In Hollywood, the Strikes Are Just Part of the Problem

Author: Editors Desk Source: N.Y Times

July 15, 2023 at 07:37

The industry’s two traditional businesses, the box office and television channels, are struggling badly.Credit...Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

The entertainment industry is trying to figure out the economics of streaming. It’s also facing angst over a tech-powered future and fighting to stay culturally dominant.

Existential hand-wringing has always been part of Hollywood’s personality. But the crisis in which the entertainment capital now finds itself is different.

Instead of one unwelcome disruption to face — the VCR boom of the 1980s, for instance — or even overlapping ones (streaming, the pandemic), the movie and television business is being buffeted on a dizzying number of fronts. And no one seems to have any solutions.

On Friday, roughly 160,000 unionized actors went on strike for the first time in 43 years, saying they were fed up with exorbitant pay for entertainment moguls and worried about not receiving a fair share of the spoils of a streaming-dominated future. They joined 11,500 already striking screenwriters, who walked out in May over similar concerns, including the threat of artificial intelligence. Actors and writers had not been on strike at the same time since 1960.

“The industry that we once knew — when I did ‘The Nanny’ — everybody was part of the gravy train,” Fran Drescher, the former sitcom star and the president of the actors’ union, said while announcing the walkout. “Now it’s a walled-in vacuum.”

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