In and Against the Dream Factory

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Hollywood does not exist. Not really, anyway. Asked to define its borders, most residents of Los Angeles will provide very different answers. Some will be starkly literal, describing the Walk of Fame, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and the rest of the cheap tinsel tourist traps that occupy a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. Others will be more ecumenical, including the surrounding environs like Echo Park and Silver Lake. Still others will make it a point to entirely exclude West Hollywood, which, despite its large number of theatres and acting schools, is an entirely separate municipality from the rest of LA. 

As for the movie stars and film studios synonymous with Hollywood, they are far-flung. Sure, there’s a smattering of well-known actors living in the Hills, under the shadow of the Hollywood sign. Far more live in Beverly Hills or Malibu. Meanwhile, many of the film studios are beyond the borders of Hollywood proper. Disney and Warner Bros are headquartered in Burbank, Amazon in Culver City, and so on. 

The romance, the action, the aura of celebrity, potent as they are, don’t rise fully formed from a single place. They are everywhere and nowhere, spontaneously emerging and consciously constructed. They casually anchor themselves in social life through destinations like Disneyland in Anaheim, Universal Studios in the San Fernando Valley, and are as disposable as a Map to the Stars. If Mike Davis’ observation that Los Angeles is less a place than an idea holds true, then Hollywood is its nebulous wellspring.

Recently, however, Hollywood has become surprisingly real – ironically because much of its usual business has disappeared. At midnight on 1 May 2023, the Writers Guild of America declared its first strike in fifteen years against the major entertainment studios, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Hundreds of WGA members are picketing outside Universal Studios in North Hollywood, Disney and Warner Bros, in Burbank, Netflix’s Sunset Boulevard headquarters, and other locations. Same for studios in New York City – NBC Studios at Rockefeller Center, Disney’s Times Square Studios, and the like. About 11,000 writers are striking. Every scripted TV show, every film funded by a major studio, grinds to a halt. 

The spirit on the pickets is angry, but also jubilant. ‘I’m so happy to be a member of the WGA’ says Marcelina Chavira. In the coming months, Chavira will be out in front of Paramount Studios on Melrose Avenue almost every day, alongside hundreds of others. The television writer, most recently on the reboot of beloved animated show King of the Hill, volunteered as picket captain. When asked why, she first brings up family history. ‘My father was a migrant farmworker growing up,’ she says. ‘So, I’ve always had reverence for the United Farm Workers.’

There is a certain myth of what it’s like to be a Hollywood writer, cut from the same cloth as all the other images of this city pinballing their way through mass consciousness. Just as everyone in Los Angeles spends their days at the beach being what they’ve always wanted to be, the Hollywood writer is paid obscene amounts of money to tinker on a keyboard for a few hours before heading off to weekend coke benders at a Malibu mansion. 

‘My first writing job, I was paid more than I’d ever been in my life’, says Chavira. 

But it was for eighteen weeks. And then I didn’t work again for a year and a half. So that’s the reality of it. You do make a good amount of money. Not anything life-changing, just enough to where I could pay my rent and buy groceries at the same time and pay all my bills. I wasn’t moving. I wasn’t buying a new car. I was just finally making ends meet. And that was my first writing job.

Chavira’s story is common among writers. In the days running up to the strike, Alex O’Keefe, staff writer for critically acclaimed series The Bear, spoke to the New Yorker. He shared stories of writers’ room meetings over Zoom in his unheated Brooklyn apartment, of showing up at award shows with a negative bank balance. 

‘A lot of people assume that, when you’re in a TV writers’ room, you sit around a table, and you just dream together’, said O’Keefe. ‘I thought we would be treated more like collaborators on a product. It’s like an assembly line now.’ 

Hollywood, such as it is, needs the fantasy of the dreamers. Without it, the assembly line risks falling apart. And so, perversely enough, the assembly line must also manufacture the dreamer fantasy. Discerning this is a strange kind of mise en abyme, each image giving way to another picture within a picture. At the core of it all, though, it’s the same old-fashioned exploitation keeping the machine chugging along. A dream factory, after all, is still a factory. 

