Boston University graduation ceremony. Students also chanted, “Pay your writers!”

The Writers Guild of America has been on strike for over two months; the Screen Actors Guild may follow suit in the next week or so.

---

“David Zaslav Demands ‘Corrections,’ GQ Editors Cravenly Acquiesce” notes

The Streisand effect

^[1] Named after two-time Academy Award winner Barbra Streisand,† the Streisand effect refers to attempts to hide or censor information that backfire by increasing awareness of that very information.

The expression originated in 2003, when Streisand tried to suppress the publication of the California Coastal Records Project’s photograph of her Malibu cliff-top residence, which was supposed to illustrate coastal erosion in that part of the state. The result was that the photo – and the house depicted in it – gained worldwide attention.

† Barbra Streisand was named Best Actress for Funny Girl (1968; tied with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter) and received her second statuette as co-composer of Best Song winner “Evergreen” from A Star Is Born (1976).

Save TCM uproar

^[2] One assumes David Zaslav wasn’t quite expecting the furor against his decision to throw a wrecking ball at TCM, as it ended up raising the ire not only of classic cinema aficionados but also of Hollywood celebrities ranging from Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and George Stevens Jr. to Ryan Reynolds, Mark Hamill, and Paul Thomas Anderson – some of whom are the kind of people Zaslav would like to have working at Warner Bros.

Curiously, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has remained publicly silent on the matter, as they seem to be far less concerned with the wide dissemination of film history than with snide social media hashtags.

Relevant detail: TCM’s “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart is the director and president of the Los Angeles-based Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (website).

And to think that a few months before gutting the TCM staff, David Zaslav was in attendance at this year’s TCM Film Festival held in Hollywood. While sitting next to Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and interviewer/TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Zaslav declared, “I watch Turner Classic Movies all the time. It’s the history of our country, the motion pictures,” going on to mention the importance of classic Hollywood titles like Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Black Legion, and Gentleman’s Agreement.

Anyhow, to date at least one pivotal TCM employee has been reinstated: SVP of Programming Charles Tabesh.

ATTACHMENT NINETEEN – From the Guardian U.K.

‘IT FEELS LIKE IT’S STRIKE SUMMER’: US UNIONS FLEX MUSCLES ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Labor is increasingly militant after years of inaction, energized by star power from the actors’ and writers’ strikes

By Steven Greenhouse Wed 26 Jul 2023 08.00 EDT

It’s been a fast and furious few weeks for labor. First, 3,000 workers went on strike at 150 Starbucks, then 6,000 Los Angeles hotel workers walked out, and now 11,500 Hollywood writers and 160,000 television and movie actors have gone on strike. Not only that, 340,000 UPS workers seemed ready to walk out on 1 August, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union is threatening to strike one or more Detroit automakers later this summer.

“It feels like it’s strike summer,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center. “There’s tremendous energy within the labor movement, and there’s tremendous energy on the strike lines.”

“Tik tock #HotLaborSummer,” the Teamsters tweeted last week as they counted down to a strike at UPS that could have cost the company more than $800m and the country over $7bn, according to one estimate.

But on Tuesday a UPS strike was averted as the company increased its offer and the union declared victory in what could be a significant win for the labor movement. In announcing the settlement, Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters’ general president, said: “This contract sets a new standard in the labor movement,” adding that UPS “has put $30bn in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations”.

Maite Tapia, a professor of labor relations at Michigan State, said: “It’s not just a hot, labor summer – we’re in a protest and strike wave. It’s fascinating and inspiring to see how these workers are leveraging their power against massive corporations.”

Employee frustration and anger have fueled the work stoppages. Many frontline workers are still fuming about how poorly they were treated during the pandemic, and many are upset that their pay increases have lagged far behind inflation.

“We are coming out of more than three years of pandemic where people felt that economic inequality has grown,” Wong said. “Many workers were called essential workers, but they often felt they weren’t respected or appreciated, yet at the same time they have seen all this outrageous corporate greed.”

But the corporations hit by strikes or threatened with them say they have made generous contract offers, although management and labor often seem to be talking past each other. Many unions argue that it’s only fair that workers receive larger-than-usual raises to offset the 9% inflation that coursed through the US economy, but many corporations resist giving raises of more than 3% a year.

My co-workers don’t feel they’re treated with respect. They’re treated like they’re just a piece of trash

Diana Rios-Sanchez

Diana Rios-Sanchez, a housekeeping supervisor at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles, said thousands of hotel workers walked out for three days at more than 30 hotels because they feel underappreciated and underpaid. “My co-workers don’t feel they’re treated with respect,” she said. “They’re treated like they’re just a piece of trash.”

Rios-Sanchez said that because of Los Angeles’ soaring rents, hotel workers are desperate for sizable raises. She makes $26 an hour, but she and her husband can only afford a one-bedroom apartment for themselves and their three children. “I might take home $3,500 a month with overtime, but a two-bedroom apartment costs $2,000 to $2,500 a month, and then there’s childcare and food bills,” she said.

The tight labor market helps make it a good time for workers to strike. Unions are more likely to strike when the jobless rate is low; that hampers companies’ ability to find replacement workers during a walkout. Also, strikes are contagious, emboldening other workers to walk out.

In California, the epicenter of today’s labor strife, 48,000 University of California graduate teaching assistants, researchers and other academic workers walked out last November and won a settlement that included raises of more than 55% for the lowest-paid workers. In April, 30,000 Los Angeles school district custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and teacher’s aides struck for three days. They won a 30% raise. Those victories helped embolden LA’s hotel workers to demand a 40% raise.

Workers’ attitudes about going on strike have also changed significantly. “For many decades, unions wanted to avoid a strike because strikes could mean disaster,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a longtime labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “That was certainly true in the 1980s and 1990s.”

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (Patco) union in a move that was seen as a devastating blow to organized labor – it led to that union’s collapse and discouraged other unions from striking.

“In the wake of the Patco strike, companies saw strikes as opportunities to weaken unions or even break them. That’s not the case today. Today there’s no fear that calling a strike will result in disaster,” said Lichtenstein.

“Today there’s a sense that unions are on the offensive,” Lichtenstein continued. “Take the actors. They say they don’t want just a good contract. They want a transformative contract.”

He said today’s younger generation of workers – often inspired by Bernie Sanders, often irked about high rents and student debt, often unfamiliar with labor’s setbacks in decades past – is more inclined to strike than older workers.

Several business trends have spurred the strike wave and increased worker anger. Like many companies, UPS has relied heavily on part-time workers to hold down costs, and many of those workers complain that their limited hours mean they earn far too little. Similarly, television writers increasingly say they’re not being given enough work to live on – they often used to work on series that had more than 20 episodes a season, but now they often work on series with just six or eight episodes a season. With the explosion of streaming, TV actors are upset that they’re earning far less from residuals than they did in the era before streaming.

Corporations are not happy about the increased labor militancy. The Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers said it “offered historic pay and residual increases”, adding that the actors’ union, by striking, “has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry”.

Eager to avert a Teamsters strike, UPS agreed to significantly increase wages for full- and part-time workers. The wage gains are double the increases from the union’s previous five-year contract and include a 48% pay raise for part-timers over the life of the contract.

“We’ve changed the game … This contract raises the bar for all workers”

Teamsters president Sean O’Brien

“We’ve changed the game, battling it out day and night to make sure our members won an agreement that pays strong wages, rewards their labor and doesn’t require a single concession,” O’Brien said. He added that “this contract … raises the bar for all workers”.

The Teamsters win is likely to embolden the UAW as that union considers a strike, too. “Without a credible strike threat, the Teamsters could not have gotten this much,” said Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, “In recent memory, we haven’t had three such large labor situations, one following the other, each of which has national implications and each of which could provide momentum for the other. A big strike that moves the needle for workers – we haven’t seen that in a long while at the national level.”

This summer’s strikes come as public approval of unions is at its highest since 1965, and some labor experts say the strike wave could increase support for labor organizing, even though strikes often inconvenience the public.

“When these actors go on strike, it has a huge impact way beyond their numbers; everyone knows who these people are,” said Lichtenstein. “It’s extraordinarily important when a star like Harrison Ford – 3 or 4 billion people know who he is – says I’m for unions. I back the strike.”

He noted that when 185,000 Teamsters walked out at UPS for 15 days in 1997, “that was a very popular strike. Everyone knows their UPS driver.” He argued that strikes by well-liked UPS drivers and Hollywood celebrities could boost support for labor. Indeed, Lichtenstein said that if the Teamsters and UAW are very successful in their contract negotiations, whether with or without a strike, that could help President Biden and other Democrats in 2024, especially in midwest states, where the UAW is strongest.

More militant union leadership is another catalyst for strikes. Over the past two years, insurgent candidates won the presidency of the UAW and Teamsters, having promised a more confrontational approach in bargaining and a greater willingness to strike.

Speaking about the UAW president, Shawn Fain, Michigan State’s Tapia said: “He seems to be gearing up the workers to strike. He has said the workers’ true enemy is multibillion-dollar corporations that refuse to give union members their fair share. The Teamsters and UAW leaders have talked about the significance of strikes not just for their members, but for workers across the whole country.”

In recent months, unions have shown significantly increased energy both in striking and in organizing, for instance at Starbucks. “What these two phenomena make clear is the importance of collective action,” McCartin said. “Historically, to move the needle for workers, they need to engage in collective action.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY – Also From GUK

THE 1 CENT PAYCHEQUE: HERE’S THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT BEING AN ACTOR IN THE ‘GOLDEN’ AGE OF STREAMING

While streaming services rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, many TV stars can’t even afford heating – or are somehow paid in negative figures. No wonder they’re on strike

By Stuart Heritage Mon 17 Jul 2023 05.22 EDT

The strike by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Sag-Aftra) inconveniences a lot of people. It effectively shuts down production on hundreds of films and TV shows, which means that thousands of crew members will be out of work. The lack of stars willing to promote their work mean that the festival circuit is functionally kaput. Worst of all, it means that new original scripted content will soon dry up, and I will be forced to write about all sorts of worthless true crime documentaries. This, I’m sure you will agree, is the real tragedy here.

