Labor Pains, Offset by New Diversions
Dear Wags,
“Well, it’s over,” said Our Friend the Strike Captain, who was shoving picket signs into a bin when we rang. “For now, anyway. Don’t act like this is over forever.”
Who gets peace of mind forever? But do give us a day to feel the shudder of relief rippling through Los Angeles, from Silver Lake to the Santa Monica Pier. Pending a few bits and bobs, the actors strike is history. After six months in neutral, the creaky engine of Hollywood will sputter back to life, which brings different miseries. Schedules must be unscrambled, and the holidays are practically here. Delays to production and associated costs are a nightmare. Businesses that support film and television have been devastated. The cost to the California economy is well into the billions. It’s like a massive pile-up on the 405, which will take ages to clear.
What is in this deal, anyway? Necessarily half of a loaf, says somebody familiar with the wrangle. Former picketers may feel their union did not pry quite enough loose when came to AI protections and future revenue from streaming. Those big questions will loom over every negotiation for the foreseeable future — they were never going to resolved by a single strike. This is the beginning, not the end, of a way of doing business.
Understand how clubby, hidebound, and rife with inefficiencies the entertainment industry can be. After decades of complacency, it has been jolted by a series of shocks— streaming, the pandemic, various and sundry reckonings. These challenges, as Entertainment Strategy Guy points out, have revealed just how troubled the enterprise is: Its distribution model is in tatters, its overhead is enormous, and it has unmoored itself from a general audience that sustained hits (and helped it weather flops). Yet the business has a vestigial charm, which does not appear on spread sheets or blossom in the C-suite. Hollywood’s allure has to do with quirky human talent and the primal appeal of stories.
Until lately, those magical qualities have gotten short shrift. Like so many troubled industries, entertainment tried to ape the habits of Silicon Valley, reducing what it makes to disposable content and diminishing humanity in favor of anodyne shareholder value. In the process, it cut itself off from the crowds that made it successful in the first place.
The Hollywood leadership class has a knack for affecting social concern, but their remaining employees are hyper-attuned to hypocrisy. The writers and actors strikes of 2023 may turn out to be bumps in a road that leads inexorably to a different industry, one in which human beings matter less and technology matters even more. But certain assumptions have been shaken. Bland managerial arrogance has been met with visceral outrage, and the McKinsey types have been forced to bend, if only a little.
The problems faced by studios and streamers (whose interests, Barry Diller points out, do not neatly align) remain. And, the producers’ contract with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents more than 150,000 backstage types, expires in July. So, we will go through these battles again. What is clear is that labor, in creative work and far beyond, has found its voice again. As Hollywood faces an uncertain future, bruised moguls will have to take that into account.
Yours Ever,
Reuben Warshowsky
Yanks Abroad
The Buccaneers (Apple TV+). Our official editorial position is that Edith Wharton kicks Jane Austen’s ass (or arse). Here we have Witty Katherine Jakeways’ take on Wharton’s 1938 novel, her last, which remained unfinished until Marion Mainwaring constructed an ending in 1993. A group of American debs —hello, Alisha Boe, Aubri Ibrag, Josie Totah, Kristine Frøseth, and Imogen Waterhouse—seek their fortunes in Jolly Old. Rejiggered for a contemporary sensibilities, it plays a bit like Gossip Girl, but it’s pleasant to watch the petticoats swirl. —Bertha Dorset
Another Day, Another Jackal
The Killer (Netflix). Being an assassin is stressful, but as the title hitman, Lord Michael Fassbender, copes by practicing calf-stretches and doing affirmations. He’s as cool as a cucumber until an assignment goes balls up. It makes him the focus of a global manhunt, and escaping that pickle will require all of his skills. Mr. Intensity David Fincher debuted this nail biter at the Venice Film Festival, and the cast includes Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell, and Tilda Swinton. It’s all as sleek as a stiletto. —Anton Chigurh
Mars Attacks
For all Mankind (Apple TV+). What an epic Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi have cooked up. It reinvents the space race, putting women in the center frame and accelerating achievements in interstellar exploration. This season, we are in an alternative version of 2003, in which there are permanent colonies on the moon and Mars. It’s a lavish spectacle that’s quite possibly being ignored. What a shame! Our galactic wanderers include Joel Kinnaman, Wrenn Schmidt, and Krys Marshall, among other worthies. Launch into the stratosphere with them. —Mark Watney
Housing Bubble
The Curse (Showtime). What could be more wearying than another pair of house-flippers gussying up an unsuspecting American burg on HGTV? Evil Genius Nathan Fielder gets that there is something creepy about missionaries of subway tiles and shabby chic décor. Sometimes, a rundown, slightly methy crossroads just wants to be left alone. He plays the unctuous hubby of a wild-eyed Emma Stone, who is determined to bring her eco-bungalows to Española, New Mexico. What could go wrong? Everything, and that’s OK with their amoral producer (Perfectly Mad Benny Safdie). —Walter Fielding, Jr.
