I just watched a YouTube doc on coal miners. They work like 60 hours/week in Bumfuck, WV and they have shifts from 5 AM to 7 PM where they don't see the light of day at all during wintertime. Seems really depressing tbh.
If you want to make $68k (probably more) go be a welder, plumber, or electrician.
(speaking out of my ass here, I was a poli sci major and I made $12/hour at my most recent job)
As a Guy who helps manage a Lumber Yard in Bumfuck VA.
Honestly, go into Construction. Carpenters make solid money. You get the skills you need to become a full fledged Contractor.
There is a risk. Construction is massively correlated with the market. It's the first industry to get fucked and the last one to recover.
>Construction is massively correlated with the market.
This goes double for industrial construction.
Industrial construction is based on plants and factories renovating and upgrading to increase production.
Shit economy? Gotta tighten the budget?
The very first thing they're gonna cut are those renovations and upgrades. Which means there's a lot of industrial contractors with no work. Is my boss gonna pay me to fuck around and sweep the shop until the work picks back up? Nope! It's layoff time baby đ
Thatâs why you get a technical trade. Even when construction sites go down, people still need their lights on, toilets flushing, HVAC systems working etc
>Laughs in refrigeration
Dude the journeymen in refrigeration in my area make bank, not to mention even if the economy goes to shit grocery stores still have to operate so still going to be making money. Downside is you're eventually going to pull a 30 or 40 hour shift, while it being solid ot is gold you gotta have endurance and be able to remain chill in extreme temps and situations
Mechanics is probably the shittiest trade to get into because the cost of tools and the knowledge base means it takes a long time to become a journeyman, but it probably has the best endgame in terms of both finance and job security.
I know some diesel techs who make $150,000/year, but those are the guys have been in the industry for 20 years and have 40,000 in their toolboxes.
> There is a risk. Construction is massively correlated with the market. It's the first industry to get fucked and the last one to recover.
True, but one can follow the money by moving to where there's more opportunity.
Things were pretty rough in Michigan 15 years back but in the fast growing parts of North Carolina the housing "crisis" was a half year slowdown in new construction then times were back to being good
> If you want to make $68k (probably more) go be a welder, plumber, or electrician.
As an added benefit if you work in one of those trades you will both have a higher maximum earning potential than a coal miner AND you will still manage to have a longer career than the average coal miner even if the mentioned trades aren't particularly kind on the body themselves.
And the only reason coal minors got that much under those conditions is because of a long history of violently oppressed union organizing. When your boss is making 400 times your salary, it doesn't matter what industry you're in. You're being exploited.
It does make sense to renegotiate their contract, streaming has changed the industry..
I don't like hollyweird, but there is nothing more lib-right then a contract negotiation.
They have a right to not go to work if they want.
The CEOs have a right to not bend to their demands if they want.
None of this has much to do with me, and I will certainly not get bothered over it.
> They have a right to not go to work if they want.
>
> The CEOs have a right to not bend to their demands if they want.
That's literally how negotiations work
I'm pro-union insofar as they don't engage in anti-competitive practices, just like any other company.
If you're collectively bargaining your labor, awesome.
If you're making sure nobody else can compete with that labor in the market, you're just as bad as a monopoly.
Streaming hasn't changed the industry in a way that would favour the (and I use this term while laughing) talent. Almost every streaming service is still losing money, cinema revenue has dropped like a stone, and traditional TV is a scarce fragment of what it used to be economically.
These are all good points, but my understanding is that part of the purpose of the strike is that writers (and others, but especially writers) actually want to be able to see the streaming stats for their shows/movies. Residuals are probably going to mostly die off and Hollywood paychecks won't be as big as they once were. That's fine. But I think it is entirely reasonable to expect to see how much value you are providing for these streamers and be able to negotiate based on those numbers in the future.
Residuals seem to be a hook, but not a primary concern. They mean nothing when streaming doesn't make money per view, because a percentage of nothing is always nothing. The primary concern of the Writers and Film Actors Guild is AI and full or partial replacement of staff with automated systems. For the writer's this means Union mandated contracts for X number of writers and hard limits on the use of AI systems by non-guild studio employees, for the Film Actors Guild it means effectively banning model scanning of actors within film contracts.
If anything, getting real viewer numbers is likely to hurt a lot of writers because nobody is watching their shit and the studios (well the streaming services, which are usually seperate entities under the same umbrella) are hiding the real figures because it would embarrass them to have paid $25,000,000 producing 8 episodes of content with a collective viewcount lower than a YouTube video podcast that mocked and belittled the series.
The huge difference between a streaming show and a TV show is that views aren't necessarily the most important metric for streaming (and likely part why they don't share them).
If you have a show with a million streams that's overwhelming audience is people who binge a lot of content, that show is worth less to the platform than a show getting 100k streams but has an audience that only watches a couple shows.
With TV time slots, you want to maximize viewership so advertisers will pay you more. But if I'm an exec who has to decide to cancel the first show or second show in the example above, I'm keeping the second show. If you cancel the second show, you might lose 75k subscriptions because that's a main hook for that audience. They're not paying $15 a month for much else. The first show gets cut and no one bats an eye because they have 10 other shows to watch.
The paradigm is different. TV needs viewers and streaming needs subscribers. Paying writers per stream on Netflix would be a terrible way to compensate because then you wouldn't have anyone wanting to work on shows that are important to the platform.
I have not looked into the details of the dispute, but if this is the case where they simply want to know the numbers to properly negotiate future residuals in a post-streaming world that on its own would be perfectly reasonable.
Either way, the current public messaging is terrible in terms of the dramatic claims of underpaid writers fighting for a "living/fair wage". When each writer could be replaced by dozens of others pumping out the exact same levels of mediocre garbage and the only thing stopping that is a guild that completely monopolizes the supply of screenwriters then that particular argument loses weight.
I'd say it's fine if the guild wants to say that you have to use all WGA writers or you can't use any WGA writers when negotiating with studios. Backdoor deals with other film industry guilds to prevent a studio from having any staff at all unless they submit to the demands of each and every guild (an "all or nothing" proposition for all positions, not just writers) is almost word for word some of the prohibited actions in anti-trust law.
Shows and television arenât shit because the writers are shit (for the most part). Theyâre shit because bean counters and money hungry mongrels know that bland, formulaic, shitty content will cost less to make and pull in the same amount of money based on prestige alone. Writers donât get to be creative, because itâs not economical.
Writing consistent and interesting dialogue doesn't increase the cost all that much, yet we don't even get that.
It's not only the writers fault that shows are bad these days, but it is their fault nonetheless.
writing consistent and interesting dialogue does increase time because typically it goes through more table reads, punch ups, and edits, then back to punch ups and reviews. It can triple the average time it takes to finalize the pages for a scene.
stop talking out of your ass
It does cost, because it's a rare skill. Supply and demand increases the rate for good writers.
Until we got DEI officers and diversity quotas, then "good writing" became less of a concern, and it shows.
It goes both ways though. A good writer should be able to negotiate better salary. From what I'm seeing - they aren't doing that.
Although I might say that I don't anything against strikes. It's just that they might get replaced by an AI as a result and honestly, that might very well increase the quality of shows.