Nevertheless, as inconvenient as it may be, the strike feels vital for the future of the acting industry. As with the Writers Guild of America strike (when we learned that a writer for critical darling The Bear was paid so badly that it left him overdrawn and he had to work in an apartment with no heating after the studio refused to fly him to the writers’ room in Los Angeles), details are emerging about the difficulty of being a working television actor in the age of streaming.

This was underlined by a recent feature in the New Yorker, concerning the miserable compensation received by cast members on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. Kimiko Glenn, who played Brook Soso, posted a video to Instagram in which she opened a Sag-Aftra foreign-royalty statement and, despite starring on a huge, award-winning series that helped pave the way for the current glut of streaming originals, discovered she had been paid just $27.30 (about £21). Another cast member, Matt McGorry, replied to the post revealing that he had to keep his day job throughout filming, because he couldn’t support himself on his acting salary. A further star, Beth Dover, revealed that, after deducting travel expenses, she lost money on the show.

One of the issues here – and one that is driving the Sag negotiations – is the lack of residual rates (similar to TV royalties) offered by streaming services. Previously, a guest star on a series could expect a cut of the money whenever an episode was re-aired anywhere, and this could help sustain them through the leaner times that most actors experience. But streamers such as Netflix don’t re-air episodes because all their content is constantly available to be watched by anyone around the world whenever they want. So, as the New Yorker reports, Emma Myles can still make hundreds of dollars a year for a few spots on the traditionally broadcast Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but only $20 a year for OITNB, which she worked on for six years.

This isn’t to say that OITNB is especially terrible either: as the strike begins to bite, more and more actors are revealing how hard streaming has made it for them to make a living. Kendrick Sampson, an actor who has spent the past half-decade working on shows including The Flash, Insecure and I’m a Virgo, recently wrote a Thread revealing that he received 50 residual cheques for his work over the past year, but they totalled just $86. Brandee Evans from P-Valley posted a TikTok of a residual cheque she received for exactly one cent. Kamil McFadden, an actor who has worked on I Think You Should Leave, KC Undercover and Millennials, tweeted a scrolling list of his recent residuals, many of which somehow detailed negative figures.

It is a lousy situation, and is not helped by the fact that many people think all television actors must be dripping with money. They have heard about the vast sums made by the cast of Friends, The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory, and assume that this level of opulence applies all the way down the line. Which isn’t the case at all. To qualify for Sag-Aftra health insurance, an actor is required to earn $26,470 from acting or residuals each year. It has been claimed that 75% to 90% of members are not able to reach this threshold. Even household names can fall foul of this; two years ago, Sharon Stone lost her union health coverage after earning $13 less than the minimum figure.

At the bottom end of the scale, a background performer will make the equivalent of £142 a day, for insecure, irregular work. But even that is being chipped away at. Sag claims that background artists are now having their likenesses scanned when they sign on for a project, with studios apparently reusing them in other work without consent or compensation.

Obviously, this points at a miserable present and a worse future, and is especially unfair when studio bosses are earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It is hard not to see this and want to support the strikes however you can. And if that means I have to sit through another miserable true crime documentary, it is a sacrifice worth making.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY ONE – From the Washington Post

HOLLYWOOD STRIKE DELAYS EMMY AWARDS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN DECADES

By Samantha Chery Updated July 28, 2023 at 10:45 a.m

The Emmy Awards will be significantly delayed for the first time in more than two decades amid a dual strike that has virtually shut down Hollywood.

A person familiar with the delay, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter before an announcement has been made, told The Washington Post that the 75th annual ceremony will be pushed back from its originally scheduled air date of Sept. 18.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the show has been rescheduled for January, but The Post could not confirm that. Variety previously reported that the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which presents the awards, wanted to push the ceremony to November, while the broadcaster, Fox, preferred a longer delay.

The last time the Emmys aired after September was in 2001, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan pushed the show into November. The show was not even postponed when the pandemic shut down Hollywood in 2020. It went virtual instead.

But this year’s ceremony had been widely expected to be delayed because of the historic strike in the U.S. entertainment industry. Nearly all Hollywood writers stopped work in May, and tens of thousands of TV and film actors joined them in July, barely two days after the Emmy nominees were announced. The striking actors are barred by their union not only from working for major studios, but also from promoting projects or appearing in award shows.

Among this year’s contenders for top awards is the HBO drama “Succession,” about a dysfunctional family of billionaires. Its co-star, Brian Cox, raged against studios at a solidarity rally in London last week, saying that low pay and the encroachment of artificial intelligence technology has put actors “at the thin edge of a really horrible wedge.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY TWO – From the Hill

NEWSOM OFFERS TO HELP MEDIATE HOLLYWOOD STRIKE 

BY LAUREN SFORZA - 07/27/23 8:32 AM ET

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is offering to help mediate the writers and actors strikes that have left Hollywood in a standstill, his office said.

Anthony York, Newsom’s senior adviser for communications, told The Associated Press the governor’s office has contacted all parties involved in the strike to help broker a deal. He noted that while none of the sides have shown interest in using Newsom’s help, the governor and his top advisers have been in contact with the writers, actors and studio executives as the strikes continue into the late summer.

“Thousands of jobs depend directly or indirectly on Hollywood getting back to work,” York said.

During the last writer’s strike more than a decade ago, the Milken Institute estimated it cost California $2.1 billion.

“It’s clear that the sides are still far apart,” York added. “But he is deeply concerned about the impact a prolonged strike can have on the regional and state economy.”

The writers have been on strike since May, while the actors joined them earlier this month. Among other issues, both unions said they have concerns about the rise of streaming services and decline in audiences watching cable television or going to the movies.

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Newsom offered to help mediate a solution when the writers first announced their strike. As a potential future presidential candidate, helping negotiate an end to the Hollywood strikes could boost him on the national stage.

When AP reached out to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) about Newsom’s involvement in mediating it, Bass spokesman Zach Seidl said in a statement they will “continue to engage with labor leaders, studio heads, elected leaders and other impacted parties to arrive at a fair and equitable solution.”

York did not detail who Newsom spoke with on the union or studio side — and neither responded to requests for comment, AP reported.

use A@

ATTACHMENT TWENTY THREE – From the Hollywood Reporter

WHEN WILL THE STRIKES END? LESSONS FROM 1960

History is a rough guide — and AI is the major wild card — but there’s much to glean from that decades ago walkout in how to make a deal.

BY THOMAS DOHERTY JULY 28, 2023 7:25AM

The “double strike” of 1960 — the last time the Writers Guild and SAG marched shoulder to shoulder in a labor action against the owners of the means of production and, crucially, distribution — is the clear precedent to the ongoing reboot. Yet while historians like to believe that the past is prologue, or at least a cautionary example, for all the parallels between the two walk-outs the differences are stark. Today, the tone is more rancorous, the stakes more serious.

The connecting thread is the upheaval wrought by a new communications technology. In 1960, the disrupter was TV; today, it’s digital streaming. In both instances, the new revenue source for the producers makes the old terms of service for the talent look like a pact with the devil. Then, as now, the artists seek a bigger slice of the pie, or crumbs really, parceled out in decimal points, from a cash flow unimagined when they signed the original deal. “To the guild[s], this is extra pay for extra use and perfectly proper,” observed the trade weekly Broadcasting in 1960 in an apt summary of the battle lines. To the producers, “this is double pay for the same job and completely improper.”

The Last Time Actors and Writers Both Went on Strike: How Hollywood Ended the 1960 Crisis

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To read the sideline commentary during the 1960 strike (the writers walked out, or stopped typing, on Jan. 16 and settled on June 25; SAG struck on March 7 and agreed to settle a month later, on April 8) is to hear an unmistakable echo of current opinion. “The film business is on the brink of disaster, with every branch of the business having contributed to that condition,” warned Billy Wilkerson, then-owner of The Hollywood Reporter. 

In 1960, however, the prospects for an expeditious settlement were facilitated by an adherence to a set of social norms not yet shattered by social media. Looking back, one is struck by the moderate tone and measured language from the representatives on both sides. John L. Dales, national executive secretary of SAG, criticized the “shortsighted, belligerent attitude” of the producers and chided them for giving the “impression that the guild proposals are new and revolutionary, whereas the truth is that these principles are well established and accepted,” but he didn’t resort to insult.

Charles S. Boren, the executive vp in charge of industrial relations for the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP), the precursor to the AMPTP, made a point of speaking more in sorrow than anger. “We deeply regret the Screen Actors Guild action in calling a strike, thus imperiling thousands of jobs in the industry as well as the institutions of the industry,” he said, expressing hope that a prompt resumption of negotiations would “preserve the jobs of many innocent bystanders.” Sure, they were striking a pose, and behind closed doors things doubtless got testy, as arguments over money always do, but the language of diplomacy kept heads cool and relations congenial.

On April 8, when SAG and the AMPP announced a tentative agreement, SAG president Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston, a member of the SAG negotiating committee, and Columbia vp B.B. Kahane and Boren shook hands for the cameras. The men are beaming, all smiles; you can imagine them all going out for a drink after. Throughout the negotiations, producers weren’t so callous as to publicly wish that the screenwriters be left destitute and homeless; no actor responded with 12-letter epithets.