Love Will Tear Us Apart (Again!)
Fingernails (Apple TV+). The Era of Jessie Buckley is well underway. Someday soon, she will win an Oscar. At the moment, she plays a teacher who finds new employment in a sort of love factory run by Luke Wilson (couples are scientifically matched with mates, satisfaction guaranteed). It’s a quirky place we’ve popped by before — in movies by Yorgos Lanthimos and Michel Gondry. It’s worth a return visit, because Buckley shoots moonbeams out of every pore as a gal torn between two lovers (Jeremy Allen White and Riz Ahmed). It’s the whole head vs. heart dilemma, artfully turned out by director Christos Nikou. Plus, Our Pal Annie Murphy will make you smile. — Clementine Kruczynski
Clive Owen, in Reykjavik, with an Ice Pick
Murder at the End of the World (FX on Hulu). Emma Corrin, last seen rollerskating through Kensington Palace as Shy Di in The Crown, returns by a Nosy Parker named Darby Hart, who, along with eight other guests, has been invited to the Icelandic retreat of a sinister billionaire (Lord Clive Owen). There will be dinner, and murder, and a frantic search for clues before the killer knocks off each of our visitors, one by one. Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij whipped up this chilly thriller.—Henrik Vanger .
The Tour de Force
With all of Hollywood’s hiccups, it's easy to forget that this is traditionally the season when Very Big Stars are showcased in Very Meaty Roles. It isn’t quite over! In Nyad (Netflix, we have Dame Annette Bening dodging sharks and stinging nettles as she swims from Florida to Cuba as The Unsinkable Diana Nyad, with Rhys Ifans and Jodie Foster rooting her on. Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi have obviously seen Rocky, and the script, by Julia Cox and Ann Biderman, is designed to lodge a lump in your throat. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (Theaters) casts Sir Paul Giamatti in the role of a crusty teacher, stranded at a boarding school over Christmas with a wayward preppy (Dominic Sessa) and the cafeteria lady (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). It’s a sweet comedy that feels like it wandered into the multiplex from a less bombastic era. Lastly, Wag Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla introduces the world to Remarkable Cailee Spaeny as Mrs. Elvis. She’s already won the Best Actress award at Venice. Clear the runway for what’s next. — Addison DeWitt
For more than a decade, a Tennessee county illegally jailed hundreds of kids. The Kids of Rutherford County, a four-part documentary from the folks who brought you Serial exposes officials who locked up young people for minor infractions without much protest, until former juvenile offenders started speaking out. Reporter Meribah Knight investigates a twisty tale of corruption and criminal justice in collaboration with the New York Times, ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio. — Elizabeth McHenry
I know that you need someone to blame/So you always choose yourself. Kyoto’s Sen Morimoto, a jazz-rap instrumentalist, cranks out a very funky number in Bad State. We think we heard this as a kid, playing on the stereo in some divorced dad’s sunken living room, high in Hollywood Hills. There’s a smidge of Steely Dan in this bowl, and we mean that in the best possible way. —Polexia Aphrodesia
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) disappointed its director and fizzled the box office. Too stagey and experimental for mainstream postwar audiences, its reputation has grown ever since. The story of two brilliant young men who almost get away with murder was adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play, which in turn was inspired by the 1924 murder of Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. The cinematic translation was handled by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents. For his first technicolor project, Hitchcock wanted to replicate the claustrophobic feel of his 1944 movie Lifeboat; he dispensed with traditional film-making techniques to create a drama of long unbroken scenes set in a single room. The effect was one of continuous, real-time action, ratcheting up the intensity as James Stewart figures out just what the killers, played by John Dall and Farley Granger, have done. Stewart found the project exasperating (the actors had to subordinate their work to the camera, which moved around them on rollers). But the overall effect — the walls close in as the murderers are gradually found out — helped make Rope an immortal pyschological thriller. Hints of a gay relationship between the villains, more explicit on the stage, were muted for the film (Nov. 10, TCM). —Richard Greenleaf