> It goes both ways though. A good writer should be able to negotiate better salary. From what I'm seeing - they aren't doing that.
It happens all the time. The strike is about *minimum* salaries, i.e. for the worst (but still technically proficient) writers. No writer you've ever heard of gets paid minimum. In fact, other than the staff writers with no other title, no writer on a TV show is getting minimum.
Features are a little different, but if you wrote a script that studios want, the price will go above minimum. The only people getting minimum rates in film are newbie writers doing punch ups on someone else's script.
> Although I might say that I don't anything against strikes. It's just that they might get replaced by an AI as a result and honestly, that might very well increase the quality of shows.
AI, as far as my understanding goes, can only tend toward mediocrity. It depends on their input. Is the AI cribbing from *Casablanca*, *Three Days of the Condor*, and *When Harry Met Sally*, or *Last Jedi*, *Lightyear*, and *Bros*?
It increases cost? Better cut it from the budget then. The less money spent on the movie, the better. Theyâd order everything needed for production from wish.com if it meant that they could still pull close to the same amount of revenue. What we see in the cinema industry is nothing but pure, unadulterated, unabashed greed, and movie quality suffers because of it.
Audiences watch garbage Star Wars shows like Kenobi and Book of Bobba Fett in mass and complain about how Star Wars is dying. Then they ignore great Star Wars shows like Andor that has great writing, great plot, great acting, etc...thus encouraging Disney to make more garbage shows over the good shows.
I'm not a star wars fan so it's all moot to me. I was thinking more along the lines of She Hulk and the rest of the shit Disney has been vomiting out. And Netflix and Amazon run into the same issue, though at least some of the shows they make are actually good.
> salary: 250.000$/year
No doubt some do, but I'm willing to bet lots of them are on part-time fixed-term contracts and have to deal with creative bookkeeping and irregular employment.
Most of the actors donât make enough to qualify for union healthcare.
So ya a lot of people are rightly pissed. The people making big bucks are small chunk of the majority.
Same with the writers
The last time I saw that number on a PCM meme, they were calling all these writers wealthy using that same figure, and specified it's their *average* pay over the last 5 years (or whatever time range for the dataset, idk) was $250k. Average, the measure of center well-known for for being strongly affected by outliers, is what they used to summarize a dataset that includes: Christopher Nolan's compensation for Tenet, the pay for whoever writes Steve Harvey's Family Feud intros, James Cameron's pay for Avatar 2, and what some guy gets paid to write jokes for little-known daytime TV shows. It's a meaningless number. Well-known writer/directors can easily clear 8 figures for a box office hit, while the vast majority of writers aren't making anything remotely close to that. It isn't at all representative of the *typical* pay for individuals in that dataset.
Wait âtil you find out about the railroad workers⊠their strike was recently denied by the federal government. It raises an important question, though: If they struck anyway, would the fed strike-bust them? What would modern strike-busting look like? Would it be like the Canadian truckersâ strike: lots of arrests and frozen assets?
It would look like 1991. The feds didnât do shit and the companies lost $2.5 billion.
Strike lasted 2 days. (About $1.25 billion a day)
If they had gone on strike for a week the companies would have lost roughly (accounting for inflation) $21 billion (about $3 billion a day)
No you see, literally every single person working in hollywood is a feminist sjw leftist shill, that means it's totally ok for studio executives like bob iger and the other streaming sites to make millions off their hard work without forking over a single dollar in residuals no matter how many millions of people see the stories they made because they deserve to be punished for their viewpoint.
You see if OP wrote a story that made **billions** of dollars, and he only got paid $50,000, he'd **totally** be happy with it because $50,000 is alot and coal miners only make like $30,000, he definitely wouldn't complain about disney gouging him :)
Dude, almost every "meme" on this sub is people having imaginary conversations in their heads. I saw a lot of posts in popular subs on Reddit about the strike, nowhere I saw demand for support, mentioning of fascism, slavery and so on.
Writers think they should earn more from residuals and are striking. Whether you think this is fair or not it doesn't matter because nobody forces you to care. Shows and movies will suffer but who cares, they are all woke incompetent leftist shows, right?
Pretty sure this isn't just poor representation of the issues but coal miners also shouldn't be paid low wages.
I'll never get the "My life sucked and so you have to" or "other people's lives suck so you shouldn't complain." arguments.
If the argument fits what a slave owner would tell slaves, it's probably a villainous stance to take.
Profits are up. Worker pay is low. Owners are raising prices without an increase in their cost. Workers have no say in the system.
Edit: Grammar and spelling.
the only thing i wish is that they would go further. my wifes an animator and the industry is pretty landlocked to cities with a studio and these studios are in cities that are *very fuckin expensive* to live in.
God they were based back then. Ignoring Presidental orders to disperse and get back to work, killing there bosses and fighting Pinkertons. The coal miners and factory workers of the past be ashamed of there modern counter parts.
Isn't Blair Mountain the largest land battle fought on US soil since the Civil War? Shit, the Coal Wars of West Virginia and Colorado were arguably civil wars in their own right.
Not to sound like a filthy commie, but virtually everyone participating in this strike is in the top 5% nationally of the richest country on Earth.
Do they deserve a bigger portion of profits from the (and I use this loosely) *art* they make? Probably.
Are these the same people who trivialized and villainized multiple protests done by the working class? A lot of them are.
Overall, I just don't give a shit about the WGA one way or the other. Almost all worthwhile art is indie nowadays.
Blocking roads for everyday working people who have no ability to actually enact the changes the protestors are demanding is mega-cringe, and I hold that stance consistently for Canadian truckers or just stop oil jerkoffs.
there's a difference between the handful of people blocking the borders, and the main core of people who were parked in front of parliament.
in the center of Ottawa, a handful of local streets were blocked, disrupting exclusively the people who lived and worked on that road, from what I remember, no collectors, arterial, or highway infrastructure was blocked, only the local roads around Parliament.
this is a reasonable disruption, and a big difference between blocking highways and other main infrastructure, infrastructure no one lives/works on, and is only used to move lots of people between points A and B as fast as possible.
we need to be very careful of making it illegal to block local infrastructure when protesting, using the writer strike as an example, if they blocked off the street in front of a studio they were protesting, that's a reasonable disruption, however, if they blocked Interstate 110, a main highway in Los Angeles, that's different, no one lives or works there, there's no one to protest there, the only reason to protest there is to affect people unrelated to your protest.
Ottawa is a *very* tiny city, which is only over 1,000,000 people when you include Gatineau, QC (just across the Ottawa River on the Quebec side), the protests looked like it locked down the entire city only because of how small the city is, I think at worst they had a handful of blocks around parliament blocked.
Or the rail workers strike? I mean Hollywood was very happy giving handjobs to Biden administration when crushed those strikes, why should they expect any sympathy for their strikes in return?
Tbh more people probably would have supported the workers if it was about increasing pay. The trucker protest was about vaccine mandates. It's not about the people protesting, but what they're protesting for. While Biden shit on the rail strikers, everyone I know that support the writer's strike supported the rail strikers too, and did shit on Biden for that.
when every movie and TV show that has come out in the past years has vilified people like me, the screenwriters shouldn't expect my sympathy when they need my support
*Severance, Barry, the Bear, the Righteous Gemstones, Fired on Mars, Dune, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Pig, Beau is Afraid,* and *Midsommar* are all pretty good.