Likewise, the rhetoric surrounding the 95-day strike by SAG in 1980 over wages and residuals for the new revenue stream of that day — pay television, videocassettes and video discs — was also almost demure, at least for attribution in print, compared to the unfiltered, hit-send sentiments provoked by today’s platforms (though actor Ed Asner, characteristically, was as blunt as newsprint would allow: “I think it stinks,” he said of the pact ultimately agreed to). 

Unfortunately, the 2023 strikers confront a wholly new threat — namely, the ghost in the machine that Hollywood itself has been warning us about since 2001: A Space Odyssey, artificial intelligence, which judging by the proposals put on the table by the producers seems to have already achieved singularity in Hollywood. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher was not being a Luddite when she warned that “we’ll all be replaced by machines,” but it might actually be worse than that. Automation can take your job; AI wants your soul. (The AMPTP’s July 21 characterization of its AI proposal was that it favors “a balanced approach based on careful use, not prohibition.”)

In this sense, the picketers are at the leading edge of a battle that the ranks of labor — indeed, the entire U.S. body politic — needs to attend to. The fight for a better residual contract is a matter of dollars and cents, a deal can be cut, differences can be split. The right to your own self is non-negotiable, what the Founding Fathers called “unalienable” — meaning a right so fundamental to what it means to be human that it cannot be “alienated” — that is, relinquished or surrendered.

You can sign away the rights to a single performance or a screenplay, but no matter how desperate for a gig, you cannot sign away your self. “We had faces,” says Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. “We want your faces now — and your voice and body” is what the talent fears the producers are saying. That’s not a bargaining chip; it’s a deal-breaker. 

This story first appeared in the July 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY FOUR – From Time

EVEN AI FILMMAKERS THINK HOLLYWOOD’S AI PROPOSAL IS DANGEROUS

BY ANDREW R. CHOW UPDATED: JULY 26, 2023 10:42 AM EDT | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: JULY 25, 2023 2:43 PM EDT

In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) wanders through crowded city streets, bumping past sailors and women in red dresses, before learning that they aren’t real people, but instead simulations.

In future Keanu Reeves movies, it’s possible that everyone around him might be simulated, too. On July 13, Hollywood producers advertised a “groundbreaking AI proposal” involving the “use of digital replicas or…digital alterations of a performance.” The SAG-AFTRA union lambasted the proposal, accusing the studios of simply trying to replace background actors with AI. Studios could scan an actor, pay them for a day, and then simply use AI to insert them into the rest of the film, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, said in a press conference. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers responded that this characterization was inaccurate and that they would “establish a comprehensive set of provisions that require informed consent and fair compensation when a ‘digital replica’” or similar AI technology is used.

While the scenario Crabtree-Ireland described may sound far-off or dystopian, it’s basically already technologically possible. Generative AI companies like Runway and Stability AI have released products that allow filmmakers to create all sorts of hyper-realistic images out of written prompts. And those consumer-facing products pale in comparison to the advanced tools that major studios have at their disposal. Studios can already use AI to render scenes of packed nightclubs or sprawling battlegrounds—and do so more cheaply than paying for dozens of actual actors, AI experts say.

But even those AI experts, who believe that AI technology will eventually be a net good for creators and workers in film, believe that replacing background actors with AI is a bad idea.  “That is a great example of a terrible way to use AI in the industry,” says Tye Sheridan, an actor and entrepreneur who co-founded the AI start-up Wonder Dynamics. “We need to come together as a community to know where it poses its threat, and where it can potentially launch the next great artists of our generation.”

Read More: 'They Are Doing Bad Things to Good People': Fran Drescher on Why SAG-AFTRA Is Striking

Before AI tools were available, Hollywood artists used CGI—or traditional computer graphics techniques—to change actors’ appearances. Carrie Fisher, who died in 2016, appeared posthumously as Princess Leia in subsequent Star Wars movies thanks to expert VFX teams performing digital wizardry upon archival footage of the late actor. More recently, The Flash contained scenes with Christopher Reeve's Superman, who was depicted via a similar blend of film and technology. 

But AI processes, which require less human intervention than CGI techniques, are becoming cheaper and more widely available, says Nikola Todorovic, Wonder Dynamics’ CEO and co-founder. “With Carrie Fisher, that had to be a VFX studio, which put a huge budget and thousands of artists behind it,” he says. “Before, it was more expensive to do it than hire an actor. Now, it’s less expensive, so that’s why the studios are like, “Oh, scan them once, and do it every time.’”

According to Collider, studios have already been using AI technology to render background characters for several years, including in the upcoming films Captain America: Brave New World and Netflix’s The Residence. In April, the Marvel director Joe Russo predicted that AIs will be able to create movies within two years. Just last month, filmmakers generated a 12-minute movie solely with AI imagery—although its eerie close-ups of human faces make it obvious that the footage is not real.

Empowering Indie Filmmakers

Filmmakers around the world have already begun testing the abilities of AI to create on-screen characters, with eye-popping success. It took the Berlin-based director Martin Haerlin about three days to create a now-viral video in which he seamlessly transforms from a wealthy British aristocrat into a talking ape into a female MMA fighter with a snap of his finger. 

Haerlin, who mostly directs commercials and music videos, started playing around with the AI tools Runway and Elevenlabs in the midst of a sharp decrease in advertising budgets this year. Haerlin filmed himself at his house, and then input the footage into Runway, asking the AI to transform him into various historical or sci-fi settings. “This was a revelation for me and an empowerment, because all of a sudden, I could tell stories without the pressure of the crew, of a producer, of being chosen by a client or an advertising agency,” he says.  

Jahmel Reynolds, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, has been similarly emboldened. Reynolds has been using Stable Diffusion and Runway to create sci-fi scenes of marauding giant robots and Power Rangers-like motorcycle gangs. He’s currently working on a short film, Helmet City, created entirely in collaboration with AI, which fuses sci-fi and hip-hop aesthetics. 

Reynolds still says that generative AI rendering, as advanced as it is, can’t achieve full realism. “The movements look awkward: I haven’t seen a technology that’s been able to do that well, in a way where you can’t make the distinction,” he says. “There’s still a level of the uncanny valley.” 

Actor Tye Sheridan, who starred in the 2018 metaverse sci-fi film Ready Player One, co-founded Wonder Dynamics with Nikola Todorovic in 2017 precisely to aid small-scale filmmakers like Haerlin and Reynolds. Wonder Dynamics’ AI-driven software allows users to film a scene, then replace the on-screen actor with another character, whether it be a cartoon or an alien. That character then mimics the actors’ motions and even facial expressions. 

The goal of Wonder Dynamics technology, its creators say, is to empower independent sci-fi filmmakers to dream bigger, and to create worlds like Avatar or Ready Player One without needing massive studio budgets. Sheridan recalls spending eight weeks in motion capture suits on the set of the latter movie, which then required dozens of artists to process all of the data. “We don’t know where the next Spielberg, who might be some kid in some village somewhere, is from. Right now it’s almost impossible to discover some of these voices,” Todorovic says. “We want to build tech to give access globally, as opposed to people having to move to L.A. and break into the industry a certain way.” 

Risks For Actors

But it is exactly this sort of technology that also seems to threaten the livelihoods of actors. Martin Haerlin says that production companies have already started soliciting him to create AI videos to cut down on costs and the number of actors involved. “They all think AI is like a magic wand; that now there's one person who can replace everything, and can make a video very easily,” he says. 

Fran Drescher, the SAG-AFTRA president, says that the movie studios want to use AI technology in lieu of paying actors full-time. (On July 21, the studios released a chart refuting this characterization.) The scenario Drescher describes seems not so different from the dystopia depicted in a recent episode of Black Mirror, “Joan is Awful,” in which a streaming service instantaneously creates emotionally manipulative content featuring AI replicas of the actors Salma Hayek and Cate Blanchett. 

“Our livelihood is our likeness—the way we act, the way we speak, the gestures we make, that’s what we’re selling,” Drescher told TIME in an interview. “And that’s what they want to rip off.”  

The results of SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP’s negotiations could disproportionately affect a large working class of non-prominent actors. Working-class actors must often take on background roles in order to gain experience, network and pay the bills. Drescher told TIME that 86% of the union’s 160,000 member don’t even make enough money to be eligible for health benefits, which is around $26,000. 

And while prominent actors likely would be able to hire good entertainment lawyers to negotiate favorable contracts with regards to AI, working-class actors may not—which could result in reputational damage if the AI performs worse than they do. At the same time, even big name actors are concerned, including Tom Cruise, who joined negotiations to press the producers on SAG-AFTRA’s concerns around AI, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

All four AI filmmakers interviewed for this story agreed that protections for actors and other film workers are essential. “AI has been very cool and empowering for someone like me. But the flip side is larger companies using it for their best interests, in a way that isn’t fair to background actors,” Jahmel Reynolds says.

Todorovic and Sheridan created Wonder Dynamics’ technology specifically so that actors’ performances would remain central and irreplaceable to the films that use it. Filmmakers can use Wonder Dynamics to turn an actor into an alien—but not an actor into another actor. 

“We’re not generating art out of thin air,” Todorovic says. “We don’t want to be a part of building a future where actors are sitting at home, licensing their likeness, and they’re in 5 movies at the same time.” 

