Fran Drescher Says the Jig is Up!
Dear Wags,
We interrupt Barbie vs. Oppenheimer blah-blah with this dispatch from the actual Human-Robot war. As Wag Suprema Fran Drescher puts it, This is a moment of history that is a moment of truth.” The last time we saw Drescher, she was hawking a sitcom called Happily Divorced. Now she’s Winston Churchill! It’s the role of a lifetime.
The Great Actors’ Strike of 2023 is the latest aftershock from huge technological change. The fight between Drescher’s union, SAG-AFTRA, and studios and streamers isn’t merely about TV residuals. It’s about the nature of human creativity. Changes in the show business model have been wrenching in an industry that relied on big talent and big audiences. A handful of actors are rich, famous, and insufferable. Most are scraping by, just like everybody else. The old rules of the game were blithely rewritten without their consent and to their detriment. Like Hollywood’s writers —on strike for more than 70 days—they are furious.
Hard-pressed corporations will cut costs. What’s depressing is that they do so in predictably lousy ways. Labor is crushed, while the C-suite goes on feathering its nest. Before A.I. was a glimmer in a technologist’s eye, the creative economy shifted to modes that devalued artists (and the army of people who support them), in favor of the MBA class. The assumption was that creativity was simply another product to be cranked out at swamping volume. Success or failure wasn’t determined by talent but by programmatic hacks. Anybody could do the grubby human stuff. All the magic was in spreadsheets and algorithms.
This is false, and the chickens have come home to roost. The shift to streaming disrupted show business without coming up with a monetization strategy to replace what was lost. That lurch cut creatives off from potential earnings with little more than a Sorry, times have changed. Fragmentation may be unavoidable, but entertainment companies should expect a fight over a shrinking pie.
Storytelling is a wonky human activity. It does not always deliver a boffo shareholder return. Efforts to jam Hollywood into Silicon Valley’s model are problematic, because there is no clean techie formula for artistic success. Anybody who has worked in a media corporation knows there is always a febrile search for shortcuts: If only we could get those annoying, irrational, quirky humans out of the way. If only there were an equation that added up to a blockbuster!
The actors are onto this. Like the writers, they see the potential of generative A.I. to kill their ancient profession. The more challenging things become, the more such diabolical efficiencies are plausible. Drescher isn’t having it. “They plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs,” she says of media conglomerates. “It is disgusting. Shame on them.”
What’s happening to the industry can’t be hung on a few executives. But if the idea of work — in show business and everywhere— is changing, workers need a seat at the table. For decades, labor has been anemic force in American life. The relentless pace of change helped it find its voice—in Hollywood of all places. “What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor,” said Drescher. “When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run, we have a problem.”
Yours Ever,
Norma R. Webster