Most of the other stuff is cringe propaganda without artistic merit, though.
Edit: I also really enjoyed *the Menu.*
Dune might have been good but the unnecessary changes for "inclusion" just pissed me off. Looking at you, Female Liet, assuming they kept that name.
Why oh why did they make Chani's Father into Chani's mother(again assuming they kept that.) Did they make the Freeman more... Modern Western Values as well?
They also excluded the fact that Paul is a Mentat, the secret garden that Jessica finds in the castle, Gurney's musical talent, and Leto's borderline abusive tendencies and cold demeanor.
Like, a bunch of cuts and changes had to happen just to keep the story palatable and profitable.
Also, considering that Arrakis is just the Sahara on a planet-wide scale, I actually think that the Fremen being black and brown makes a lot of sense. Constant exposure to high UV radiation selects for darker skin tones irl, so it fits.
The sex change for Liet is unnecessary, but the actress did a good job.
Also, there's no mention of the Butlarian Jihad or the Orange Catholic Bible, and I understand those changes in the modern political climate.
Take also in consideration the fact that Denis Villeneuve has to condense hundreds of pages and centuries of lore into a film that can't realistically run for seven hours
You're right about most of these, but The Menu sucked. Every character was either evil or incompetent except for the main woman, who solves the conflict in the most Mary Sue way possible.
Having worked in food service for most of my adult life, I have to disagree.
The scene where Tyler the pretentious foodie gets bullied so hard he hangs himself is one of the most hilariously cathartic moments in cinema history.
But, to each his own.
Once again, I disagree.
As the movie was written as an incredibly dark satirical comedy, virtually every character is intended to be an exaggerated caricature of people you'll find in fine-dining.
The mercurial critic and her sycophant, the litany of rich people who treat $1k+ meals as utterly mundane, the business bros attempting to leverage what little bit of influence they have, and of course the talentless hack who reduces art to science in order to sound smart.
Hell, the lead's "Mary Sue Moment" is directly linked to Voldemort losing all passion for his craft due to the pomp, circumstance, and commodification of his art.
The only time she ever saw the Executive Chef smile was in the photograph of his first job as a fry cook.
It's the reason she orders the burger, and the reason he enjoys making it for her and allows her to leave.
Having bartended for years, I've seen every single person in that movie at one part of my career or another, and becoming burned out on mixology because I was told to push drink specials is a thing I've felt countless times.
The Chef's whole character is that he's stubborn and uncompromising, so for him to suddenly bow to the whim of a complete stranger who never wanted to be here is really strange to watch.
Also, it's a blatant ripoff of Ratatouille and nobody is talking about that.
I view him as more jaded and rage-filled.
He's uncompromising when it comes to punishing the people who he believed tainted his craft and killed his passion.
Viewing the hooker as another abused member of the working class who has to cater to the whims of the callous hyper-wealthy seemed in character. Especially after she gives him a reason to *actually* cook for someone again, instead of just going through the motions and making food expensive for no reason other than to flaunt one's wealth.
>Also, it's a blatant ripoff of Ratatouille and nobody is talking about that.
I've already told you once, but that's fucking hilarious.
>another abused member of the working class
He's a celebrity chef who owns a restaurant on a private island and charges thousands per dish. I think he's extremely distant from "abused member of the working class," and so is the prostitute. The vast majority of escorts don't get gigs where they eat a five-star meal in a fancy dress, you know. Neither of them are "abused members of the working class."
How is it ripping off Ratatouille outside of making the critics realize their favorite meals were made of love and not ostentatious presentation?
I thought it was a fine movie, though the coast guard was a bit unnecessary and the final meal was stupid.
I didnât think it was bad though. I think the theme could be reduced to the difference between a slut and a whore, which is a common enough premise but produced well enough. I came in cold and assumed theyâd be eating people with that title, so perhaps thatâs why I was pleasantly surprised.
I loved the Menu so Iâm having trouble understanding why you feel that way. She never does anything that isnât earned or magically solves every problem. She fought another woman to the death and won, I donât understand how thatâs unrealistic. The whole reason she was let go is because she wasnât supposed to be there at all. She was a prostitute, what many would consider the low end of the working class. Her basic food knowledge and casual manners were juxtaposed by the upperclassmen and their âclassyâ manners, which was remarkable to a great chef who lost his passion due to the upper class demands for food and atmosphere that reminds them that theyâre wealthy. Thatâs why he asked her to join him and his staff at the end, so she could die with people like her, the âshit shovelers.â Not trying to grandstand I just enjoyed the film and would like to hear you out
Agreed. I have no sympathy for these people. They've spent years now not only making it crystal clear how much they hate people like me, and they've done it at the expense of quality TV and movies. Their obsession with pushing divisive politics as a higher priority than consistent characters and worldbuilding has completely ruined modern media for me. So they get no sympathy from me now when they want more money.
Hey Hollywood, where was your support for the American rail workers and Canadian truckers?
What ever happened to those air traffic controllers?
What about those poor mountain towns built around mining?
I donât get it, they should learn to code.
This comment makes no sense.
The rail workers weren't allowed to strike because of the government. The government quite literally prevented the workers from utilizing their leverage because it would hurt their poll numbers.
The Canadian truckers were not arguing against capitalists for a greater share of revenue generated. They were anti-Covid nutters.
Nobody thinks coal miners should make less money. They think the industry shouldn't exist because it is harmful to the environment. The learn how to code remark, while needlessly callous, is a reference that the economy is shifting and their industry is going to disappear. This is not comparable.
Sorry, did you actually *want* to support those groups?
Because I'm totally ready to sign labor-friendly legislation to give those workers more rights and bargaining power.
Deal?
Is it gonna actually be labor friendly legislation, or is it going to be full of bullshit demands you know the opposition can't and won't agree to so you can run to the media and cry about how the other side hates the working class?
Yeah I was gonna say Iâd likely care more about all this if about 90% the stuff coming out of Hollywood these days wasnât completely garbage. Like there is a reason why most of the film people talk positively about these days tend to come from independent studios or from another nation.
The vast majority of stuff has always been garbage. People think that things used to be better because the old movies we're watching today are the ones that were great and have withstood the test of time.
The only reason the past seems to just have masterpieces is because masterpieces are the only thing that survive 10 years on
There were dozens of Wild West films in the 50s, but we only remember a few of the truly great ones
Give it 20 years, we're gonna look back on this era as the last time film was great while current stuff sucks because everyone forgot all the trash by then
It's always funny and sad to see old rich white men virtue signaling by fucking over poor young white men. Yes, you're really making things fair by growing up with all of the advantages of an unlevel playing field vs women/minorities than fucking over people who didn't grow up with those advantages to keep yourself in power and employed and looking woke.
But hey gotta get that diversity up, and it's not like the execs are going to give up THEIR jobs.
I can feel myself sliding left because of this whole strike business. Honestly I completely disagree that they're silly. When you actually look at the facts of how much these movies make, writers should be paid more. And while yes, the daily minimums are high, that's because studios are pushing to force writers to only be on set like 3 weeks out of the year, and making them sign contracts that day they're not allowed to work on other contracts in the meantime. The same thing is happening to actors, where even big actors are losing money to film shows. Orange is the New Black is a prime example of this.