At this juncture, AI-driven upheaval in film seems inevitable. Haerlin predicts that “many, many jobs will be lost during the next months or years.” But he hopes that actors will be protected—and that analog and AI movies will be able to exist side by side and serve different purposes. “It’s maybe comparable to rugs, “ he says. “You can buy a rug from IKEA that is machine-made. And then you can buy a handmade rug, which is maybe more beautiful and sophisticated, but it's way more expensive.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY FIVE – From GUK

THE HOLLYWOOD STRIKE CAN AND MUST WIN – FOR ALL OF US, NOT JUST WRITERS AND ACTORS

The thousands of strikers are at the frontlines of two key battles: against a future controlled by AI, and against suffocating inequality

By Hamilton Nolan Wed 19 Jul 2023 06.03 EDT

We’re having quite an apocalyptic summer. Wildfire smoke chokes the air of major cities. Amid a brutal heatwave, striking workers muster picket lines on scorching streets. The screenwriters of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) have been on strike for nearly three months. Last week they were joined by 160,000 members of Sag-Aftra, the actors’ union. Hollywood is closed for business. Everyone is scared that artificial intelligence could steal away our jobs. It’s hot. Tempers are short. The whole entertainment industry is out of work and angry and ready to lean into class war. It feels a little scary. It feels a little giddy. It feels like anything might happen this year.

This is good. If there wasn’t a huge fight happening right now, the implications would be much, much worse.

It can be tempting to demonize Hollywood as the source of all of society’s ills. The right hates them for being decadent limousine liberals undermining traditional values, and the left hates them for being decadent limousine liberals spreading America’s pernicious capitalist myths worldwide. But what is happening right now should be understood as Hollywood’s redemption.

The thousands of workers engaged in this enormous, multi-union Hollywood strike – something America hasn’t seen since 1960 – represent the frontline of two battles that matter to every single American. You might not naturally pick “writers and actors” to be the backbone of your national defense force, but hey, we go to war with the army we have. In this case, they are well suited to the fight at hand.

The first battle is between humanity and artificial intelligence. Just a year ago, it seemed like a remote issue, a vague and futuristic possibility, still tinged with a touch of sci-fi. Now, AI has advanced so fast that everyone has grasped that it has the potential to be to white-collar and creative work what industrial automation was to factory work. It is the sort of technology that you either put in a box, or it puts you in a box. And who is going to build the guardrails that prevent the worst abuses of AI?

Look around. Do you believe that the divided US government is going to rouse itself to concerted action in time to regulate this technology, which grows more potent by the month? They will not. Do you know, then, the only institutions with the power to enact binding rules about AI that protect working people from being destroyed by a bunch of impenetrable algorithms that can produce stilted, error-filled simulacrums of their work at a fraction of the cost?

Unions. When it comes to regulating AI now, before it gets so widely entrenched that it’s impossible to roll back, union contracts are the only game in town. And the WGA and Sag-Aftra contracts, which cover entire industries, will go down in history as some of the first major efforts to write reasonable rules governing this technology that is so new that even knowing what to ask for involves a lot of speculation.

What we know for sure is this: if we leave AI wholly in the hands of tech companies and their investors, it is absolutely certain that AI will be used in a way that takes the maximum amount of money out of the pockets of labor and deposits it in the accounts of executives and investment firms. These strikes are happening, in large part, to set the precedent that AI must benefit everyone rather than being a terrifying inequality accelerator that throws millions out of work to enrich a lucky few. Even if you have never been to Hollywood, you have a stake in this fight. AI will come for your own industry soon enough.

And that brings us to the second underlying battle here: the class war itself. When you scrape away the relatively small surface layer of glitz and glamor and wealthy stars, entertainment is just another industry, full of regular people doing regular work. The vast majority of those who write scripts or act in shows (or do carpentry, or catering, or chauffeuring, or the zillion other jobs that Hollywood produces) are not rich and famous. The CEOs that the entertainment unions are negotiating with make hundreds of millions of dollars, while most Sag-Aftra members don’t make the $26,000 a year necessary to qualify for the union’s health insurance plan.

In this sense, the entertainment industry is just like every other industry operating under America’s rather gruff version of capitalism. If left to their own devices, companies will always try to push labor costs towards zero and executive pay towards infinity. The preferred state of every corporation in America is one in which all of its employees earn just enough money to survive and the CEO and investors earn enough money to build private rockets to escape to a private Mars colony for billionaires. The only – the only – thing that stops this process is labor power. That comes from unions. The walls that unions build protect not just their own members, but by extension the entire working class. That is what’s at stake here.

So do not make the mistake of seeing these strikes as something remote from the realities of your own life. Hollywood has many flaws, but its most redeeming quality is that it is a strongly unionized industry. Unlike in most places, its workers have the ability to fight back against abuse, whether it comes from AI’s dead-hearted algorithms or from David Zaslav’s stupid rich smug face. @get The strikers in the streets are taking upon themselves the responsibility of drawing a line in the sand, saying that the excesses of inequality must stop here and now. Whatever they win will help us all.

And they will win. Bet on it. Go out to a picket line and you will believe me. They will win because they are truly pissed; they will win because they are willing to suffer for what is necessary; and, most of all, they will win because Hollywood executives can’t act or write.

All those executives can do is sell what the actors and the writers make, and steal as much of the profit as they can grab. But when the work stops, there is nothing to sell. There are no profits. And while everyone on the picket line finds love and community and purpose, the executives will find nothing but empty theaters and public scorn. Pretty soon, nobody will remember why they got paid so much money in the first place.

· Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York City and a member of the WGAE

ATTACHMENT TWENTY SIX – From the New York Times

REAGAN’S PERSONAL SPYING MACHINE

By Seth Rosenfeld Sept. 1, 2012

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

IN 1961, when Ronald Reagan was defining himself politically, he warned that if left unchecked, government would become “a Big Brother to us all.” But previously undisclosed F.B.I. records, released to me after a long and costly legal fight under the Freedom of Information Act, present a different side of the man who has come to symbolize the conservative philosophy of less government and greater self-reliance.

When Reagan needed government help, he was happy to take it, which is particularly interesting in light of the current debate over “entitlements,” and which might give pause to members of both political parties who speak glowingly of the Reagan legacy.

The documents show that Reagan was more involved than was previously known as a government informer during his Hollywood years, and that in return he secretly received personal and political help from J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, at taxpayer expense.

Reagan’s F.B.I. connection is rooted in the turbulent years of post-World War II Hollywood, a time when, Reagan has written, his worldview was coming apart. His film career, his marriage to Jane Wyman and his faith in the political wisdom received from his father, an F.D.R. Democrat, were all faltering.

The timing was thus significant when, one night in 1946, F.B.I. agents dropped by his house overlooking Sunset Boulevard and told him that Communists were infiltrating a liberal group he was involved in. He soon had a new purpose; as he wrote, “I must confess they opened my eyes to a good many things.”

The newly released files flesh out what Reagan only hinted at. They show that he began to report secretly to the F.B.I. about people whom he suspected of Communist activity, some on the scantiest of evidence. And they reveal that during his tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the ’40s and ’50s, F.B.I. agents had access to guild records on dozens of actors. As one F.B.I. official wrote in a memo, Reagan “in every instance has been cooperative.”

Reagan went on to make his fight against Communism in Hollywood a centerpiece of his talks as spokesman for General Electric in the 1950s. Those eventually became broader warnings about what he saw as creeping socialism. The founding fathers, he declared in his 1961 speech, believed “government should only do those things the people cannot do for themselves.”

But that guidance apparently didn’t apply to Reagan himself. According to F.B.I. records, in 1960 he turned to the federal government for help with the kind of problem families usually handle themselves. That March, his close friend George Murphy reached out to an F.B.I. contact, explaining that Reagan and Ms. Wyman, now divorced, were “much concerned” about their estranged daughter, Maureen, then 19. She had moved to Washington, and, her parents had heard, was living with an older, married policeman.

According to an F.B.I. memo: “Jane Wyman wishes to come to Washington to perhaps straighten out her daughter, get her back to Los Angeles, but before doing so desires to know the following: (1) Is [the man in question] employed as an officer of the Metropolitan Police Department?; (2) Is he married?; (3) Is his wife in an institution and what are the details?; and (4) Any other information which might be discreetly developed concerning the relationship.”

At F.B.I. headquarters, supervisors reviewed a background report on Maureen Reagan that they had prepared the previous year, when she applied to work at a federal agency. It provided a glimpse of her family life and quoted an administrator at Marymount Junior College, in Arlington, Va., from which she had dropped out: “Maureen was the victim of a broken home, and because she had resided in boarding schools and been away from parental contact so much of her life she was an insecure individual ‘who could not make up her mind’ and did not achieve goals set by herself or others.”

An assistant F.B.I. director, Cartha DeLoach, recommended that the F.B.I. grant the Reagans’ request, even while noting that “there does not appear to be any F.B.I. jurisdiction here.” Hoover quickly approved the inquiry. Posing as an insurance salesman, one agent made a pretext phone call to neighbors; another contacted a police source; a third interviewed the maid at Maureen Reagan’s rooming house.

The investigation confirmed that Ms. Reagan was living with the married patrolman, and Mr. DeLoach ordered an agent to tell the Reagans via Mr. Murphy “on a highly confidential basis.”

This government assistance did not solve Maureen Reagan’s problems, however. The officer left his wife and married her, but as Ms. Reagan later wrote, he repeatedly beat her. They divorced in 1962. Nor did it bridge the gap between Reagan and his daughter. “I still haven’t spoken openly to my parents, or to anyone in my family, about the details of what I went through,” she wrote in 1989.

Hoover helped Reagan with another family concern, in early 1965, not long before he embarked on his first political campaign, for governor of California. That January, the F.B.I. was closing in on Joseph Bonanno, known as Joe Bananas, the head of one of New York City’s five Mafia families, who owned a house in Arizona.