A bright, guilty place

Any worthwhile theory of contemporary artistic and aesthetic production must grapple with the decadence piled onto it by profit. Identifying the creative process at its most essential entails stripping away the culture industry’s artifice, clearing the chaff that gets in between the human being and their creation. 

A quick survey of those theories that manage to accomplish this will yield a panoply of radical and revolutionary thought. Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Brecht’s epic theatre, the filmmaking of Dziga Vertov, the left wing of surrealism, the feminist gallery invasions of the Guerrilla Girls. Always implied, often explicit in these theories, is the quintessential communist ideal: that of humanity’s collective control over what it creates. Any understanding that elides these values will ultimately fail to understand what the commodity form has done to filmmaking.

One can keep all of this in mind, can be the most rigorously educated cultural theorist, and still be caught off-guard by Hollywood. Here, the simulacrum screams itself into existence before your eyes, alluring you, punishing you, then mocking you for being lured. It’s telling that the most recognised cover of The Society of the Spectacle features a photograph of moviegoers wearing 3D glasses, passively awaiting the film’s emergence into reality, and, unwittingly, its replacement – a photo taken, appropriately, in Hollywood. 

But ultimately, unavoidably, somewhere in the process of making art, someone must actually make the art. Conspicuous consumption and luxury never account for this. Indeed, they do everything they can to avoid any notion of aesthetics as work. But again, even the creation of that narrative requires someone pointing a camera, building a set, writing a script, before it can enter the ether and bait others into the mirage. As ideological ouroboroi go, it’s marvelously effective.

This is the tension of art under capitalism. During the earliest decades of moving pictures – when socialists, communists, and other militants fought to redefine the very nature of work – the conversation between film and the ideal of liberated labour was obvious. Charlie Chaplin in revolutionary Russia. Mickey Mouse shaking hands with Sergei Eisenstein. 

Walter Benjamin, in ‘The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, sketches not just the way authoritarian governments might use film to manipulate the masses, but how those same masses might democratically seize filmmaking for their own ends. Come the 1930s, one could point to both form and content reflecting what Michael Denning calls ‘the laboring of American culture’. 

Hollywood studio heads learned, particularly during the Great Depression, how to bury democratic truth in glitz. Louis B. Mayer – he of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – created the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Academy Awards, as an alternative to union organisation. 

It didn’t entirely work. Most of the Hollywood crafts ended up unionising, culminating in a series of bitter and often violent strikes in 1945 and ’46. But Mayer’s ploy was influential. Hollywood’s awards season is as inescapable as it is exhausting. For several months every year, the city teems with massive ‘For Your Consideration’ billboards implanting The Crown, Dune, and countless other properties into the mind of anyone who might be on a judging panel. There are, at best, a few thousand of these people in the Los Angeles area. As for the other four million who live here, the billboards beckon to us, inviting us into a club most of us can never join. In a city where everything is fake, nothing is so unbelievable as those who must work. At least we have an idea of what to watch when we get home.

As one would expect, the writers’ pickets are full of clever slogans. One sign in front of Disney in Burbank reads ‘The Greediest Place on Earth’. Others poke fun at writers’ legendary awkward and irascible temperaments: ‘You’re forcing us to socialise’, ‘Pay the nerds a fair wage’, ‘Stop walking off with my pens!’ 

Still others take characters, lines, or premises from shows or films, and détourne them off the screen and into the strike. Studio CEOs as Mr Burns, or the despicable wealthy characters from Succession. Then there are the signs that go full meta, embracing the absurdism of the whole situation: ‘You’re gonna be the villains in the limited series about this’, ‘Wrote ChatGPT This’, ‘EXT: STRIKE – DAY’.

