Next TV used to coach youth baseball in a league adjacent to Los Angeles’ affluent Hancock Park neighborhood.
Those blissful days of escape on the ball field followed several traumatic layoffs in the print news business, and we tended to enviously lump the writer, actor and producer parents we dealt with into one monolithic ball bucket — rich Hollywood folks, far better off than we were, who weren’t being so much disrupted by the internet but rather flourishing amidst it, the rise of new suppliers like Netflix and Amazon adding to their seemingly endless prosperity.
They may have looked diffused from our relatively disadvantaged perspective, but the lines of fault and class demarcation were certainly there. We just didn't see them at the time.
For starters, few of these parents were ”just writers.’ If you were merely a subordinate in a writers’ room, even for a hit show, you probably couldn’t afford to live in a neighborhood with a median home price of $2.3 million.
There were a few notable actor parents among the group. One was an affable former supporting role player on a classic NBC sitcom. He was a truly nice man who loved nothing more than to watch his son play ball, but he was perpetually rushing from the stands to catch flights to places like Vancouver. He never lacked work, which was good because he seemed to be locked into a kind of Tantalusian curse, unable to fully grasp onto the level of an austere overhead somehow forever out of his reach.
Looking back on it, the league was run — literally — by the showrunners, one of whom staged a coup, firing everyone from the board and taking it over. A charismatic “multi-hyphenate” who still acted in the shows he ran, several ousted board members even thanked him after he had them jettisoned from their fun volunteer roles.
These producers largely stayed in town when they weren’t traveling all over the world with their families for personal pleasure. The coup leader turned league president often threw backyard barbecues (yes, lavish ones) for the families of his teams. Next TV never got invited to one of those events, but we heard they were fun.
Also among these producer ranks was a top-level creator of the then-new Netflix hit original series Orange Is the New Black, who I was told hosted fundraising dinners for then-President Barack Obama when he’d fly into town. Her kid was our catcher. I met her once as she was whisking her boy off the ball field in the middle of a doubleheader so that he could attend a dinner party of some kind.
Catchers are hard to replace, but we got by.
Lose My House? What House?
On Friday, Next TV read Michael Schulman’s 3,300-word story in The New Yorker about underpaid role players on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black with mouth-agape wonderment.
There was, of course, the essential through line of this can’t-miss read titled, “'Orange Is the New Black’ Signaled the Rot Inside the Streaming Economy.”
This collection of previously unknown female performers starred on a hit show watched by hundreds of millions of viewers globally. The series, one of the first subscription streaming originals, fundamentally changed the way we watch television. The term “binge” dates back to this specific series.
Many of the actors interviewed in the story appeared in this brilliantly orchestrated, wonderfully diverse ensemble comedy-drama irregularly, but they still became recognized all over the world.
But due largely to shortsighted capitulation on digital project revenue sharing during the tense 2009 SAG-AFTRA negotiations with producers, these talented performers were receiving royalty checks of $27 or less and still living in one-bedroom apartments.
But what really floored us was Schulman just letting the aforementioned Orange producer completely off the hook. This top-level creative, who ostensibly had the final word on hiring each of the vastly underpaid performers interviewed in Schulman’s story — and who refused to be interviewed herself — “had little say over the actors’ salaries,” contends the author, who rather directs boogeyman-seeking readers to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and the series’ studio, Lionsgate.
Schulman’s not wrong. The digital giants and their Hollywood studio partners deserve plenty of blame for what has been somehow only recently revealed to be an ugly, vast wealth chasm threatening the peace, civility — and productivity — of the video business.
Certainly, the optics were conspicuous enough this week, as captains of media industry met at their annual “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho, while SAG-AFTRA negotiations with the AMPTP melted down.
But Schulman telling us that Jenji Kohan had no idea that actress Taryn Manning, who played a core role on her show as Pennsatucky, was struggling to find an off-the-rack size zero, on her own dime, so that she could attend the SAG Awards and pick up her well-deserved acting trophy?
Sorry, we’re not buying that.
Fortunately, others have spoken up.
A lifelong denizen of the conspicuously capitalist Mecca that is Los Angeles, Next TV has always cast a jaundiced eye — OK, they’re both pretty jaundiced — to Hollywood's often fawning, conspicuously performative gestures of proletariat support.
We initially reacted that way on Friday to actor Ron Perlman ... initially.
