Hollywood’s workers are on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear whether they will be going on a picket line. Eight days ago, 98% of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees members who voted chose to authorize a strike if the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers doesn’t offer them a better deal. With 60,000 IATSE members covered by the movie and TV contracts being negotiated—in jobs like makeup artist and set designer, grip and editor—a walkout could cripple the entertainment industry.
“It’s very ominous,” says Sarah May Guenther from the set of the forthcoming HBO Max limited series Love and Death, where she is a second camera assistant. She is also on the national executive board of the International Cinematographers Guild, which means every ring of the phone could bring the news that changes everything for her and her colleagues. “I was going out to take a call, and my director of photography came up to me and he was just like, ‘Are we going on strike?’” Guenther says. “‘Should I be preparing for this?’”
It’s hard to see how Hollywood could adequately prepare for a walkout of this size, as it would encompass workers from preproduction all the way through to postproduction.
“They’re the one union that could strike and it would actually be incredibly powerful—they are everything!” says the showrunner of a popular streaming series. “It would be a disaster,” argues Sue Naegle, chief creative officer of Annapurna, which produces both television and movies. “If there is a strike, we’ll have a certain warning so we can get everybody wrapped and then support our crew.” What’s the backup plan? “There is no backup plan.”
Studio and streaming executives are closely monitoring the situation. There are rumors that some productions are currently working seven-day weeks in anticipation of a strike, hustling to get shooting done. Many productions are already on such tight schedules or have such narrow time frames with A-list actors that even a short walkout could spell disaster.
As for IATSE members, Guenther says, “We’ve definitely been told by our union to start saving up and be prepared for no income.”
IATSE and AMPTP have been at the negotiating table all this week. “We’re hoping we can get a deal to prevent having to figure out how disruptive [a strike] is,” says IATSE communications director Jonas Loeb. In a statement, AMPTP spokesperson Jarryd Gonzales says the organization “remains committed to reaching an agreement that will keep the industry working,” arguing that “a deal can be made at the bargaining table, but it will require both parties working together in good faith with a willingness to compromise and to explore new solutions to resolve the open issues.”
Hollywood has long been a progressive beacon, albeit one that doesn’t always live up to its ideals. Productions divide workers into two stark categories: above the line (generally stars, directors, producers, and writers) and below the line (everyone else). Many of the issues under discussion by below-the-line workers are both primal and familiar to many Americans, whether they are gig workers or fully employed. IATSE members are demanding reasonable working hours, rest periods, sufficient health insurance, and a safe work environment, among other things.
Not known for drama, the 128-year-old IATSE has never before authorized a national strike. Its members are the workhorses of Hollywood, many of whom traditionally prided themselves on their toughness and endurance.
“All of us have been conditioned into this [idea] that we’re making magic —a ‘we’ll do anything,’ can-do attitude,” says Marisa Shipley, an art department and set decoration coordinator who has worked on Roseanne and Grace and Frankie. She’s also vice president of Local 871, which she says represents some of the lowest-paid workers. “We’re groomed into the expectation of the industry that you’re gonna have to work for free and the hours are gonna be ridiculous…. But it becomes like self-harm in a way.”
When the pandemic shut down Hollywood, Shipley says, it left many television and film people without work for many months. It also allowed some of her colleagues to take a step back and see their situation more clearly. “The shutdown was the first extended rest that some [of these workers] have gotten!” Suddenly, the ordinary grind people endured behind the scenes began to seem less...ordinary.
Sarah May Guenther was one of those people questioning the hardships she and her colleagues put themselves through. In November 2019, she crashed her car into a wall on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway after a long “Fraturday” shoot—Fraturday being crews’ nickname for a very long shoot that stretches from Friday afternoon to the wee hours of Saturday morning. “I was tired and I was on the phone with a coworker trying to keep myself awake, because I knew that it was going to be a risky drive,” she recalls.
Although she wasn’t injured, her car was totaled—and she was embarrassed. “I felt like I had failed at trying to survive the conditions I was [expected to] uphold,” Guenther says. Back on set, a colleague consoled her: “Hey, it’s okay, I’ve done this four times. Welcome to the club!”