There are some meaningful victories in these first weeks. Several films and series that attempted to keep shooting are shut down by picketers. After the WGA calls for a mass demonstration at the 2023 MTV Movie Awards, MTV announces that they will not hold a live show this year, switching it out for a series of filmed segments.Roughly two weeks later in Boston, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav speaks to graduates at the commencement ceremony for Emerson College. Or at least he tries to. He struggles to make his speech heard over the chants of ‘pay your writers’ coming from the audience of graduates. 

In their own way, each moment exposes a gap between the ideal of Hollywood and its reality. This is particularly the case with the embarrassment of David Zaslav. Since the merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery – a merger that made him CEO – Zaslav has become a cartoon-villain avatar for the callous way Hollywood regards creatives. A proponent of ‘reality-based’ content over scripted, his first move was to axe dozens of projects that had been completed or were close to completion. Work done by hundreds, if not thousands, of writers, actors, animators, editors, directors, and crew members will never see the light of day. Zaslav thought it better to scrap them and get a tax write-off.

There was, naturally, plenty of reportage on the extremity of Zaslav’s cuts. Likewise, there was no lack of commentary on the apparent disregard they showed for creatives’ work and livelihoods. These words made little difference. Zaslav still felt confident enough to show himself in public, stepping to the dais at Emory with that familiar smug grin on his face. His certainty, not misplaced, is that no matter how much ink is spilled, these same creatives are functionally little more than moving parts of his spectacle. What Zaslav and others are unprepared for is the possibility of these parts moving in a direction he hasn’t predicted. People, after all, are separate from their aesthetic place-holders. 

When writers last struck, in the winter of 2007 and 2008, they wrenched significant concessions from the studios regarding pay and residuals. Left almost entirely untouched were the WGA demands around the still-amorphous ‘new media’.

‘New media’, now taking the form of countless subscription streaming services, have given rise to a business model that deliberately bilks creatives. ‘Pre-streaming, they had the Nielsen system’, explains Marcelina Chavira. ‘So you saw data in terms of those watching, commercial values, and renewals and how much money you get in residuals. They had Nielsen families that reported how many people were watching every show.’

Streaming has thrown the Nielsen system for a loop. But if anything, tracking the number of views for a series or film should be easier. ‘Streamers know how many people watch any given episode of any show down to the number … They’re not telling us that. So they’re not being transparent with how much what we have done is worth.’

With studios unwilling to release the numbers, residuals for most writers have consequently been gutted. Writers tell of mailed royalty checks for literal pennies. They are, evidently, the lucky ones. Despite working on three shows, Chavira has never seen a cent in residuals. 

‘Residuals are what makes this a career’, she says. ‘You get paid a chunk of money for the eight to twenty-two weeks you work on something, and then the residuals are what lets you pay your bills the rest of the year, or while you look for more work.’

Part of the problem – and it is not a problem unique to film and television – is that so many of today’s streamers see entertainment as only one facet in a diverse portfolio. Apple TV is run by the most well-known computer and tech company on the planet. Prime Video is owned by Amazon. Even with production halted, the financial blow is cushioned. All the more reason, in the studios’ view, to refuse sharing viewership numbers, particularly now, when there is more television, more film, more content, being churned out than ever before. 

It has also meant that streamers have had no shortage of programming to roll out over the course of the strike. The last writers’ strike in 2007 and 2008 saw an explosion in reality TV in an attempt to fill empty time slots. Television’s most unfortunate mutant offspring now had the room to mature into a lumbering grotesque of popular culture: cheap to produce, no pesky unions, and overflowing with tawdry voyeurism. Jean Baudrillard once wrote that ‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.’ If so, then reality TV integrates reality and spectacle in a different way, showing us that our real lives can be orchestrated and quantified, observed and judged. 

Artificial intelligence, another bone of contention in this strike, takes it a step further. It adds another layer of mediation into both art and life. And where there is mediation, there is always a degree of control asserted. The question is by who. 

‘CEOs, they think in quarters’, says Chavira. ‘They are not big picture thinkers. Creatives are big picture thinkers. That’s why all this sci-fi has come true. This is the dystopia that we’ve been warning you about.’