F.B.I. agents in Phoenix made an unexpected discovery: According to records, “the son of Ronald Reagan was associating with the son of Joe Bonnano [sic].” That is, Michael Reagan, the adopted son of Reagan and Ms. Wyman, was consorting with Bonanno’s son, Joseph Jr. The teenagers had bonded over their shared love of fast cars and acting tough.

(In my legal fight for these files, the F.B.I. initially redacted Michael Reagan’s identity on the ground that this information concerned “law enforcement” activities. But Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court in San Francisco ordered the F.B.I. to disclose it.)

Joseph Jr. was not involved in organized crime, but he was spending time at his father’s home, the inner sanctum. In October 1964, he had been arrested in connection with the beating of a Scottsdale, Ariz., coffee shop manager. And in January 1965, The New York Times reported that the Manhattan federal prosecutor Robert Morgenthau had subpoenaed him to testify about his father.

Following routine procedure, F.B.I. agents in Phoenix asked agents in Los Angeles to interview Ronald Reagan for any information he might have gleaned from his son. The investigation, after all, was a top priority. But Hoover blocked them from questioning Reagan, thus sparing him potentially unfavorable publicity. Declaring it “unlikely that Ronald Reagan would have any information of significance,” Hoover instead ordered agents to warn him about his son’s worrisome friendship.

Reagan expressed his gratitude to an F.B.I. agent, William L. Byrne Jr., on Feb. 1, 1965. Reagan “was most appreciative and stated he realized that such an association and actions on the part of his son might well jeopardize any political aspirations he might have,” according to an F.B.I. report. “He stated that the Bureau’s courtesy in this matter will be kept absolutely confidential. Reagan commented that he realizes that it would be improper to express his appreciation in writing and requested that SA [Special Agent] Byrne convey the great admiration he has for the Director and the Bureau and to express his thanks for the Bureau’s cooperation.”

Newspapers carried sensational stories about the F.B.I.’s Bonanno investigation, but the boys’ troublesome relationship never came up. During his campaign for governor, Reagan focused on other people’s children, making protests at the University of California, Berkeley, one of the hottest issues.

Days after he took office in January 1967, Governor Reagan called the F.B.I. and requested a briefing on the demonstrations at Berkeley. Hoover again obliged, confidentially providing information from the bureau’s domestic surveillance files.

Here was Ronald Reagan, avowed opponent of overdependence on government, again taking personal and political help from Hoover.

Perhaps now and then we all need a little help from Big Brother.

Seth Rosenfeld is the author of “Subversives: The F.B.I.’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power.”

ATTACHMENT TWENTY SEVEN – From Time

'THEY ARE DOING BAD THINGS TO GOOD PEOPLE': FRAN DRESCHER ON WHY SAG-AFTRA IS STRIKING

BY JUDY BERMAN JULY 20, 2023 3:53 PM EDT

SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents some 160,000 performers, went on strike on July 13, joining the WGA in the organizations’ first concurrent work stoppage since 1960 and effectively bringing Hollywood to a standstill. The most prominent—and also the most unmistakable—voice in this fight belongs to Fran Drescher. Elected SAG-AFTRA president in 2021, The Nanny’s flashy girl from Flushing proved her union-organizer chutzpah in a press conference announcing the strike. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity,” Drescher said. “They plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them.” It was time, she proclaimed, to tell the studio bosses: “You people are crazy!” At one point, she even invoked the storming of the gates of Versailles.

Her performance lit up the internet, going viral in real time. Memes circulated. Fans swooned. And Drescher suddenly became the poster girl for a Hot Labor Summer already in progress. (Along with the writers, whose strike is now deep into its third month, California hotel workers picketed over the long Fourth of July weekend and 340,000 Teamsters employed by UPS could walk off the job as soon as Aug. 1.) It’s a role she’s happy to fill—not out of vanity, but because she knows workers across industries will benefit from the exposure. “We get the press,” Drescher tells TIME. “So, OK—let me be the face and the voice of this awakening.”

Not that Drescher’s professional responsibilities end when the cameras stop rolling. It’s all she can do to make sure someone walks her dog while she’s running around from the picket line to the bargaining table to events for her nonprofit, Cancer Schmancer. (She’s a survivor of uterine cancer.) “This is my life now—I’m pulled from every direction,” she says. “And it’s forcing me, as a Buddhist, to stay in the moment and be present now, not get ahead of myself.”

Union work takes precedence, of course, over everything besides Drescher’s elderly parents, who are proudly tuning in to watch her represent her fellow actors on shows like Morning Joe. In fact, it occurs to Drescher as we’re chatting that she should make sure her assistant sends them a pair of SAG-AFTRA T-shirts—size XXXL, “because then my mom will wear it like a little house dress and my dad, he’ll wear it like a little nightshirt.” (She promises to post photos.) It’s a fitting way to thank the systems-analyst father she credits for instilling in her the ability to see what’s broken about the Hollywood ecosystem. “I have his skill set, even though I don’t apply it to a career like he did,” Drescher says. But now she’s putting it to work in negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). “They didn’t think that Morty Drescher’s daughter was gonna crack the code on what’s wrong with the old contract!”

Over the phone from Los Angeles, Drescher discussed the strike, how the entertainment industry’s embrace of streaming and A.I. have hurt actors, and why she’s thrilled to see vintage Nanny stills making the rounds on social media. Here are edited excerpts of that conversation.

TIME: It can be hard to reconcile reports of A-list stars like Tom Cruise and Will Smith commanding tens of millions in salaries with the news of an actors’ strike. Why has a union representing such an apparently lucrative profession taken such a dramatic step?

Drescher: Those big, big stars that earn seven and eight figures—they’re the engine that makes it all run. They’re the thing that draws people into the theaters, and allows everybody below them to work and make a living. So I have nothing against them. But 86% of the people in this 160,000-members-strong union make not enough money to even be eligible for health benefits. [That threshold] is actually quite low. It’s like $26,000; that’s almost like a part-time job.

Most actors are what we call journeyman actors. They’re hardworking people that just want to pay their rent, put food on the table, and be respected and honored for their contribution. And those are the people we must strike for. Because when the opposition is saying that if you’re a background person, we’ll scan your image and pay you for one day, but then we’ll own your likeness in perpetuity—where does that leave that performer who’s made a career out of being in the background? What does it mean to the person that gets the base salary? [The AMPTP] are offering not a cost of living increase, which would be 11%, but 5%—which would, in real money, give us less than we made in 2020. We are so far behind inflation, it isn’t even funny. [Editor’s note: In a statement released on July 17, the AMPTP disputed SAG-AFTRA’s characterization of its AI proposal and said it is offering an “11% pay increase in year 1 for background actors, stand-ins and photo doubles.” The statement does not explicitly address cost of living.]

This contract, the foundation of it was forged in 1960. That was so far before anything that we’re dealing with now: streaming, digital, AI. It’s a completely different industry. They have disassembled the old business model. It demands a whole new, reinvigorated, restructured contract.

People do realize, I think, that this is a tumultuous time in Hollywood. We’ve watched linear TV’s bumpy transition to streaming and movie theaters struggle amid a pandemic. But what do you wish the public understood about how this changing economy—and particularly streaming—has affected the actors who make the films and shows they love?

Well, let’s look at The Nanny. That was a completely different business model that was predicated on the longevity of a show that went from network TV into syndication. It went on cable, it was sold around the world. And there was a long tail of revenue upon which residuals were based. And as long as there were eyeballs and ad dollars on television, you would do between 22 and 28 episodes a season. And if the show was a success, it would go between six and 10 seasons. So over the course of time, the performer was able to make a living—even if you had a small part, even if you weren’t a regular, you would get residuals throughout the years, because the show continued to make money. That’s the way it was back in the day. And that’s what came out of the 1960 strike, when Ronald Reagan was in my job.

Now, the whole model with streaming is, there is no tail of revenue. There’s no transparency as to how well the show does or how many eyeballs are on it. And [the business model is] not predicated off of that anyway, because the name of the game is subscribers. Algorithms dictate how many episodes a season needs to be before you reach a plateau of new subscribers and how many seasons a series needs to be on. That reduces the amount of episodes per season to between six and 10, and it reduces the amount of seasons to three or four. You can’t live on that. We’re being systematically squeezed out of our livelihood by a business model that was foisted upon us, that has created a myriad of problems for everyone up and down the ladder.

Would it be fair to say that streaming has pushed actors who might once have sustained themselves working on a single TV series into a sort of gig economy?

Yes. But there’s so many people champing at the bit for any given part. You’re lucky to get on one series! Who gets on two or three at the same time? But that’s why, in our Netflix contract, it was so important that we make sure they don’t force actors to be exclusive. It’s essential that they don’t have exclusivities on us and then take 18 to 24 months to write the next season. What is a person supposed to do? They’re completely insensitive and disrespectful. They dishonor those that are the foundation of their entire business.

To return to AI, SAG-AFTRA’s characterization of the AMPTP proposal that you mentioned, for scanning background actors, has been described as “dystopian.” Do you think this technology is purely a job killer for actors, or might there be a fair way for studios to use it?

We want to put barricades around it. Right now, it’s a free-for-all. And people don’t always do right by you. The mentality of this industry is: Let’s scrap them wherever we can get away with it. But consent and compensation must be in the DNA of this new invention. That’s what is required. Even the biggest stars are reaching out, because it’s a threat to them also. Our livelihood is our likeness—the way we act, the way we speak, the gestures we make, that’s what we’re selling. And that’s what they want to rip off. Well, we’re not going to do that. “You just have to trust us.” No, we don’t trust you. I know who I can trust in my life, and it ain’t you.

You’ve been especially vocal about insensitive comments from studio heads. You called Bob Iger’s characterization of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA’s demands as unrealistic “repugnant and out of touch,” and said: “If I were that company, I would lock him behind doors.” On a psychological level, can you wrap your mind around how a guy who stands to make up to $31 million this year could shrug off the plight of journeyman actors?

