This headline is a little bit misleading, I’ll stipulate, because it doesn’t take something into account which is obvious – namely, that the lament of Kaylee Poche and the other leftists on the staff and the limited readership of John Georges’ other vanity publication isn’t the decline of the film industry per se but the particular incumbents who brought it on.
But that’s not how this piece is sold. It’s most concerned about the plight of set workers in New Orleans who are losing out on job opportunities as the writers and actors go out on strike and the projects grind to a halt.
For the last eight years, New Orleans resident Lewis “Duck” Pieratt has worked on local TV and film sets building and operating the cranes and dollies for cameras. Pieratt had worked his way up, starting off sweeping floors before moving on to making props and ultimately to his current job as a grip. The long hours during productions are grueling — he typically clocks in 60-80 hours a week. But with most of that coming as overtime or double-time pay, Pieratt was making good money, averaging anywhere between $8,000-$10,000 in a good month, he says. Plus, as a member of the local chapter of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) for the last decade, he was able to get health insurance and a pension. He even fulfilled his longtime goal of buying a house. It’s “just a lot of stability … we make enough money to where in the lean times you have money saved up,” Pieratt says. But nothing could have prepared him for the past nine or so months. Now, he says, “There’s barely nothing … I know people who haven’t worked since November.” Long before the national writers union went on strike in May or the actors union joining them on the picket line July 14, work had started drying up. That’s because the heads of TV and film production companies already knew they likely wouldn’t meet worker demands for protections and benefits when the major union contracts expired in the spring and summer. So rather than start new productions and have them or the promotion of them halted by strikes, major studios and distributors, like Disney/ABC/Fox, Paramount/CBS, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery (HBO), Apple, Netflix and Amazon, began holding off on new projects altogether. As a result, opportunities in the industry have been drying up since the end of 2022, leaving thousands of people in Louisiana out of work before the strikes officially started. Trey Burvant, president of The Louisiana Film & Entertainment Association, compared the current state of the industry — with only commercials or indie projects left shooting — to the pandemic shutdowns. “You’ve got empty stages,” he says. “You’ve got folks that have been used to working for years, some of the best in the industry, sitting on the sidelines looking for other work.”
Obviously, nobody begrudges Duck Pieratt, or any of the other people mentioned in the piece, a job.
But let’s face it – working in the film industry means you’re going to be off and on. It’s great when the getting is good, but it’s seasonal work at best.
And it isn’t at best.
The Gambit piece spends a lot of time screeching about the greed of the studio heads who’ve impoverished all the little ones in the industry. But it completely misses what’s happening to Hollywood right now. I had an entire column on this at The American Spectator last week, but rather than quote from that I’ll offer John Nolte’s excellent piece at Breitbart which summed up the situation brilliantly by saying that Hollywood is dying from six different causes…
- Cable and “linear” TV is going away thanks to people cutting the cord, and because of that the big media conglomerates who own 80 percent of those channels are losing the financial padding the entertainment industry has had for decades.
- Streaming services which are replacing cable are all based on merit, in that people are chasing content rather than a brand. So if you want your streaming service to pick up an audience, you’d better have things folks want to watch. And the pay TV players trying to move things to streaming are finding out that nobody cares about most of their offerings.
- Hollywood was put on welfare by pay TV, and the film industry creators got very lazy and very woke knowing that they weren’t in an “eat what you kill” world.
- As Nolte puts it, “With billions and billions of unearned dollars pouring in from the old pay-TV model, Hollywood stopped worrying about quality, stopped worrying about serving Middle America, and felt secure turning their companies over to the Wokesters. Disney is so politicized it has openly embraced sexualizing its children’s content.” But with that model breaking down, the idiots at the top running these companies won’t let go of the woke poison which simply drowns them in red ink.
- Now there are lots of free TV options like FreeVee, Tubi, Redbox, and Pluto which pour a massive amount of programming out there for nothing. Most of it is old, and most of it is crap, but when all the new stuff is also crap, you’ll go for the free crap instead of the crap you have to pay for. Finally…
- The strike, as I noted in my column last week, has put all of this into the open.
Because the writers and actors want residuals from the streaming services. And that’s a legitimate demand. The problem is, once the world finds out what those streaming services’ revenues really are, those mega media conglomerates are going to take a colossal hit on their stock prices – and then it becomes questionable whether their business models are viable at all.
Nolte’s correct in every particular, and what’s going to happen is that all of these giant media conglomerates who created this atrocious culture swamp we’re in will start failing.
Once the first one goes bankrupt, it’ll look like dominoes.
And they’re all going to die, because they’ve politicized their content and they’re totally out of touch with their audiences. Plus the movies and TV shows they make are utterly awful in the vast majority of cases. They can’t even make a decent morality play anymore most of the time.
But the interesting thing about it is the demand for entertainment hasn’t gone away. It’s still there. Quality entertainment still makes a killing.
And people who can produce quality entertainment will end up having a better shot at scoring big, because the corporate gatekeepers will be gone. The next iteration of Hollywood will be crowdfunding platforms for streaming film projects like Angel Studios.
This was all going to happen anyway. With the Hollywood strike, it’s going to accelerate. All of this is a good thing.
Ultimately, at least some of the film industry will come back to New Orleans and elsewhere in Louisiana. But it won’t likely be a bunch of Hollywood players bringing California values to Louisiana movie sets. It’s probably going to be a lot more of a democratized, wide-open industry based on projects the audience has pre-paid for. Because the Angel Studios model, which is bottom-up, is a whole lot more sustainable than the top-down model of Hollywood, where some mogul greenlights projects or kills them.
That top-down model works OK when you have a David O. Selznick with a magic touch running the show. Now, thanks to corporate wokeness you have people like Kathleen Kennedy, who managed to destroy both the Star Wars AND Indiana Jones franchises.
From a public policy standpoint, what Louisiana’s candidates in this fall’s elections ought to be thinking about is how to revamp the state’s tax incentive program to stimulate the growth of a fully domestic, independent film industry which can build projects soup to nuts here in Louisiana. Forget about giving tax credits to mega media conglomerates from Hollywood; try to get film production companies here in the state rolling so that it’s Louisiana values making it to movie and TV screens, rather than those of the woke elite. And maybe re-set that program up so that it takes an investor’s stake in those film projects – hit big on a few of them and then it starts to pay for itself like a real film fund does.
That way Duck Pieratt, whose politics and philosophy we have no clue about, might well get a steady job working for a local company who isn’t subsidized by our taxpayers to make crap nobody wants to watch.