There is, admittedly, a lot of hyperbole around AI. But the quieter, more mundane truth of it supplanting artistic labour – or any labour for that matter – is in many ways far more chilling than any number of Skynet-type scenarios. 

‘You don’t have to pay an AI; they don’t have families and bills and dreams’, explains Chavira. ‘But the bottom line is that AI is not generative. It’s derivative. All of its output is based on everything else, which is why Margaret Atwood and all these other authors are saying, “hey, we want to be compensated for the fact that you’re using our work to train your AI.”’

Chavira also argues that, with AI learning and deriving from such a hugely stratified culture, material created by AI is not unlikely to be marked with white supremacy, misogyny, and other toxicities. She also thinks AI is bound to tell us the same stories about the impossibility of change that seem to saturate film and television. 

‘Killmonger was right’, she says, reviving the discussions about the first Black Panther movie. ‘It would have been more interesting to see an actual Afro-futurist perspective in that movie, as opposed to it filtered through Marvel, a giant corporation that’s trying to uphold the status quo.’

AI represents a similar threat to actors. Caitlin Brodnick, a member of the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) for more than ten years, worries about actors’ ability to pay bills in a film landscape dominated by AI. ‘We don’t go to movies to watch something that a computer cranked out for us’, she says. All the major studios have publicly stated their intention to scan the faces and bodies of background actors so that their image can be used in perpetuity, without further compensation. With so many actors reliant on background work to pay the bills, this would make their craft even more precarious than it already is. 

‘It exerts such a strong control over that human being’s image’, she says. ‘And that’s not fair to anyone. You should have a say if somebody uses your image, ever … Maybe I don’t want to play a background Nazi supporter in 1945. Maybe I don’t want to do that, but I don’t have control over that either.’

This lack of stability and autonomy needn’t be such a strong feature of artificial intelligence. But any technology comes imprinted with the values of the society that made it. For all the mystification that surrounds artificial intelligence, even its own existence relies on the extreme atomisation of the labour process. As Phil Jones and others have pointed out with their recent reporting, the algorithms of AI and automation depend on the labour of underpaid microworkers, making pennies per click as they train programs to recognise and behave a certain way. 

In some ways, then, AI is just another phase in the evolution of platform capitalism. Once again, work is obscured to such a degree that it can be made more precarious, more easily controlled, more profitable. Until, and unless, someone takes it upon themselves to break through the spectacle. As capitalism in the twenty-first century comes to rely more and more on the alienating aesthetic, a meaningful labour militancy will require an ever-greater understanding of it. Such militancy will also require a willingness to disrupt not just business as usual, but the manufactured image of business as usual. For the two are now more intertwined than ever.

Beachside Versailles

Pull back the focus. From Hollywood to the rest of the culture industry, and into the rest of Greater Los Angeles, mapping the economic tangles binding them together. The WGA strike takes place in the context of general unrest among organised labour in the United States. Directly adjacent to the writers are the actors, also in extremely contentious negotiations with the AMPTP. Come July, they too will be on the picket lines.

Crew workers – camera operators, prop makers, lighting techs and other crew, organised into the International Alliance of Technical Stage Employees – prepared for a strike in late 2021. The strike didn’t happen, and union leadership caved on a last-minute deal. IATSE members are restless. Workers in several other creative industries are unionising: comic book editors, video game designers, music streaming programmers. It is not merely that capitalism has become more aesthetic – which it has. It is that the infrastructures of aestheticisation are more sophisticated, more atomised, more proletarianised than ever before – to the point that they have become near intolerable to the creatives they rely on. The myth of the culture worker as something other than a worker is probably more threadbare than ever. The interconnections between the lives of culture workers and workers writ large are, therefore, similarly apparent, including those well beyond the industries of film, TV, and music. Teamsters, who transport large sets and equipment onto the studio lots, have vowed not to cross picket lines. Later in the summer, preparations for a nationwide, 340,000-strong Teamsters’ strike at United Parcel Service will push the company into making significant concessions. Even then, the contract leaves significant demands unmet, prompting a vocal ‘vote no’ campaign among rank-and-filers.