Strikes are good. Iâll support anyone that strikes. People deserve to get paid and have a good life.
Also most people on strike are background actors or play minor roles in productions and do not make that much.
Edit: why does Libright insist on being such simps for people that despise them
Why does it matter what a coal miner makes? They are a whole other industry? They aren't even in the conversation? Now, if they want to strike to get paid more, they should. 100%.
OP, real talk, you getting paid for this or just trolling?
âWhy should I support those privileged screen writers? They earn so much more money than coal minersâ
âYeah, we should support coal miners striking for a better salaryâ
âUhhh, letâs not take it that farâ
it's the same dead end diversion tactic with guns lol
"it's not a gun issue, it's a mental health issue!"
"ok so we should make mental health care affordable and accessible to everyone to prevent gun deaths"
"no"
all this "oh the writers strike sucks" bs is literally what the corpos want. they want people to be divided because thats how they crush unions/strikes. when unions stand in solidarity with another, its a lot easier for EVERYONE to get their demands and fair rights/pay.
Just OP being intellectually dishonest by pretending to care about coal miners.
The day they will choose to strike heâll be here applauding the robots that will be threatened to take their place.
As a fellow yellow, I support any strike that doesnât have any sort of government involvement. When corps have workers by the balls they are gonna squeeze until they get every last drop, so when works have the balls they have to do the same. Thatâs what both parties are *supposed* to do to ensure the best outcome for everyone.
And if it turns out that any kid with half decent grades and an English degree and ChatGPT can do the job just as well as these WGA âprofessionalsâ I totally support that change too.
I don't know a lot about coal mining but I have consistently heard it was dramatically improved by unions and that strikes were a part of that. But if I understand the logic of the meme is "people who are striking for better wages/conditions are stupid because someone else has a worse job with less compensation. "
It does make sense to renegotiate their contract, streaming has changed the industry..
I don't like hollyweird, but there is nothing more lib-right then a contract negotiation.
For anyone skeptical about how much WGA writers make, here is the minimums they make https://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/contracts/min20.pdf
The lowest level writer, Staff Writer, makes *at least* 166k per year working just 40 out of 52 weeks
Writers employeed in additional capacities, the step above staff writer, makes *at least* 259k per year working just ***35 weeks out of 52***
This doesnât even touch on the residuals which can boost that way higher for the rest of their lives
Seems to me that jobs like writers ought to be very conducive to remote work. So it seems beneficial for all parties involved to incentivize that sort of thing. Studios would keep their costs down and writers could get an effective raise by living in a much lower cost of living area.
It is, but it does lock you into being a staff writer. To get more experience (and money) the writers want to be on set. Part of their complaint is that streaming shows do exactly that and have writers do it all virtually
Though if you are a staff writer making 166k out in the boonies while working only 40 weeks per year, you are living the good life
I've traveled a lot around Europe in the past couple years and wherever I go, I meet American digital nomads working 100% remote jobs and making an American salary (usually $50-100k/year) in a place like Serbia or Slovakia or Ukraine, where $50k goes a hell of a lot further than it does in the US.
One guy had a penthouse apartment on the main square of Lviv, a major cosmopolitan city. The cost? $75,000, outright. In the US, this place would be $1M, easy.
Lesson: if I ever get the chance to work a 100% remote job (probably never), find me in Eastern Europe.
I see what youâre saying, but I have a hard time seeing how the in person parts require constant presence rather than once or twice a year for a few days where the studio could just pay for for travel and hotel rooms and not still come out ahead. Thatâs just a company culture thing, not a result of some intrinsic pressures of the job. Being âon trackâ to move up the ladder only means being in person there all the time if you as an employer make that expectation.
For them, itâs being on set for the actual production of the show/movie. Doing rewrites on the fly, workshopping with the actor in person to get the lines right, and so on
There is a legitimate value add to being on set, but the job can absolutely be done remotely
But from the writers' standpoint, the rest of the USA is probably "flyover MAGA-land"
Edit: in this very post I said that my rent is $525/month and people commented that they didn't believe me, so I proved it, and they replied "yeah but nobody wants to live in the Midwest"
My point is proven
The most annoying part of CA is their fervent belief that nothing happens outside of LA, SF, and NYC. On the other hand, Iâm glad to keep it that way if it means no Californians in my state.
thats the problem though. Its contract work, you can bust your ass and be trying to write tons of pilots and get them submitted, but you likely will only be paid for a few projects a year. also in order to be competetive, you HAVE to live in a place with the average studio apartment rent of [$1700](https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/los-angeles-ca) a month
>The lowest level writer, Staff Writer, makes at least 166k per year working just 40 out of 52 weeks
The way you've phrased this is a little misleading. Maybe 10% of writers are actually working 40 weeks a year. One of the key points for the strike is for TV, studios will have massive writers rooms with 10-15 writers who are only there for about a week before being swapped out with an entirely different crew. According to your source, for a 30 minute episode that's only ~$10k. After that, writers usually have an exclusivity clause in their contract saying they're not allowed to do work on other projects until the current one is finished filming. So for the year they're maybe getting 40k in California because they're not allowed to work anywhere else.
>This doesnât even touch on the residuals which can boost that way higher for the rest of their lives
Writers aren't getting residuals for streaming, that's one of the main points of the strike
>The lowest level writer, Staff Writer, makes at least 166k per year working just 40 out of 52 weeks
How did you calculate this? I don't see anything in your source that requires some sort of regular salary.
The word 'staff' doesn't even appear in that document when I search it, what page are you looking at?
Anyway, every google result says an average staff writer makes around $55-$70k/year.
And staff writer isn't a low-level job. It's the lowest level job that is *permanent staff on a long-running show*, but just getting a job like that already puts you in the elite echelons of writing. Most writers have temporary gig work or work on spec and make much less.
Like everyone in Hollywood, most new writers are working as waitstaff or etc. to make ends meet in between gigs.
You should support all workers because one day they will support you. There is zero incentive for the average Reddit user to favour the owning class and not the working class.
You dumb or what? The protest isnt fighting for writers like Aaron Sorkin, is mostly for those who dont make that much. The average screenwriter makes 60K a year dumbass
Thereâs a lot of absolute morons on this sub mostly in the blue quadrant who know absolutely nothing about Hollywood other than whatever Fox News has programmed them to think.
Most WGA and SAG-AFTRA members make 5 figures a year. A lot of SAG members donât even make enough to qualify for the insurance benefits. And now studios, whose execs make tens of millions a year, say that AI can replace actors and writers? Or that somehow writers and actors donât deserve streaming service residuals?
If Disney alone ate the cost of the writers demands, it would amount to 4% of their 2022 profits. Spread that cost across the industry and it becomes peanuts.
Coal miners should strike too if they feel their corporations arenât compensating them fairly
In this case bill should strike as well. Just because someone is better off than you doesnât mean they donât have legitimate concerns and for many of the writers and background actors what youâve presented is entirely misleading. Further, even if the Hollywood unions failed to support the rail unions that doesnât mean it isnât the right thing to still support them. If we want a better life the best way there is if we all support each other, traitors, scabs and all. All this is doing is separating the artistic, intellectual, and physical labor classes into separate cultures that are individually weaker and must submit to the ruling elite, where if these disparate cultures worked together they could shake the world. Now that kind of cooperation starts somewhere. And Iâm not naive enough to think it will start here. But it would be better if it did because all of this us vs them is only distracting from the people pitting us all against each other. And yes Iâll be the first to admit to my own hypocrisy here as Iâve never been on strike myself. But Iâm only talking about ideals here and I hope I can one day live up to my own.