Hours after SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA in striking against Hollywood producers, Perlman posted on Instagram a since-deleted, expletive-laden video that included a threat against an unnamed producer quoted in one of the Penske showbiz trades. This studio executive suggested waiting writers out, until they’re softened up by unfortunate economic circumstance including foreclosure of their homes, before returning to the negotiating table.
“There are lots of ways to lose a house,” brooded tough guy Perlman, raised in an unbroken home in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, and schooled in the dramatic arts from an early age.
Ron Perlman on the studio exec that wanted the strike to drag on until union members lose their homes:“There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people, you wish that families starve while you’re making 27-fucking-million a year.” pic.twitter.com/BWBNeervmlJuly 14, 2023
According to the super-credible website Celebrity Net Worth, the former Hellboy and Sons of Anarchy star has an asset value of $8 million. You shouldn’t be impulsively writing campaign checks over two bottles of Pinot Grigio at Hancock Park Democratic fundraisers with that kind of money, but it doesn't necessarily rank you with the Orwellian chickens and the other condemned livestock of Animal Farm L.A., either.
Indeed, Perlman's tough guy act comes off a little cliche … with a tinge of criminal liability. But credit him for being one of the finite number of established showbiz folks who have put something on the line to call out Hollywood's polarized, unsustainable charade.
The internet is the ultimate tough guy here.
It took down newspapers. Then the music business. And now it’s coming for video entertainment. Every major sector in our Company Town built around media has now been disrupted.
And judging by Maureen Dowd's column this week, AI promises to be even worse.
Many of us in other media sectors have already had our own Orange Is the New Black moment, and they’ve been pretty lonely experiences.
In 2009, Next TV, along with a lot of our colleagues, was told to grab a box, get our things and get out by the print showbiz trade we’d worked for over the previous decade.
The next thing we knew: Editors were telling us to accept freelance writing rates of 3 cents a word because they could find someone else who would do the work for that unsustainable rate.
And we were naively floored by how little of a shit was expressed by our surviving coworkers at the time, who were probably just scared out their minds about their own job security.
At the same time that Next TV and our colleagues were being kicked into the ice-cold waters of The Great Recession, SAG-AFTRA was negotiating its way out of a previous strike with the AMPTP … which somehow managed to convince the actors union that “new media” would remain in a nascent developmental stage of YouTube cat videos for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, and Next TV remembers the visionary editors of our showbiz trade --- effectively our “showrunners” — referring to the youthful workers in the far-flung ghetto of our newsroom as the “web monkeys” as recently as 2008.
We didn’t have a union … or good strategic decision-makers in our corner … or even guys like Perlman. But we sure could have used any and all of them
After 20 years of perpetual layoffs and sales to private equity, the news business continues to eat its own legs, with Buzzfeed, Vox and Vice becoming only the latest examples of news companies blowing the digital future.
In the 30-year-old age of the internet, our industry’s executive decision-makers have never been any good at digital monetization and are certainly no match now for formidable forces like Google and Meta, which continue to steal our goods at will.
Yes, the “Golden Age” of print and digital journalism, if there ever was one, seems like very long ago. But we don’t just have the greed of internet companies and private equity firms to blame for this.
Our showrunners let us down. And we let ourselves down by showing a complete lack of unity, caring, pride ... and Perlman-esque grit.
We didn’t take care of each other. Too many of us who managed to find full-time editorial work again were OK offering their freelancers 3 cents a word.
Will TV, just coming off what was a true Golden Age, fare any better?
For the first time, the industry's executive decision-makers have no idea how to effectively monetize their products. (This recent Bloomberg story illustrates the situation pretty good.)
The man who is currently the most influential executive in the video business, David Zaslav, isn’t making his mark on what he creates but rather what and how much he chooses to tear down.
Amid his well-publicized CNBC Squawk Box appearance last week, Disney chief executive Bob Iger simultaneously devalued the futures of both streaming and linear, the latter of which he seemed to indicate was approaching fire sale.
(Responding to Iger, SAG-AFTRA chief Fran Drescher called his remarks “repugnant.”)
Given this backdrop, it’s hardly surprising to see the AMPTP close ranks and try to impose a little desperation on the other side.
For the sake of the video business — which we certainly don’t want to become like, say, the news business — let’s hope Hollywood’s rank and file finds its inner Ron Perlman and it also discovers the will and unity to dig in for the long, good fight.