On 26 May, a rally of several thousand union members and their supporters is held in Downtown Los Angeles, in front of Crypto.com Arena. This insipidly named sports stadium isn’t the only indication of how flagrant the corporate domination of culture is in LA. Unlike most other large cities in the United States, LA’s Downtown remains mostly run-down. This hasn’t made it any more affordable, with lux penthouses hovering ten-plus floors above tent cities and vacant storefronts. But the plaza directly abutting the Crypto.com Arena valiantly attempts to project itself apart from this. Polished surfaces, chain restaurants, digital billboards promoting sports events and new shows; a space designed for consumption rather than engagement.

The WGA is, naturally, the focal point of this rally, and there are speakers from SAG-AFTRA and IATSE at the front. But there are also speakers from the Teamsters, city workers represented in SEIU Local 721, teachers in United Teachers of Los Angeles, and hotel workers in UNITE HERE Local 11. All their respective contracts are expiring in the next several months. Los Angeles is about to become a flashpoint for American labour. In July, UNITE HERE launches a series of rolling strikes against Southern California’s biggest hotels. Members of the heavily Latino and immigrant workforce tell stories that illustrate a harrowing irony: working in the hospitality industry, ensuring that affluent tourists can spend a few nights in a city that is pushing workers further and further out. Los Angeles has one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. With rents constantly rising, room attendants, porters, housekeepers and others are forced to move to Santa Clarita, San Bernardino and other far-out cities.

‘I was priced out of my community in Los Angeles’, Marriott uniform attendant Brenda Mendoza tells the rally. ‘Now, I get a few hours of sleep every night and spend four hours a day driving on dangerous roads between my home in Apple Valley and my hotel job in Downtown LA’. Apple Valley is almost a hundred miles from Los Angeles.

Theme park workers report the same. At Universal Studios, employees are represented by both UNITE HERE and IATSE. The two unions have established a working relationship in negotiating with Universal. Ride operators, entertainers, and service workers report shabby working conditions, stagnant pay, and inability to make rent. Chris Lillian, a food stand worker, tells the crowd ‘my wages are so low that I had to choose between buying a car and housing.’ He will later tell investigative reporting site Capital & Main that he is often amazed that he is able to cover his monthly expenses. ‘It’s a never-ending litany of costs, which means there’s no work-life balance and no long-term plan’. 

Hearing these stories, and witnessing several thousand union members flooding the plaza near the arena, it is difficult to deny the gulf between actually-existing Los Angeles and the ideal of a truly democratic city. A few nearby restaurant patrons screw their faces up as the peace of their overpriced meal is interrupted. Cops, though mostly keeping their distance, shuffle their anxious feet, as if some instinct is telling them they’re supposed to be enforcing a more orderly public space.

Strikers and their supporters chant, dance, laugh, introduce themselves to one another. The false line between artist and worker breaks down. Briefly, this small part of LA fails in its aim to usher people to and fro, between exploitation and consumption. Those who work in the city can, at this moment, inhabit it with relative freedom. 

For now, it can only be a moment. On 11 July, Hollywood trade publication Deadline runs a story regarding the strategy of the AMPTP. The plan, says the article, is to let the strike drag on for several more months, until late autumn at the earliest. ‘The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses’, says the anonymous studio executive. Another, also anonymous, calls the strategy ‘a cruel but necessary evil’.

The next day, actor Ron Perlman posts a video on social media. ‘Listen to me, motherfucker’, says the hulking Hellboy actor. 

There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. Some of it is financial. Some of it is karma. And some of it is just figuring out who the fuck said that. And we know who said that, and where he fucking lives … You wish that on people? You wish that families starve, while you’re making 27-fucking-million dollars a year for creating nothing? Be careful, motherfucker. Be really careful. Because that’s the kind of shit that stirs shit up.