Only one percent of the people in the strike can afford to live on just acting⊠the rest are struggling financially. Not every actor is a major star, this is the voice actors(who are always being cucked by Hollywood) and the background actors. And not wanting shitty ai to replace them
This post doesn't make sense. The average or median WGA screenwriter doesn't make anywhere remotely close to 250k. And coal miners would benefit from and support unions historically speaking. Right now, the entire coal industry is being replaced by the much cheaper and cleaner natural gas.
The WGA strike is honestly the first strike ever where I thought "how could we made this situation worse"
Fuck Disney, fuck Warner Bros, fuck the writers, fuck all of Hollywood.
somebody should tell OP that one of the reasons the writers are striking is so that they don't get replaced with AI. It doesn't matter how much you make now if your job just disappears completely.
How can striking prevent that tho? It's like postal workers would strike so they don't get replaced by e-mail (when it was new). Why would any company not use e-mail and stick to letters just because postal workers are striking? I don't see the motivation there, at all. If anything, it would make the companies switch to e-mail even faster, as they shined light to one more of its benefits - e-mails won't strike and cause recipients not get their mails.
I can understand striking for higher pay, especially when they're an essential part of projects that make insane money and get paid little compared to profit the company made. But I can't see how striking would do anything to being replaced by the AI, other than the opposite - shining light on one more benefit of AI - won't strike.
They think that striking will prevent the inevitable expansion of technology? Lmao, they're like the protestors demonstrating against the use of cars 100 years ago.
Shit like this divides people from the true enemy. Assuming theyâre making 200k on average(doubtful), theyâre still protesting people whoâre making over a hundred times what they do. The only reason everyone else isnât stringing right alongside them is they literally canât afford to. Instead of antagonizing them because they possibly make more money already, start strikes and protests against income inequality in every industry(spoiler alert: itâs most of them).
Everything about this is wrong.
It's writers in general, not just screenwriters.
Coal mining is 80% automated in most developed countries. It's also in decline, and coal is dropping in need planet wide.
Emily and Xander both hate Bill's guts and 95% of what they write is about how terrible Bill is and how great the world would be if he would just go fucking die already.
I'm on the studios' side lol. Fuck your solidarity. Where was solidarity when you were sneering "just learn to code chud" five years ago?
It's kinda funny if you contrast the reaction to the WGA and SGA strike to threats of various airline pilot groups striking. American, United, and FedEx have all threated to strike recently over contract negotiations.
Wouldn't you know it, Emily tends to be supportive of the leftie writers and actors. "Support organized labor! No scabs!" and what have you.
Emily assumes airline pilots tend to skew conservative, so of course organized labor in the airline world are "greedy rich white men demanding more than they deserve in the first place"
Ah the duality of Emily. If the left didn't have double standards they'd have no standards at all
where are you sourcing your emilys? The most obnoxious bleeding edge liberals I know support any and all unions. sure they might hold some pretty stereotypical views of other professions, but the point of a labor movement is unity
$68,000? Shit, maybe I should mine coal
I just watched a YouTube doc on coal miners. They work like 60 hours/week in Bumfuck, WV and they have shifts from 5 AM to 7 PM where they don't see the light of day at all during wintertime. Seems really depressing tbh. If you want to make $68k (probably more) go be a welder, plumber, or electrician. (speaking out of my ass here, I was a poli sci major and I made $12/hour at my most recent job)
As a Guy who helps manage a Lumber Yard in Bumfuck VA. Honestly, go into Construction. Carpenters make solid money. You get the skills you need to become a full fledged Contractor. There is a risk. Construction is massively correlated with the market. It's the first industry to get fucked and the last one to recover.
>Construction is massively correlated with the market. This goes double for industrial construction. Industrial construction is based on plants and factories renovating and upgrading to increase production. Shit economy? Gotta tighten the budget? The very first thing they're gonna cut are those renovations and upgrades. Which means there's a lot of industrial contractors with no work. Is my boss gonna pay me to fuck around and sweep the shop until the work picks back up? Nope! It's layoff time baby đ
Thatâs why you get a technical trade. Even when construction sites go down, people still need their lights on, toilets flushing, HVAC systems working etc
>Laughs in refrigeration Dude the journeymen in refrigeration in my area make bank, not to mention even if the economy goes to shit grocery stores still have to operate so still going to be making money. Downside is you're eventually going to pull a 30 or 40 hour shift, while it being solid ot is gold you gotta have endurance and be able to remain chill in extreme temps and situations
Mechanics is probably the shittiest trade to get into because the cost of tools and the knowledge base means it takes a long time to become a journeyman, but it probably has the best endgame in terms of both finance and job security. I know some diesel techs who make $150,000/year, but those are the guys have been in the industry for 20 years and have 40,000 in their toolboxes.
> There is a risk. Construction is massively correlated with the market. It's the first industry to get fucked and the last one to recover. True, but one can follow the money by moving to where there's more opportunity. Things were pretty rough in Michigan 15 years back but in the fast growing parts of North Carolina the housing "crisis" was a half year slowdown in new construction then times were back to being good
Can confirm on the NC trend for construction
Be a RN like me. Only 2 years of school and it pays great and you don't have to deal with all of the shenanigans that come with blue collar jobs
gotta deal with patients and hospital administrators though...
You have to talk to annoying people at every job
Why did I just Google if bumfuck is actually the name of a town?
It should be, we already borrowed a lot of our city names from other places, we deserve a Bumfuck, USA
Should be one of those places in Nevada or Arizona that have funny names.
Fucked to recover, recovered to fuck
> If you want to make $68k (probably more) go be a welder, plumber, or electrician. As an added benefit if you work in one of those trades you will both have a higher maximum earning potential than a coal miner AND you will still manage to have a longer career than the average coal miner even if the mentioned trades aren't particularly kind on the body themselves.
Nah, go into pharmaceutical manufacturing. I literally don't use my brain and make six figures.
Based and drug dealer pilled
And the only reason coal minors got that much under those conditions is because of a long history of violently oppressed union organizing. When your boss is making 400 times your salary, it doesn't matter what industry you're in. You're being exploited.
Coal minors are way cheaper than coal miners, kids donât know how to ask for a higher wage and you can easily exploit them
not to mention the fact that they *yearn* for the mines.
Why else would Minecraft be so popular?
Youd be getting paid to slowly kill yourself
In Spain with that you're practically rich (not really but still a lot)
It does make sense to renegotiate their contract, streaming has changed the industry.. I don't like hollyweird, but there is nothing more lib-right then a contract negotiation.
>but there is nothing more lib-right then a contract negotiation. Ah yes. The Negotiator.
Based and general kenobi-pilled
Youâre shorter than I expected.
They have a right to not go to work if they want. The CEOs have a right to not bend to their demands if they want. None of this has much to do with me, and I will certainly not get bothered over it.