I have nothing against capitalism. But when you become intoxicated by the money, to the point where you stop feeling respect and compassion for people up and down the ladder, it becomes like a sickness. That’s where I draw the line. And that’s where my members are right now. They are already feeling the squeeze. The CEOs aren’t—on the private jets and the billionaires’ camp and the designer suits and the yachts and all this. They are doing bad things to good people.

On a personal level, I’m sure you’ve heard by now that your speech on Thursday was a big hit on the internet. On social media, people have been passing around a still from an episode of The Nanny where your character says: “Never, ever, ever cross a picket line.” What has it been like to see these moments from your early career rediscovered?

When I see it on the internet, I’m proud that it’s there. I came up with that strike episode for The Nanny. The Beautician and the Beast also has a Norma Rae scene. And I’m enjoying all the creativity of the people that are putting together things that are in support of this righteous strike. We stand on the front lines of a whole labor movement that stands behind us. But everybody stands to benefit from our success, because everybody is in jeopardy of being replaced by AI, or being undercut or underpaid.

Would it be correct to infer from that image that labor issues have been at the forefront of your mind throughout your career?

Without question, because I come from a humble beginning. I’ve never been an elitist. I treat everybody the same. We all should. We all feel. We all hurt. We all love. We all get sick, we all get well, laugh, cry, and we all want the same things for our children. But, you know, people, when they have success, doesn’t mean that they have inner peace. So they act like they’re all that, and that superficially fills some kind of void in them, which is always gnawing at them. When people in powerful positions, like these CEOs, behave poorly—when I look at those people across the negotiating table—I’m thinking: How could you do this? Your whole job is to screw us. That’s the wrong side of the table.

I guess that’s why we need unions in the first place, right?

Really! I mean, Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” And who knew better than him?

ATTACHMENT TWENTY EIGHT – From the New York Post

WOKE HOLLYWOOD CUTS THE NATION A BREAK — AND CANCELS ITSELF

By Dan McLaughlin July 14, 2023

Hollywood’s actors have joined its writers on strike.

It’s the first time both have walked out at once since 1960.

Maybe they’ll learn something in their time off — and maybe the country could use a break from them.

The movie business has been disrupted in recent years from all sides.

More competition has driven changes to what we watch and how we watch it.

With streaming services, bigger flatscreens and faster broadband, there were fewer reasons to leave the couch.

Streamers now offer a broad menu of foreign-made content.

Gen Z viewers spend more time with immersive video games and personalities on YouTube and Tik Tok, and less watching TV and movies.

All of this was accelerated by the pandemic decimating the reeling movie-theater business.

Through it all, Hollywood has been its own worst enemy.

Moviegoers like superhero movies, name-brand franchises and Pixar cartoons?

Inundate them with so many sequels, of such declining quality, that viewers tune out.

#MeToo scandals reveal the industry is overrun with sexual predators protected by an insular liberal elite?

Overcompensate by turning casting and programming decisions into a festival of “representation”-focused identity politics and ham-fisted leftist agitprop.

f your creative class is churning out content this devoid of creativity and alienating half the audience in the process, you may as well replace them with machines.

At least, that seems to be the thinking of Hollywood bigwigs, who have pushed the writers and actors to accept a greater role for artificial intelligence.

Say what you will about AI: It doesn’t grope its co-stars, vanish on coke binges, send ill-advised tweets or promote polarizing political causes.

Machines work cheap, they’re always in shape, they don’t care about race or gender, they never ask to renegotiate and they don’t have a union.

Of course, the actors and writers may not be especially sympathetic, but neither are the studio bosses, who made a lot of this mess.

They’re the ones who produced all those dreadful films, and they’re no less politically wacky than the “talent.”

It’s not the actors and writers who’ve been selling Hollywood out to China.

If there’s a long work stoppage, the suits should take the opportunity to cancel some of their worst ideas and remember why Americans used to love the movies.

Some role for AI can’t be stopped, but it’s the right time for the industry to hash this out.

The writers are complaining about competing with AI and sharing screen credits.

For them, AI presents a simple challenge: Do better.

Stop churning out content so generic that a bot could write it.

Stop trying to sell us your pet politics.

Learn some words with more than four letters.

Write as if you’ve met some normal people.

Get a sense of humor.

For the actors, AI is a creepier threat: loss of artistic and financial control over their own images and creative futures.

Film studios want to scan images of actors and re-use them later — without asking for their consent to later projects, and without giving actors the leverage to demand more money when it happens.

The strikes are largely about how creators get paid in the future for things they do today.

The writers and actors are mad that they don’t get the same residual payments when films and TV shows are streamed as when they are re-aired on TV.

If the unions want a role model, they should look to a leader from their past: Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was in his sixth term as president of the actors’ union when they walked out with the writers in 1960.

It was also a time of disruption: TV took away a lot of the movie audience in the 1950s and was beginning to re-show films.

Reagan negotiated the original residuals deal.

He took heat from veteran stars angry that he didn’t deliver residuals for older movies (including his own biggest hits), but in exchange he got a lump-sum payment to launch the union’s health-insurance plan and pension fund.

That mattered more to workaday actors, who outnumbered the stars and voted overwhelmingly for the deal.

Reagan won in part by dividing his adversaries, cutting a deal first with Universal.

But he also understood both sides.

He represented the union while working for the management of General Electric, which was in the midst of negotiating with its own union.

He was also a former New Deal Democrat who was about to become a Republican.

Today’s Hollywood could use more like him.

But it will need human intelligence, not the artificial kind, to learn that.

ATTACHMENT TWENTY NINE – From the New York Post’s Peanut Gallery

· SailorJoe

15 July, 2023

Sanitation workers go on strike is a problem. Nurses on strike is a problem, subway train drivers on strike is a problem. Hollywood writers and actors on strike is not a problem. To hear them talk one would think actors and writers are working in coal mines in the 1880s.

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· Flavius Spaghettini

14 July, 2023

Change is constant, inevitable. Movie and TV entertainment have become different animals than they were a mere 10 years ago. Foreign films and shows have captured great viewer interest here.

How the film and TV studios address the issues and move forward in negotiating a deal that’s good for everyon...

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· Wrath of God

14 July, 2023

TMC, Criterion and Mubi all have great movies.

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· Bookem Dano

14 July, 2023

The actors' bubble will burst when they realize the sun will still come up in the morning and that they and their work will not be missed. The pay services have just about reached the price point of the great unwashed and it's downhill from here.

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· Saloogie

15 July, 2023

Excellent article. America has had it with Hollywood and the drivel they put out. I've been watching French, Italian and other European movies for years now because Hollywood can no longer produce a movie that a mature adult can possibly sit through. Europeans are making movies the way Hollywood used to.

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· Half Off

14 July, 2023

I hate to see anyone out of work because it impacts our economy. I am glad, tho, that there might be a shake up in Hollywood which could possibly, in some miraculous way, lead to quality products based on creativity instead of political agenda.

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o Nature's Son

14 July, 2023

I hate to see anyone out of work because odds are they are Dems, by the tens of millions, and I pay for them.

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· ata777

14 July, 2023

I think the most frightening thing for these people might be the fact that no one will notice.

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o Kiki_Beez~

14 July, 2023

that'll be a nice wake-up call

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o chuck

15 July, 2023

Not to mention but, no one will care either.

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· Mrs M

14 July, 2023

I pray it will be a permanent break and the end of Hollywood. Hollywood has done enough damage to this country. Enough is enough. I pray this is the end of the end for the entire industry.

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· JintYank61

14 July, 2023

Hang in there, Hollywood writers and actors, for as long as it takes. Stick it to the suits, and don't hurry back on our account. Really.

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· Carl Jacobson

14 July, 2023

The problem is that many people are employed in businesses that support the Entertainment Industry- this puts them out of work too

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o Rusty Mitchell

15 July, 2023

As O'Dumbo said after the '08 crash - some jobs will never come back, so people will have to take on new career training!

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· Bill

15 July, 2023

That's the best news I've heard out of "Hollywood" since Disney released "Song of the South". The industry will move to non-union people (and not in Hollywood). When (and if) this is over, things will never be the same. The industry, and concept, is archaic, with its heyday being in the 30s and ... Birth of a Nation?

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· Leftistsarehypocrites

14 July, 2023

It's funny, AI is going to take over actors roles but when outsourcing happens to the average American worker, they don't care. So I simply don't care about them either if they are out of work nobodies anymore. Most are just overpaid leftists who don't do anything useful for society anyway.

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o KDog

15 July, 2023

I really don’t care about the strike. However, the one issue where I think they have a legitimate complaint is the future use of their images and, if possible, their voices. They should be compensated for that since, if the studios deem their images of such value that they use them in future movi...

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o Half Off

14 July, 2023

How does AI takeover actor’s jobs? I don’t get it.

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· Nature's Son

14 July, 2023

Lay down with "Bob" DeNiro and his rancorous "victimless crime is no crime at all" buddies, and wake up with...an hour to get to your kid's funeral. Anything still goes, Bob? Gonna push prosecution, or is drug dealing an act of "economic necessity?" Did the poison come through your open border? Sad...

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· Clinton Parks

15 July, 2023

Stops Broadway too, I believe, and they can't afford to shutdown with the shows flopping...But Tourists are not exactly filling the spaces either. Let's thank the Illegals, The Addicts the Muggers for this wonderfulness as NYC keeps going down. and all this courtesy of "No Crime" Bragg and "Nig...