It isn’t clear whether Perlman knows who this eviction-happy executive is. Hollywood, as always, is full of untold stories that get around. Is Perlman, known for portraying tough, often bruiser type characters, simply putting one on for the sake of solidarity? Even if it is just bravado, does the role it plays in sharpening the anger toward the studios transcend the artifice?

The next day, on 13 July, talks between the AMPTP and SAG-AFTRA break down. There are differences between the demands of the actors and writers, but streaming residuals and AI are again at the top of the list. Union president Fran Drescher – a longtime actor best known for playing the titular character on ’90s CBS sitcom The Nanny – addresses the press conference. Perhaps it’s because it’s the day before Bastille Day, or maybe it’s simple frustration and anger. In any event, she goes off-script.

‘I am shocked by the way the people we have been in business with are treating us’, says Drescher. 

I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds and millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history … Eventually, the people break down the gates of Versailles, and then it’s over! And we’re at that moment right now.

It is one thing for striking writers or actors to reappropriate lines from their shows. It’s another entirely for actors to essentially call for ransacking executives’ homes. One doesn’t want to make too much of moments like these, but neither should we dismiss them. There is something to be said for how they puncture the noise of mass-produced culture. 

Caitlin Brodnick says that the amount of unpaid labour this culture requires is simply staggering. 

When you’re trying to get work, we have all accepted that we’re probably not going to make that much for a certain number of years. We understand we’ll be auditioning, we understand we’ll be hustling. We understand we’ll have day-jobs, we’ll be paying a lot of out of our own pocket for headshots and filming things and rehearsal.

Despite all that, Brodnick says that many actors stay in the business because when they do land a recurring role or the promise of residuals, it can make paying their bills easier, and in turn strengthen their craft. In her view, the AMPTP’s offer essentially obliterates this promise. ‘When they’re talking about these cuts, not giving anyone residuals or AI doing it, it’s like, well, then there’s no way to survive.’

Brodnick, who moved from New York to Los Angeles just after SAG-AFTRA walked off, says that her experiences on the picket lines have been both enlivening and enlightening. 

Sometimes, yes, actors are competitive with each other because we want a role. But the pickets just feel like a community of warmth and support. I saw so many people so happy. I saw these friendships that were connecting again or somebody stopping someone saying, ‘I thought you were so amazing in this’ or ‘so beautiful on that’. Seeing that is really exciting and it puts more hope and joy back into what we’re doing.

Public sympathy also remains decidedly on the side of the actors and writers. A Gallup poll from August shows well over 70 per cent. Studios have about 19 per cent. The day after SAG-AFTRA joins the writers on the picket lines, Disney CEO Bob Iger claims to CNBC that neither the actors nor the writers understand the pressures that face the industry. ‘There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic’, he says. ‘And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive’. As it happens, Iger shares this opinion from the annual Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, often referred to as ‘summer camp for billionaires.’ The irony is lost on nobody, save for Iger.

In August, the AMPTP agrees to re-start negotiations with the WGA, only to offer an agreement the membership calls outright insulting. Not long after, the AMPTP hires a DC-based ‘crisis public relations firm’ to rethink its strike messaging. 

Sunlight of reality

At least in one way, Iger is right. The strikes have disrupted Hollywood’s spectacle, and given the studios a financial black eye. There are a lot fewer ‘For Your Consideration’ billboards. Awards season has been scuttled, with several ceremonies delayed until next year. When The Drew Barrymore Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, and other inane talk shows announce their intention to restart production without writers, the backlash is so forceful that all quickly reverse course. 

Past mere disruption, however, you can just about suss out an alternative to the Hollywood model. The last time actors and writers struck Hollywood simultaneously was in 1960. Compared to the current strikes, with their high amount of acrimony and mistrust, the 1960 strike seems tame. Concerns about emerging technology and the changes it would mean for creatives – particularly television – also played a role then. But, in stark contrast to today, both industry and union were willing participants in a Cold War consensus. At the time, the president of the Screen Actors Guild was one Ronald Reagan.