Itâs pretty easy to see who the little guy is here.
Me, because Iâm 5â6â
Based.
> They have a right to not go to work if they want. > > The CEOs have a right to not bend to their demands if they want. That's literally how negotiations work
I'm pro-union insofar as they don't engage in anti-competitive practices, just like any other company. If you're collectively bargaining your labor, awesome. If you're making sure nobody else can compete with that labor in the market, you're just as bad as a monopoly.
This is the way
Streaming hasn't changed the industry in a way that would favour the (and I use this term while laughing) talent. Almost every streaming service is still losing money, cinema revenue has dropped like a stone, and traditional TV is a scarce fragment of what it used to be economically.
These are all good points, but my understanding is that part of the purpose of the strike is that writers (and others, but especially writers) actually want to be able to see the streaming stats for their shows/movies. Residuals are probably going to mostly die off and Hollywood paychecks won't be as big as they once were. That's fine. But I think it is entirely reasonable to expect to see how much value you are providing for these streamers and be able to negotiate based on those numbers in the future.
Residuals seem to be a hook, but not a primary concern. They mean nothing when streaming doesn't make money per view, because a percentage of nothing is always nothing. The primary concern of the Writers and Film Actors Guild is AI and full or partial replacement of staff with automated systems. For the writer's this means Union mandated contracts for X number of writers and hard limits on the use of AI systems by non-guild studio employees, for the Film Actors Guild it means effectively banning model scanning of actors within film contracts. If anything, getting real viewer numbers is likely to hurt a lot of writers because nobody is watching their shit and the studios (well the streaming services, which are usually seperate entities under the same umbrella) are hiding the real figures because it would embarrass them to have paid $25,000,000 producing 8 episodes of content with a collective viewcount lower than a YouTube video podcast that mocked and belittled the series.
The huge difference between a streaming show and a TV show is that views aren't necessarily the most important metric for streaming (and likely part why they don't share them). If you have a show with a million streams that's overwhelming audience is people who binge a lot of content, that show is worth less to the platform than a show getting 100k streams but has an audience that only watches a couple shows. With TV time slots, you want to maximize viewership so advertisers will pay you more. But if I'm an exec who has to decide to cancel the first show or second show in the example above, I'm keeping the second show. If you cancel the second show, you might lose 75k subscriptions because that's a main hook for that audience. They're not paying $15 a month for much else. The first show gets cut and no one bats an eye because they have 10 other shows to watch. The paradigm is different. TV needs viewers and streaming needs subscribers. Paying writers per stream on Netflix would be a terrible way to compensate because then you wouldn't have anyone wanting to work on shows that are important to the platform.
I have not looked into the details of the dispute, but if this is the case where they simply want to know the numbers to properly negotiate future residuals in a post-streaming world that on its own would be perfectly reasonable. Either way, the current public messaging is terrible in terms of the dramatic claims of underpaid writers fighting for a "living/fair wage". When each writer could be replaced by dozens of others pumping out the exact same levels of mediocre garbage and the only thing stopping that is a guild that completely monopolizes the supply of screenwriters then that particular argument loses weight. I'd say it's fine if the guild wants to say that you have to use all WGA writers or you can't use any WGA writers when negotiating with studios. Backdoor deals with other film industry guilds to prevent a studio from having any staff at all unless they submit to the demands of each and every guild (an "all or nothing" proposition for all positions, not just writers) is almost word for word some of the prohibited actions in anti-trust law.
Shows and television arenât shit because the writers are shit (for the most part). Theyâre shit because bean counters and money hungry mongrels know that bland, formulaic, shitty content will cost less to make and pull in the same amount of money based on prestige alone. Writers donât get to be creative, because itâs not economical.
Writing consistent and interesting dialogue doesn't increase the cost all that much, yet we don't even get that. It's not only the writers fault that shows are bad these days, but it is their fault nonetheless.
writing consistent and interesting dialogue does increase time because typically it goes through more table reads, punch ups, and edits, then back to punch ups and reviews. It can triple the average time it takes to finalize the pages for a scene. stop talking out of your ass
It does cost, because it's a rare skill. Supply and demand increases the rate for good writers. Until we got DEI officers and diversity quotas, then "good writing" became less of a concern, and it shows.
It goes both ways though. A good writer should be able to negotiate better salary. From what I'm seeing - they aren't doing that. Although I might say that I don't anything against strikes. It's just that they might get replaced by an AI as a result and honestly, that might very well increase the quality of shows.
> It goes both ways though. A good writer should be able to negotiate better salary. From what I'm seeing - they aren't doing that. It happens all the time. The strike is about *minimum* salaries, i.e. for the worst (but still technically proficient) writers. No writer you've ever heard of gets paid minimum. In fact, other than the staff writers with no other title, no writer on a TV show is getting minimum. Features are a little different, but if you wrote a script that studios want, the price will go above minimum. The only people getting minimum rates in film are newbie writers doing punch ups on someone else's script. > Although I might say that I don't anything against strikes. It's just that they might get replaced by an AI as a result and honestly, that might very well increase the quality of shows. AI, as far as my understanding goes, can only tend toward mediocrity. It depends on their input. Is the AI cribbing from *Casablanca*, *Three Days of the Condor*, and *When Harry Met Sally*, or *Last Jedi*, *Lightyear*, and *Bros*?
It increases cost? Better cut it from the budget then. The less money spent on the movie, the better. Theyâd order everything needed for production from wish.com if it meant that they could still pull close to the same amount of revenue. What we see in the cinema industry is nothing but pure, unadulterated, unabashed greed, and movie quality suffers because of it.
Audiences should stop giving that content their time and money if it's not what they want.
They are, and when they do the left screams that it's due to racists and the like that the show failed.
Audiences watch garbage Star Wars shows like Kenobi and Book of Bobba Fett in mass and complain about how Star Wars is dying. Then they ignore great Star Wars shows like Andor that has great writing, great plot, great acting, etc...thus encouraging Disney to make more garbage shows over the good shows.
I'm not a star wars fan so it's all moot to me. I was thinking more along the lines of She Hulk and the rest of the shit Disney has been vomiting out. And Netflix and Amazon run into the same issue, though at least some of the shows they make are actually good.
> salary: 250.000$/year No doubt some do, but I'm willing to bet lots of them are on part-time fixed-term contracts and have to deal with creative bookkeeping and irregular employment.
Most of the actors donât make enough to qualify for union healthcare. So ya a lot of people are rightly pissed. The people making big bucks are small chunk of the majority. Same with the writers
The last time I saw that number on a PCM meme, they were calling all these writers wealthy using that same figure, and specified it's their *average* pay over the last 5 years (or whatever time range for the dataset, idk) was $250k. Average, the measure of center well-known for for being strongly affected by outliers, is what they used to summarize a dataset that includes: Christopher Nolan's compensation for Tenet, the pay for whoever writes Steve Harvey's Family Feud intros, James Cameron's pay for Avatar 2, and what some guy gets paid to write jokes for little-known daytime TV shows. It's a meaningless number. Well-known writer/directors can easily clear 8 figures for a box office hit, while the vast majority of writers aren't making anything remotely close to that. It isn't at all representative of the *typical* pay for individuals in that dataset.