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· Willie Phistergash

15 July, 2023

There has been no funny stress relieving content in decades. Woke unoffensive screenplay is not realistic nor funny, therefore it’s unwatchable. Hollywood has destroyed itself. Good! Bye.

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o Pickle

15 July, 2023

It is sad, as escaping into a good movie or series helps release stress and pressure from one's mental state at various points throughout life. However, nowadays, there seems to be more stress and pressure from just watching some of these shows. Time to turn OFF the power button on your screen. Any...

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· Driver X

14 July, 2023

LOL i hope it goes on for years!

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· CT

14 July, 2023

What an agenda-driven take. Stop conflating. "Woke Hollywood" is mostly comprised of rich studio execs. They're NOT union; they're management.

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· SB

15 July, 2023

Most are more talented as servers waiting tables, which the restaurant industry needs.

Thankfully many will be back at their real jobs filling that void.

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· Chuchu Charlie

15 July, 2023

Now they just have to act like better waiters

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· The IT Dude

15 July, 2023

Glad I’m not the only one who doesn’t care. Stay on strike, for a very long time.

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· RFA

15 July, 2023

The latest generation has no talent and no imagination. They have not brought out anything new in years, everything is a remake and it is much worse than the original. All of Hollywood is living in LALA land and they are ruled by the woke. Can you image running programs like Sanford and Son, All in...

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· Corey’s Champagne Saber

14 July, 2023

Good- cancel yourselves because you fostered this toxic atmosphere. I hope Hollywood goes bankrupt and crashes into oblivion. Good riddance losers. Go to Zimbabwe and make movies over there and see how much better things are.

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· waxpoetic

15 July, 2023

A few thespians join the ranks of the unemployed. They'll be shocked when they learn that mindless bloviating no longer puts food in their stomachs.

The actual "victims" are those behind the "scenes" that make the TV shows and films happen.

"Acting" as a profession was not even a revered "profession ...

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· Ralph1956

14 July, 2023

What happens when they find out no one cares?

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o Nature's Son

14 July, 2023

They will sue for emotional distress, and get leftover Wuhan relief money?

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· Someone

14 July, 2023

I care very much that every single one of these people never show their faces again. No one will miss them.

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· Sri Gull

15 July, 2023

I am so excited, can't wait for the no new releases!

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· Space Cowboy

15 July, 2023

Hopefully, we are in course-correct mode reimagining entertainment, academia, MSM and Big Data.

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· Rusty Mitchell

15 July, 2023

Great opinion piece, very succinct and spot on!

ATTACHMENT THIRTY – From the Atlantic

WHAT REAGAN DID FOR HOLLYWOOD

WHEN HE WAS PRESIDENT OF THE SCREEN ACTORS GUILD, RONALD REAGAN STAGED A SHOWDOWN WITH STUDIO EXECUTIVES—AND WON THE CREATION OF THE RESIDUAL PAYMENT SYSTEM THAT LIVES TODAY

By Wayne Federman NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Tonight, the Motion Picture Association of America will honor the film career of Ronald Reagan with a tribute in Washington, D.C. The participating film studios include Paramount, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. Ironically it was these exact studios (plus MGM and Columbia) who, 51 years earlier, were engaged in a contentious high-stakes negotiation with Ronald Reagan. The outcome of that bitter 1960 showdown altered the economic fortunes of tens of thousands of film actors.

As the country winds down its celebration of the Ronald Reagan Centennial, there seems to be a growing consensus that Reagan was, for better or worse, a significant president. Personally I am convinced that he is vastly underrated, and I have more than seven billion reasons to support my argument, though not a single one of them is related to his eight years as U.S. president. Let me explain.

In the fall of 2000 I was hired to act in the film Legally Blonde. I portrayed a member of the admissions board that voted to admit Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) into Harvard Law School. I had four lines and my lone scene took just a few hours to shoot.

Eleven years later, in October 2011, I received a check from the Residuals Department of the Screen Actors Guild for the amount of $48.40. This was just the latest in a series of "Legally Blonde" residual checks that I and the other cast members have regularly received since the film's theatrical release in 2001.

Reagan joked that he was simply "trying to negotiate for the right to negotiate."

It is now accepted orthodoxy that union film actors get residuals. But it wasn't always that way. For decades, residual payments for actors did not exist; film actors were paid for their work, and that was it. The studio owned the film and could release it again and again, anytime and anywhere, with no thought of further compensation for actors.

There are, of course, many people who worked diligently to secure residuals for film actors. But at the top of the list is President Ronald Reagan. Not the U.S. President, but the union president. Here's what happened.

Back in 1937, Ronald "Dutch" Reagan was a popular baseball radio announcer and local newspaper columnist based in Des Moines, Iowa, when he travelled to California to cover the Chicago Cubs spring training camp. While in Los Angeles, he met a talent agent who arranged a screen test for Warner Brothers. The studio was impressed by Reagan's on-camera presence and offered the 26-year-old a contract at $200 per week. So goodbye sports—hello Hollywood.

Reagan moved to Los Angeles in June of '37, just weeks after the film producers accepted the fledgling Screen Actors Guild (SAG) as the actors' official union. On June 30th he paid his $25 SAG initiation fee and became "a union man." By 1941, Reagan had joined the the SAG board of directors. He soon rose to 3rd Vice President, and was ultimately elected President in 1947.

Just ten years after arriving from Des Moines, Reagan now led the union representing the biggest movie stars in the world. He was subsequently re-elected for five consecutive one-year terms.

During his first tenure as SAG president (1947-1952) Reagan, then a liberal Democrat, was instrumental in securing residuals for television actors when their episodes were re-run. However, motion picture actors were still shut out of residuals and did not receive any compensation when their studio films aired on TV.

As more and more movies were telecast (The Wizard of Oz was first shown on TV in 1956), film actors felt they were being deprived of a significant source of income. With every new contract the issue was tabled until, in 1959, the actors had had enough. They demanded residual payments for future telecasts and retroactive residuals for films shown on TV between 1948 and 1959.

The producers had a short answer: no. In fact, they were desperately looking for ways to cut production costs, not increase them. Between 1946 and 1959, domestic movie attendance plummeted over 65 percent as more and more Americans chose to stay home and watch television. As a result, the movie industry was in a tailspin and hemorrhaging money.

So the producers dug in. Any talk of residuals, past or future, was simply a nonstarter. The producers took a hard line because they knew that if they acquiesced to actors, they would probably have to make similar deals with both screenwriters and directors.

But the actors were firmly committed to their cause and, in the fall of 1959, they voted to return Ronald Reagan to the SAG presidency to spearhead the negotiations.

The talks began in January 1960 with the two sides a great distance apart. The producers refused to even talk about residuals. They put forth a simple and compelling question: Why should any employee be paid more than once for the same job?

Reagan could not get them to budge. He joked that he was simply "trying to negotiate for the right to negotiate."

In February, Reagan upped the ante. He asked the SAG membership for a strike authorization. The actors agreed and a work-stop date was set: Monday, March 7th. The producers were convinced the actors were bluffing. In the 50-year history of Hollywood, there had never been an industry-wide strike.

The producers underestimated the resolve of Reagan and his negotiating team. On March 7th, 1960 the actors did what they said they would: They walked off their respective jobs and production at all the major studios ground to a halt.

In the tense days following the walkout it was the studios, not the ex-sportscaster, who first blinked. Universal Pictures agreed, in principle, to the concept of film residuals. Eventually the other majors (Paramount, Disney, Warner Brothers, MGM, Columbia, and 20th Century Fox) fell in line and finally began negotiating the "non-negotiable" issue.

After five acrimonious weeks of intense back-and-forth, the two sides reached a compromise. It contained three parts:

1. Actor residuals for all studio films made starting in 1960.

2. No residuals for any studio films produced before 1948.

3. In lieu of residuals for films made between 1948 and 1959, the producers agreed to a one-time payout of $2.25 million, a contribution SAG would use as seed money for a new union health insurance plan and a pension plan.

It wasn't everything the actors desired but, on April 18, the SAG membership voted to accept the offer and return to work. The final tally was 6,399 to 259.

The strike was over, but some actors were furious with the deal. Stars like Mickey Rooney, Glenn Ford, and Bob Hope believed SAG could have gained retroactive residuals for all films if Reagan had been tougher and held out longer. They felt Reagan and the SAG board had "screwed" them and derided the compromise as "the great giveaway."

It is true that film actors who worked primarily in the '30s, '40s, and '50s (including, it should be noted, Ronald Reagan) didn't benefit directly from the new residual agreement. But, to label the compromise a giveaway is to miss the brilliance of the deal. By convincing the major studios to accept the concept of paying film residuals, Reagan opened the gates to an expanding revenue stream that continues to benefit thousands and thousands of film actors—and their heirs.

At a meeting of the SAG membership in April of 1960 Reagan said, "I think the benefits down through the years to performers will be greater than all the previous contracts we have negotiated, put together." Reagan's prediction was right on the money.

These days, with the prevalence of cable, DVDs, satellite, Netflix, pay-for-view, rentals, streaming, and downloads, residual payments are now massive. In fact, since SAG first began issuing residual checks, more than $7.4 billion have been distributed directly to actors. Many are middle-class actors like me. Again, this payout is in addition to the original compensation.

Looking back from the vantage point of 2011, the residual agreement seems altruistic, optimistic, and visionary. One might call it Reagan-esque.

And, thanks to Reagan and the strike he engineered in 1960, working actors are also eligible for both health insurance and a pension.