In October 1947, just a few weeks before being elected head of SAG, Reagan testified enthusiastically in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He named names, ruined lives, and fanned the anti-communist paranoia that had been brewing in Hollywood since the end of the war. In early 1948, ten directors and screenwriters were sentenced to jailtime for refusing to do like Reagan had done. All were or had been members of the Communist Party. 

Thus, the Hollywood blacklist was inaugurated, spinning well beyond the world of film. In the arts, the blacklist snared filmmakers, actors, poets, novelists, composers, musicians, from Richard Wright to Lena Horne, from acting teacher Stella Adler to jazz musician Artie Shaw, from the author of Death of a Salesman to the lyricist of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. 

The primary goal of these witch-hunts was, of course, to undermine the influence of radicals in American life, particularly in labour organisations (the violent strikes that unionised the Hollywood crafts after the end of World War II were used as pretext for the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, outlawed solidarity strikes). But bound up in this broader agenda was also the drive to limit artistic and cultural expression, narrowing the scope of ideas and aesthetics. Not a foreign concept in the age of endless Marvel movies approved by US military brass.

There is, then, something uncanny in these strikes taking place on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hollywood blacklist. Brodnick and Chavira, both artists working in today’s Hollywood, hope sincerely that the strikes can open the door to more independent projects, finding new, hitherto ignored stories to tell, and perhaps new ways to tell them. 

This, not so incidentally, was also the hope of at least one of the Hollywood Ten, John Howard Lawson. Author of several screen and stage plays, and a founding member of what would become the WGA, Lawson clearly loved film and hated capitalism. His 1953 book Film In the Battle of Ideas, published at the blacklist’s height, is withering toward the studios.

Contempt for people, and therefore for art, is inherent in Hollywood’s attitude toward its own workers, toward the product which they make, and toward the audience … In film, as in other serious forms of expression, the creative opportunities which every serious artist seeks are stifled, not only by Hollywood’s belt-line production and by the recent increase in political censorship, but by capitalism’s basic hatred and fear of free expression. Being hostile to art, capitalism demands servility and renunciation of the right to observe and create freely, as the first condition of cultural ‘respectability’ and employment. The creator who can throw off the shackles of bourgeois ideology emerges into the sunlight of reality with the whole world to explore and interpret.

This was not necessarily to say that these artistic explorations must be limited to the boring, hidebound confines of ‘realism’. Though Lawson was a partisan of socialist realism, he would find it difficult to argue with Brecht’s assessment: ‘Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change’.

Brodnick says she’s been impressed by the films produced by smaller production houses, independent writers and directors, and hopes that they might have more space to flourish after the strikes. Chavira, for her part, points to the success of Everything Everywhere All at Once and Barbie as proof that moviegoers want more original, non-traditional stories. 

People will eat what you feed them. I’ll watch Star Wars all day. I’m not a snob. It’s great. But you can see that people do appreciate originality … People want to see things that have to say something they’ve not heard before.

Chavira also recounts conversations she has had over the years with older members of the WGA, some of whom were mentored by Dalton Trumbo or other members of the Hollywood Ten. Just about all of them knew someone who had been blacklisted, and are eager to pass on their memories so that it doesn’t happen again. 

In the ’50s, the Hollywood unions capitulated to McCarthyism. In much more recent years, high-profile figures in the WGA – including a former president – have campaigned, protested, and marched alongside socialists, even publicly defending them against red-baiting from members of city council. Each of the major film and TV unions have at least a handful of open socialists among their membership. One hopes it’s a sign. 

In late September, after a few false starts, the AMPTP again sits down with the WGA. The resulting contract, tentatively agreed upon in the final hours before Yom Kippur, is celebrated by WGA leadership and membership as a watershed. It contains a significant increase in pay, mandates for transparency around viewership numbers on successful streaming shows, minimums for how many writers will need to be in a writers’ room, and better contributions from studios toward writers’ pensions and healthcare. It also mandates that AI can never be used to replace writers. It is clear to WGA members that they got way more than they would have had they not struck.