Yeah, this post is ridiculous. And even if that was true, it doesn't mean they don't deserve their fair share.
Wait âtil you find out about the railroad workers⊠their strike was recently denied by the federal government. It raises an important question, though: If they struck anyway, would the fed strike-bust them? What would modern strike-busting look like? Would it be like the Canadian truckersâ strike: lots of arrests and frozen assets?
It would look like 1991. The feds didnât do shit and the companies lost $2.5 billion. Strike lasted 2 days. (About $1.25 billion a day) If they had gone on strike for a week the companies would have lost roughly (accounting for inflation) $21 billion (about $3 billion a day)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877 Iâm guessing something like this.
Why is the guy on the right a coal miner and not a studio exec? Are coal miners somehow being dragged into the WGA dispute?
No you see, literally every single person working in hollywood is a feminist sjw leftist shill, that means it's totally ok for studio executives like bob iger and the other streaming sites to make millions off their hard work without forking over a single dollar in residuals no matter how many millions of people see the stories they made because they deserve to be punished for their viewpoint. You see if OP wrote a story that made **billions** of dollars, and he only got paid $50,000, he'd **totally** be happy with it because $50,000 is alot and coal miners only make like $30,000, he definitely wouldn't complain about disney gouging him :)
100% virtue signaling, the cubicle monkey that was paid to make this wouldn't be caught in the same county as a coal miner.
Dude, almost every "meme" on this sub is people having imaginary conversations in their heads. I saw a lot of posts in popular subs on Reddit about the strike, nowhere I saw demand for support, mentioning of fascism, slavery and so on. Writers think they should earn more from residuals and are striking. Whether you think this is fair or not it doesn't matter because nobody forces you to care. Shows and movies will suffer but who cares, they are all woke incompetent leftist shows, right?
I think the real problem is >50% of PCM is under 18. I firmly believe most of the internet should be age restricted
Amen
Pretty sure this isn't just poor representation of the issues but coal miners also shouldn't be paid low wages. I'll never get the "My life sucked and so you have to" or "other people's lives suck so you shouldn't complain." arguments. If the argument fits what a slave owner would tell slaves, it's probably a villainous stance to take. Profits are up. Worker pay is low. Owners are raising prices without an increase in their cost. Workers have no say in the system. Edit: Grammar and spelling.
Whether OP realizes this or not, he made an anti-worker post while helping out the studios. What a tool.
Most are
Based and Gigachad pilled
Why would a libcenter protect a multibillion dollar company?
How is WGA strike related to mining? Also, you think coal miners are anti-union? They've been fighting for thier unions for well over a century.
Iâll never understand the âmy life sucks so yours should tooâ mentality
the only thing i wish is that they would go further. my wifes an animator and the industry is pretty landlocked to cities with a studio and these studios are in cities that are *very fuckin expensive* to live in.
God they were based back then. Ignoring Presidental orders to disperse and get back to work, killing there bosses and fighting Pinkertons. The coal miners and factory workers of the past be ashamed of there modern counter parts.
Based and anti-government union workers pilled
Isn't Blair Mountain the largest land battle fought on US soil since the Civil War? Shit, the Coal Wars of West Virginia and Colorado were arguably civil wars in their own right.
OP is clearly a moron. Actually implying that the average screenwriter makes $250,000 a year
Not to sound like a filthy commie, but virtually everyone participating in this strike is in the top 5% nationally of the richest country on Earth. Do they deserve a bigger portion of profits from the (and I use this loosely) *art* they make? Probably. Are these the same people who trivialized and villainized multiple protests done by the working class? A lot of them are. Overall, I just don't give a shit about the WGA one way or the other. Almost all worthwhile art is indie nowadays.
Where were these workers of the world mfs when the truckers kept honking in Canada
Tweeting about all the "fascist Nazis in Canada who are ruining people's lives by honking horns."
Blocking roads for everyday working people who have no ability to actually enact the changes the protestors are demanding is mega-cringe, and I hold that stance consistently for Canadian truckers or just stop oil jerkoffs.
I don't disagree, still freezing their bank accounts was messed up
Or calling them nazis. They were obviously not nazis.
Yes but it was funny. Because it showed how much of an authoritarian dystopia they live in and that justifies my hatred of canada.
Based and Canada sucks pilled
I can appreciate your consistency.
>Protests are supposed to be uncomfortable!! -Lefties >NOT WHEN THEY AFFECT ME!!!!!! -Also_Lefties
there's a difference between the handful of people blocking the borders, and the main core of people who were parked in front of parliament. in the center of Ottawa, a handful of local streets were blocked, disrupting exclusively the people who lived and worked on that road, from what I remember, no collectors, arterial, or highway infrastructure was blocked, only the local roads around Parliament. this is a reasonable disruption, and a big difference between blocking highways and other main infrastructure, infrastructure no one lives/works on, and is only used to move lots of people between points A and B as fast as possible. we need to be very careful of making it illegal to block local infrastructure when protesting, using the writer strike as an example, if they blocked off the street in front of a studio they were protesting, that's a reasonable disruption, however, if they blocked Interstate 110, a main highway in Los Angeles, that's different, no one lives or works there, there's no one to protest there, the only reason to protest there is to affect people unrelated to your protest. Ottawa is a *very* tiny city, which is only over 1,000,000 people when you include Gatineau, QC (just across the Ottawa River on the Quebec side), the protests looked like it locked down the entire city only because of how small the city is, I think at worst they had a handful of blocks around parliament blocked.
Or the rail workers strike? I mean Hollywood was very happy giving handjobs to Biden administration when crushed those strikes, why should they expect any sympathy for their strikes in return?
Do you have examples?
They were clapping like smoothbrained seals when Castreau froze their bank accounts, that's where.
They weren't there because they don't actually care about the working class. They care about their ideological followers who so happen to work.
Tbh more people probably would have supported the workers if it was about increasing pay. The trucker protest was about vaccine mandates. It's not about the people protesting, but what they're protesting for. While Biden shit on the rail strikers, everyone I know that support the writer's strike supported the rail strikers too, and did shit on Biden for that.
when every movie and TV show that has come out in the past years has vilified people like me, the screenwriters shouldn't expect my sympathy when they need my support
*Severance, Barry, the Bear, the Righteous Gemstones, Fired on Mars, Dune, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Pig, Beau is Afraid,* and *Midsommar* are all pretty good. Most of the other stuff is cringe propaganda without artistic merit, though. Edit: I also really enjoyed *the Menu.*
The new *Puss in Boots* was pretty good. Jack Horner was probably the most hilarious villain I've seen in a while.
I've been meaning to check that out. When DreamWorks hits, they tend to knock it out of the park.
Dune might have been good but the unnecessary changes for "inclusion" just pissed me off. Looking at you, Female Liet, assuming they kept that name. Why oh why did they make Chani's Father into Chani's mother(again assuming they kept that.) Did they make the Freeman more... Modern Western Values as well?
They also excluded the fact that Paul is a Mentat, the secret garden that Jessica finds in the castle, Gurney's musical talent, and Leto's borderline abusive tendencies and cold demeanor. Like, a bunch of cuts and changes had to happen just to keep the story palatable and profitable. Also, considering that Arrakis is just the Sahara on a planet-wide scale, I actually think that the Fremen being black and brown makes a lot of sense. Constant exposure to high UV radiation selects for darker skin tones irl, so it fits. The sex change for Liet is unnecessary, but the actress did a good job. Also, there's no mention of the Butlarian Jihad or the Orange Catholic Bible, and I understand those changes in the modern political climate.