After life in lockdown, she and some of her colleagues hit the pandemic wall and acknowledged their vulnerability. “There’s still a bravado, but I think that a lot of people are kind of in a place where they’re like, No, we are human.”
That’s most apparent on the @ia_stories Instagram page, the launchpad for an explosion of anonymous anecdotes about crew life that has shocked Hollywood with its brutality. There are tales of mangled cars, similar to Guenther’s. There are 18-hour days, days without lunch breaks or bathroom breaks, and weeks without time off. There are tales of people collapsing on set and ones of workers living in their cars. “We had a dept head die of a massive heart attack a few weeks ago and we just kept shooting,” one anonymous contributor wrote. “Then they added more days, more hours, and more weekend work. They brought in a grief counselor the next day but didn’t even break for lunch so no one could visit them.”
The account has elicited a flood of sympathetic responses from famous actors, directors, and politicians such as Mindy Kaling, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and Kerry Washington; Pamela Adlon even posted a video her crew made in solidarity. Some actors and writers who posted seemed horrified by the conditions experienced by colleagues.
“There is just such a gigantic divide between the working conditions of those above the line and below the line,” says Marisa Shipley. “The whole industry is in a lot of ways built to insulate those above-line people from the realities of both the working conditions of the crew [and] sometimes the way their wants and needs and demands affect the crew directly, because there is such a culture of catering to them. I hope that this real public conversation makes it impossible to claim ignorance on that anymore.”
Many in Hollywood had become habituated to the extremes of the system, but the Instagram account stories feel like a #MeToo moment for Hollywood’s underclass. “We’ve all just accepted that this is how it is—that 14-hour days are the norm, when they really shouldn’t be because they’re dangerous,” says Naegle, an industry veteran. “I think the industry is just due for change, in terms of hours that are expected and how we’re paying people.”
Returning to work in the midst of a pandemic only ratcheted up the problem. Studios and streamers that had to shut down productions at the start of COVID-19 were desperate to meet the pent-up desire for new content. Hundreds of productions burst back to life in a mad rush, with budgets newly saddled by the cost of pandemic protections. Now people are expected to not only work gruelingly long days, but to do so in N95 masks alongside unmasked actors. Despite the new protocols, Guenther says, “we’re still trying to do our jobs in the same way. A lot of our equipment is so heavy that you need two people less than six feet apart from each other to [lift it], so we’re just putting ourselves in risky conditions to do it.”
Meal breaks have become more of an issue than ever. In the past a cameraman might not have been able to leave the set to eat, but someone could have brought food to them. With COVID, workers can’t take their masks down on the set, which could mean a full day without eating and drinking. And the fact that everyone’s wearing a mask further depersonalizes the situation, since the execs and stars might never even see crew members’ faces.
“Everything was so difficult, and there was no commensurate appreciation for that,” says the streaming showrunner. “Even though people were literally essential workers putting themselves physically at risk, there was just an impulse to just keep making it as hard as possible to save money…. I think the tech company mentality is, Cool, you did it one time. Now you can do it again with 5% less money! And so everyone is just getting squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed with these long days and dangerous hours.”
One of the issues being negotiated by IATSE and AMPTP is how much streamers should pay crew members. A 2009 agreement, written when the streaming scene was still in its infancy, gave some platforms a discount. As a recent IATSE statement noted, “The most profitable companies on the planet do not need cut rates that were negotiated to address a once-emerging distribution method. Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook should all pay industry-standard wages to the professionals who crew their productions.”
The current negotiations involve two different contracts that cover many (but not all) television and movie crew members. If talks fall apart, it could lead to the biggest Hollywood strike since 1945. Many of the IATSE details would normally feel like inside baseball—but this particular struggle is resonating with people in other areas of Hollywood, as well as American workers generally.
“Amazon and Apple have arms in television production now,” Marisa Shipley says. “And so part of me has to believe that a lot of people are looking at us and the power of our vote and asking, What happens from here?”
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“There Is No Backup Plan”: Can the Threat of a Strike Make Hollywood Live Up to Its Ideals? - Vanity Fair
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