Although I have no home in the Republican Party—I'm pro choice, drug legalization, and gay marriage—I hold a deep appreciation for the leadership and savvy negotiating skills of the seventh president of the Screen Actors Guild, and fellow actor, Ronald Reagan. head monologue writer for NBC's Late Night Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Wayne Federman is an actor, comedian, and writer known for his roles in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Step Brothers, 50 First Dates, and various television shows including Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show, X-Files, and The League. He was the head monologue writer for NBC's Late Night Night with Jimmy Fallon.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY ONE – From Deadline

PETER BART: THE “CLUB” THAT USED TO SOLVE HOLLYWOOD’S LABOR PROBLEMS IS EXTINCT. SO NOW WHAT?

By Peter Bart July 20, 2023 3:41pm

“To survive in Hollywood, all you need is an occasional miracle.”

An amateur philosopher named Ronald Reagan once directed those words to me, referring to the unexpected labor crisis of 1960. Hollywood’s actors had shocked their industry by voting to strike and now looked to their leader, Reagan, then president of SAG, to advance a solution.

Reagan was far from a resolute figure at the time. He had won his following as a crusading liberal Democrat but had now decided he was a Republican. A true believer, Reagan nonetheless forged ahead, soon finding his instant miracle and taking bows for putting the industry back to work (more on that below).

Hollywood today is looking for another Reagan miracle even though neither the industry’s structure nor its economics makes much sense to its audience or the stock market. Indeed, if Reagan was surprised in 1960 he would be even more bewildered at this moment when, once again, Hollywood is searching for leadership.

In Reagan’s era, Hollywood was ruled by a club – one that has since become extinct. “The tech companies now in control haven’t a care or a clue about the entertainment business,” as Barry Diller puts it. Like other industry leaders, Diller fears the devastating impact of a long-term stoppage.

The agendas of companies like Apple, Amazon or even Netflix are not in sync with those of today’s studio power players. Leaders like Bob Iger or David Zaslav have dropped comments triggering the sort of “class warfare” tensions reminiscent of 1930s, not the 2020s. Powerful agents like Bryan Lourd or Ari Emanuel have attempted to become calming influences. But they, too, have warred in the past with the WGA over packaging fees and ancillary production entities.

In generations past, Hollywood’s miracles often took the form of hit pictures — hence optimists draw encouragement from the promising prospects now lined up on the runway. Tom Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible has already taken flight, to be followed – even topped — by Oppenheimer, Barbie and others.

If they live up to expectations, their impact could go far beyond the box office: A major hit could re-energize a creative community that has succumbed to the woes of streamerville.

Hollywood veterans remember vividly the extraordinary impact of Titanic in reversing a major sag in the late ‘90s. Earlier, In the 1960s, surprise indie hits like Midnight Cowboy and The Graduate silenced doubters who’d feared that the 40% defection of filmgoers would be a permanent phenomenon.

So could a few hits once again remind the community of Reagan’s miracles? Says one CEO who declines to be quoted: “The writers and actors strikes will likely choke off a possible resurgence. The stars will have to sit on the sidelines and the festivals will perish.”

Today’s conditions, of course, contrast sharply with those of the Reagan Moment – the cast of characters is different and so is their motivation.

In the Reagan era, the leaders who gathered around the bargaining table had grown up together in the industry and understood the obstacles ahead. Not only was the box office fading but the antitrust crusaders had suddenly decreed that the studios must exit the distribution business.

At the same time, Hollywood stars were adding a new word to their vocabulary: residuals. It became Reagan’s mission as SAG president to persuade the studios that residuals were now a key to future peace.

The upshot: An urgent dialogue between Reagan and the powerful Lew Wasserman who, while president of Universal, had formerly been Reagan’s agent. As members of the club, the time had come for some gentlemanly bargaining: Wasserman could steer residuals to the stars while SAG could reciprocate with important concessions that would help Universal. It was all within club rules.

As a miracle worker, Reagan, of course, would soon shift his ambitions from acting to a more intriguing horizon; there was a life beyond Hollywood. As an aspiring political figure, he was eager to explain his intentions and strategies to someone like me – I was then the New York Times reporter in Los Angeles covering both politics and Hollywood.

As an ex officio member of the media club, I would understand his belief in miracles. And I would also realize that the true subtext of the Wasserman-Reagan negotiations had more to do with long-term political support and funding than with residuals or TV packaging structures.

ATTACHMENT THIRTY TWO – From Politico

OPINION | RON DESANTIS AND THE HOLLYWOOD STRIKERS SHOULD UNITE AGAINST DISNEY

Opinion by MATT STOLLER 07/28/2023 06:57 AM EDT

Matt Stoller is the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project and publishes the monopoly-focused newsletter BIG. 

In 1886, railroad and telegraph baron Jay Gould famously boasted, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Corporate power, in other words, can keep a nation divided.

This fact of politics was true then, and it’s true now. And we can see that with one of the more unusual dynamics in American politics, as both the left, in the form of an actors’ and writers’ strike, and the right, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, are fighting with the giant Disney corporation.

The GOP presidential candidate and the striking Hollywood creatives may not agree on much, but both are aggrieved by Disney’s raw use of power, and perhaps the broader dynamic of corporate monopolies in general. If the right and left join forces, they might be able to take on the entertainment behemoth — and even push to break up the company. Doing so may sound like a fantasy, but it would actually mark a return to the kind of market structure that once characterized the industry, while delivering better results for the broader public.

It’s odd to think that a populist series of rebellions would target Walt Disney’s creation. Disney World is the so-called “happiest place on Earth,” the favored destination of Super Bowl winners and six-year-olds alike. Disney can boast of spurring the golden era of 1950s animation, and then in the 1980s and 1990s of bringing Broadway-caliber theatrics to cartoon films in classics like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and the Little Mermaid. Today, it’s hard to find little girls who don’t love Frozen.

And yet, Disney is a different firm than it was just a few decades ago, and its change reflects a broader transformation in America. The studio is no longer just Walt’s playground but “imperial” Disney, in the words of film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, a colossus formed after a deregulatory push in the 1990s paved the way for a series of mergers and acquisitions that placed huge amounts of intellectual property — from Lucasfilm to Marvel to Pixar to the Muppets to Fox — in the hands of just one company. It now has roughly a quarter of the nation’s theatrical box office take, despite making fewer films than it used to.

CEO Bob Iger, who ditched the beloved Mickey Mouse ties his predecessor wore, made it clear in his biography that his strategy wasn’t to do great storytelling, which is what Americans loved about Disney, but to build a portfolio of brands and extend its power into direct distribution to 160 million homes. In addition, it is now a global empire and has to protect its significant investments in China by offering obsequious gestures to the Chinese government.

The rise of imperial Disney and its vast bargaining leverage has led to considerable fallout. One consequence is simply that Disney, like all giant streaming firms, has reduced its payout to writers, producers, directors, actors, movie theaters and suppliers. The strike consuming Hollywood is a reaction to this dynamic. Another is that the company has raised ticket prices at its theme parks for consumers and eliminated perks that longstanding Disney fans appreciated. A third is that the firm’s creative energy is dissipating, with an endless surfeit of Marvel movies. And fourth, it wields its cultural power in clumsy ways that angered and annoyed large swaths of the public, first by holding its fire on Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law and then by firmly opposing it.

All of these problems are happening now, because Disney, like other firms that have generated bipartisan backlash, such as Google and Facebook, is less a set of businesses trying to sell products than a giant financial institution organized around acquiring and maintaining market power. In other words, the fury directed at the House of Mouse isn’t about Disney, per se; it’s about the end of antitrust enforcement and regulations designed to keep markets open, a shift that’s happened across industries.

America has been here before. And Gould’s quote hints at the challenge of restoring some semblance of the old Disney, and an older and fairer economic order, that we know and love. In the 1880s, populists — a multi-racial movement of farmers in the Midwest and South — wanted to tackle the creeping corporate power that was arising all around them. They saw as a distraction the elevation of 19th century culture war issues, mostly anchored in the post-Civil War political campaign tactics of “waving the bloody shirt” to get voters to remain loyal to either Democrats (the Confederacy) or Republicans (the Union).

Anti-monopolists argued that late 19th century America, with the rise of firms like Standard Oil and giant railroad and telegraph systems, was simply a different place than it had been in 1865. And so politics should change with it. Over the course of decades, a broad coalition reoriented government to do that, making the big corporation safe for democracy by using a variety of traditional regulatory tools, updated for the industrial era.

As movie studios consolidated power over the film industry, the heirs to these populists broke them up after a fight that ended in a landmark 1948 Supreme Court case, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. After the big three TV networks — NBC, CBS and ABC — gained virtually unfettered control of the market, and began really enriching themselves through their syndication policies, anti-monopolists at the Federal Communication Commission effectively broke them up in 1970.

Today, Gould’s challenge remains. The right and left disagree on much, but both think Disney is too powerful. And yet ultimately dominant corporate power rests on public legitimacy. If policymakers enact rules to break up Disney, as they have in the past with other entertainment industry giants, then that power evaporates. We’ve already seen a hint of that, with DeSantis passing laws stripping Disney of certain economic privileges, and with the striking creatives stopping the flow of new content to Disney’s streaming service.

Forcing studios to once again choose to be either content producers or content distributors might even please investors, who are increasingly unhappy with the poor returns from streaming-first business models. There are forms of this industry structure in the U.K., where a Terms of Trade code put in place since the early 2000s has fostered a vibrant and growing production industry of both large and small firms.

Right now, however, anger at the power of big firms is too inchoate to matter. Despite the strike from the left and political assault from the right, Disney’s leadership remains relatively unfazed, because neither attack is enough to win on its own. Despite their mutual suspicions, the right and left will need to work together if they have any hope of securing real change.

And perhaps there is more in common than we might think. At the end of the day, no one really likes the endless stream of mediocre Marvel and Star Wars movies — except the financiers who prefer controlling markets to great American storytelling.