from the current print issue of Below the Line:

Union Roundup
by
Mark London Williams

Since this is the new year column, one presumes there’s the usual cusp-of-the-calendar license to look back, devise lists, and/or look ahead — and devise lists.

A “top ten” Hollywood labor moments of 2008, or perhaps “ten things to look for in the new year.”

But really, the main “highlight” of course, is that the writers’ guild strike was settled with what Ed Asner — in an LA Times Op-Ed appearing over the holidays, and doubtless being read from Aspen to Maui — called “the eight global conglomerates that control movies and television.” It’s an accurate thumbnail economic analysis, made as Asner took to print and pixels to call for a resounding strike authorization vote for the actors’ union:”Almost all informed actors, including some recent outspoken A-listers, agree that what’s being offered is inadequate for SAG members. But many of them still won’t vote to authorize a strike. Do they realize how their “go along to get along” attitude will affect their brothers and sisters?,”" he writes.

“What all of those with weak knees fail to acknowledge is that the business plan for new media is being written right now, and that what we agree to now will become the ‘template’ that the industry will cling to going forward, with no obligation to make charitable revisions,” he concludes, and while he’s not wrong, one has spent the year feeling that the Hollywood behemoths — those eight main conglomerates — and the often high-profile (as well as, dear BTL reader, the unsung ones) workers they employ, will eventually go the way of Detroit’s “Big Three,” all of them imagining that a mid-20th century economic model will still pertain to the manufacture, and vending, of their products.

Asner, and the various guild leaderships, know that we’re facing 21st century issues — digital delivery, by way of large example. But the feints and parries — and inevitable breakdowns — of Hollywood’s management/labor relationships are similarly mired in the mid-20th century. Everyone assumes that the thirst for “entertainment” will remain unabated, and lifestyles along Montana Avenue or Latigo Canyon Road will ultimately be unperturbed, once the issue of revenue streams can be sorted out.

It’s the same assumption Detroit has: “Well, if we just build the right thing, money will come flooding in again!” But that might not be true for either the tatters of Michigan’s management class, or the UAW.

Author/commentator James Howard Kunstler has been charting this reworking of American assumptions in his column, the merrily-titled “Clusterfuck Nation.” In his own end-of-year wrap up, he notes that while there will be undoubtedly be “a period of euphoria to mark the early weeks, perhaps months, of the Obama team (since it) will be a relief to have a president who speaks English correctly and has experienced something like real life prior to politics,” he also notes that Much Tougher Times loom ahead:

“We’ll turn around early in 2009 and discover that we are a much poorer nation than we thought because from now on credit will be extremely hard to get for anyone for anything. The businesses that survive will have to keep going on the basis of accounts receivable. This is the area where the crash of giants will be heard… comprehensive downscaling in all our activities, from farming to business to schooling to governance, will be the categorical imperative of the years ahead. Giant enterprises requiring giant loans to get from quarter to quarter will tend to not make it.”

Which brings us not only to questions about the viability of all those vertically/horizontally “integrated” conglomerates running the production/distribution end of things, but also all the assumptions about the “audience,” ready to fund whatever agreenment emerges from a Hollywood labor dispute.

Even someone as politically astute as Asner makes those assumptions, as he stresses the imperatives of slicing up the pie for digital revenues: “right now, you can go to your local Best Buy, purchase a big-screen TV with a direct Internet connection and download television online programming with the touch of a remote.” To stress the urgency, he repeats “it’s happening now.”

But what happens when no one can afford the indebtedness to take home one of those Best Buy behemoths? In fact, what happens when your high-speed internet connection — cable, or otherwise — becomes a “luxury” expense? Who, what, or where is the audience then?

To be sure, the theaters won’t be emptied out in the immediate future — there are still the soothing comforts of a big screen in dark times. But even that most “traditional” model of gauging Hollywood success — box office revenue — is undergoing some scrutiny.

The reliably astute Michael Cieply had an intriguing article in the New York Times recently, trying to separate the wheat and chaff from the current hyperbole about Hollywood’s hit machine, which is saying that as long as we have enough superhero movies and teenage vampires, all will be well:

“I mean, who could forget ‘Twilight’? Teenagers screaming for free tickets outside the dual-theater Westwood premiere here. Mayhem in the malls. Girls thirsting for Robert Pattinson. Box-office projections growing bigger and bigger as online vendors sold out theater after theater…It was amazing. When all is said and done, maybe 24 million tickets will be sold to that movie, based on current sales.”

Cieply’s entire thesis is that we have to look at numbers of tickets sold — especially relative to a larger putative audience (and likewise adjusting “raw box office” for inflation) — to gauge what kind of cultural, and marketplace, import today’s “hits” really have. So in terms of tickets, then, “Twilight” is “almost as big as, what? ‘Patch Adams,’ the No. 10 movie of 1998. Or roughly the size of ‘George of the Jungle,’ which placed No. 13 the year before. Or any number of films that are fondly remembered as midsize hits.”

Even last year’s smasheroo offering, “The Dark Knight,” was actually “never quite as big as it felt. Clear away the urgent reports about 6 a.m. screenings and Imax-size demand, and you are left, according to an always-sobering tally kept by the Box Office Mojo Web site…with the 26th-most-popular movie of all time, in terms of tickets sold.” Cieply concludes that “apparently, movie events that were once routine are now routinely treated as thrilling.”

And speaking of middles and muddles, as of this writing, the once-imminent SAG strike authorization vote, scheduled for the second day of the new year, has been punted into mid-January, to “address the unfortunate division and restore consensus,” as SAG leadership is quoted in an article in London’s Guardian.

Consensus, though, is easier at extremes — when things are going quite well, or completely wrong, a kind of clarity is often available.

But — back to middles again — we’re in a slow, unwinding betwixt/between state: The old, lavish American ways now ensconced in the rearview mirror, with brand new social arrangements — necessitated by larger economic, environmental and energy realities - ahead.

As in all times of upheaval, we’ll need our storytellers and performers, of course. But how will they be paid? And who will own their labor?

Write in: mark.williams@btlnews.com