Chavira is, to put it mildly, enthusiastic. Describing the union meetings that discuss and ratify the contract, tears well up in her eyes. ‘It hit me tonight at the meeting that what we did was momentous. And we got so much! We got so fucking much! It’s a really good deal. I know we got this much because we’ve been out there for five months. I’m so proud!’

She continues, saying that the WGA may set an example for the rest of the labour movement. 

I think we set a precedent. Fuck yeah. We set a precedent for the country, and I hope every other union that is striking or thinking of striking does it and gets the deal that we got. Because if this isn’t proof that collective action works, I don’t know what is.

Something is moving. In the Midwest, auto workers are striking the three biggest car manufacturers in the US. It’s the first time in history this has happened. In LA, UNITE HERE continues to strike against the hotels. Healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente are threatening to walk out if the provider’s chronic understaffing isn’t meaningfully addressed.

Likewise, something is shifting in the culture industry. It feels as if there is now a competing vision for how film and television should be produced, and that there is a growing awareness that protecting creativity is going to require a certain level of militancy. 

Despite the expectation that the AMPTP will soon similarly settle with SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ strike will stretch into November. Studios continue to deflect actors’ concerns, particularly around their intent to use an actors’ captured image in perpetuity, including, morbidly, after an actor’s death. 

By the time a tentative agreement is reached, actors have been on the line for 118 days. It is the longest actors’ strike in the union’s history. The contract is lauded by Drescher and the rest of leadership, providing for improvements on residuals, and preventing studios from replacing actors with their AI avatars.

Not everyone is satisfied with these provisions. Actor and filmmaker Justine Bateman, one of the union’s advisors on artificial intelligence, is vocal online and to the press about her frustrations with them. Bateman’s view, expressed to the Hollywood Reporter, is that a truly just contract wouldn’t negotiate guardrails around AI, but ban it entirely. Even with assurances on consent and compensation, the door is still open for studios to generate an entire cast, even entire shows and movies, using AI. 

Other voices in the union, such as actor Jason Winston George (quoted in the same piece), make clear that this has yet to happen and, while possible, is a fight that a militant, activated membership will be able to take up down the line. Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA membership has authorised a strike against the video game industry.

It is always tempting in essays such as these to end with some crude parallel between present events and one of the great revolutionary sagas that linked political liberation and creative expression. France 1968, Russia 1917, Cuba 1959, South Africa 1994. If it is difficult to picture the US in these frames, then that’s because the country is more than a hop, skip, and a jump away from them. There is, nonetheless, something instructive in them. Viewed in light of these strikes, we see the world and its art differently.

The absurd, often brutal realities of Los Angeles are easy to see when the sun is out, which is almost always. To traverse through this town is to turn corners between rows of mansions and tent cities, pristine private beaches and abandoned lots, from the pseudo-agoras of the Grove shopping mall to the garbage strewn across Alec Baldwin’s star on the Walk of Fame. If this city, or any other city in the world, can be summed up, it won’t be through cliché. 

One wonders whether it will be possible to sum up reality at all without its fundamental transformation. Not just because that reality is quickly becoming too much to endure, but because so much of the culture that springs from it is dedicated to hobbling rather than nourishing our imaginations. 

Turning this inside out cannot be done solely within the realm of culture. It will, however, require looking at all work as labour, all labour as art, and all art as work and labour. It isn’t all that is needed if the American labour movement is to become a mass force, let alone for it to usher in a new world. It is, however, necessary. Building out this vision of life will not be an easy process, but we can’t deny the drama of such a project.

Alexander Billet is a writer, critic, and artist based in Los Angeles. He is the author of Shake the City: Experiments In Space and Time, Music and Crisis (1968 Press, 2022) recently translated into Portuguese by Brazillian publisher sobinfluencia edições. More of his work can be viewed, and supported, at alexanderbillet.com.