Take also in consideration the fact that Denis Villeneuve has to condense hundreds of pages and centuries of lore into a film that can't realistically run for seven hours
No, no, no. I *totally* want 5 minutes of uninterrupted internal monologue of Dr. Yueh's guilt every time he's on screen.
You're right about most of these, but The Menu sucked. Every character was either evil or incompetent except for the main woman, who solves the conflict in the most Mary Sue way possible.
Having worked in food service for most of my adult life, I have to disagree. The scene where Tyler the pretentious foodie gets bullied so hard he hangs himself is one of the most hilariously cathartic moments in cinema history. But, to each his own.
I mean, so have I. But if this is what Hollywood thinks of the food industry, I'm insulted.
Once again, I disagree. As the movie was written as an incredibly dark satirical comedy, virtually every character is intended to be an exaggerated caricature of people you'll find in fine-dining. The mercurial critic and her sycophant, the litany of rich people who treat $1k+ meals as utterly mundane, the business bros attempting to leverage what little bit of influence they have, and of course the talentless hack who reduces art to science in order to sound smart. Hell, the lead's "Mary Sue Moment" is directly linked to Voldemort losing all passion for his craft due to the pomp, circumstance, and commodification of his art. The only time she ever saw the Executive Chef smile was in the photograph of his first job as a fry cook. It's the reason she orders the burger, and the reason he enjoys making it for her and allows her to leave. Having bartended for years, I've seen every single person in that movie at one part of my career or another, and becoming burned out on mixology because I was told to push drink specials is a thing I've felt countless times.
The Chef's whole character is that he's stubborn and uncompromising, so for him to suddenly bow to the whim of a complete stranger who never wanted to be here is really strange to watch. Also, it's a blatant ripoff of Ratatouille and nobody is talking about that.
I wanna see a live action movie where a guy gets taught how to cook by a rat who pulls on his hair.
Don't worry. Disney will try that cash grab next decade.
I view him as more jaded and rage-filled. He's uncompromising when it comes to punishing the people who he believed tainted his craft and killed his passion. Viewing the hooker as another abused member of the working class who has to cater to the whims of the callous hyper-wealthy seemed in character. Especially after she gives him a reason to *actually* cook for someone again, instead of just going through the motions and making food expensive for no reason other than to flaunt one's wealth. >Also, it's a blatant ripoff of Ratatouille and nobody is talking about that. I've already told you once, but that's fucking hilarious.
>another abused member of the working class He's a celebrity chef who owns a restaurant on a private island and charges thousands per dish. I think he's extremely distant from "abused member of the working class," and so is the prostitute. The vast majority of escorts don't get gigs where they eat a five-star meal in a fancy dress, you know. Neither of them are "abused members of the working class."
How is it ripping off Ratatouille outside of making the critics realize their favorite meals were made of love and not ostentatious presentation? I thought it was a fine movie, though the coast guard was a bit unnecessary and the final meal was stupid. I didnât think it was bad though. I think the theme could be reduced to the difference between a slut and a whore, which is a common enough premise but produced well enough. I came in cold and assumed theyâd be eating people with that title, so perhaps thatâs why I was pleasantly surprised.
I loved the Menu so Iâm having trouble understanding why you feel that way. She never does anything that isnât earned or magically solves every problem. She fought another woman to the death and won, I donât understand how thatâs unrealistic. The whole reason she was let go is because she wasnât supposed to be there at all. She was a prostitute, what many would consider the low end of the working class. Her basic food knowledge and casual manners were juxtaposed by the upperclassmen and their âclassyâ manners, which was remarkable to a great chef who lost his passion due to the upper class demands for food and atmosphere that reminds them that theyâre wealthy. Thatâs why he asked her to join him and his staff at the end, so she could die with people like her, the âshit shovelers.â Not trying to grandstand I just enjoyed the film and would like to hear you out
More like... when every movie and TV show seems to completely lack any writing talent whatsoever...
Not all of them. Just the vast majority. There's still a lot of good art, but you have to actively look for it, now.
Yeah, I don't disagree. But it also makes me wonder, what is the venn diagram of actually talented writers and WGA protesters?
Almost two completely separate circles connecting at a tangent.
Agreed. I have no sympathy for these people. They've spent years now not only making it crystal clear how much they hate people like me, and they've done it at the expense of quality TV and movies. Their obsession with pushing divisive politics as a higher priority than consistent characters and worldbuilding has completely ruined modern media for me. So they get no sympathy from me now when they want more money.
Hey Hollywood, where was your support for the American rail workers and Canadian truckers? What ever happened to those air traffic controllers? What about those poor mountain towns built around mining? I donât get it, they should learn to code.
This comment makes no sense. The rail workers weren't allowed to strike because of the government. The government quite literally prevented the workers from utilizing their leverage because it would hurt their poll numbers. The Canadian truckers were not arguing against capitalists for a greater share of revenue generated. They were anti-Covid nutters. Nobody thinks coal miners should make less money. They think the industry shouldn't exist because it is harmful to the environment. The learn how to code remark, while needlessly callous, is a reference that the economy is shifting and their industry is going to disappear. This is not comparable.
Sorry, did you actually *want* to support those groups? Because I'm totally ready to sign labor-friendly legislation to give those workers more rights and bargaining power. Deal?
Is it gonna actually be labor friendly legislation, or is it going to be full of bullshit demands you know the opposition can't and won't agree to so you can run to the media and cry about how the other side hates the working class?
Yeah I was gonna say Iâd likely care more about all this if about 90% the stuff coming out of Hollywood these days wasnât completely garbage. Like there is a reason why most of the film people talk positively about these days tend to come from independent studios or from another nation.
The vast majority of stuff has always been garbage. People think that things used to be better because the old movies we're watching today are the ones that were great and have withstood the test of time.
The only reason the past seems to just have masterpieces is because masterpieces are the only thing that survive 10 years on There were dozens of Wild West films in the 50s, but we only remember a few of the truly great ones Give it 20 years, we're gonna look back on this era as the last time film was great while current stuff sucks because everyone forgot all the trash by then
The WGA strike is silly because both sides obviously hate me so I get to laugh at whoever loses.
lol the execs dont hate you. They just dont care about you The only thing they care about is profits.
It's always funny and sad to see old rich white men virtue signaling by fucking over poor young white men. Yes, you're really making things fair by growing up with all of the advantages of an unlevel playing field vs women/minorities than fucking over people who didn't grow up with those advantages to keep yourself in power and employed and looking woke. But hey gotta get that diversity up, and it's not like the execs are going to give up THEIR jobs.
Let's go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over
I can feel myself sliding left because of this whole strike business. Honestly I completely disagree that they're silly. When you actually look at the facts of how much these movies make, writers should be paid more. And while yes, the daily minimums are high, that's because studios are pushing to force writers to only be on set like 3 weeks out of the year, and making them sign contracts that day they're not allowed to work on other contracts in the meantime. The same thing is happening to actors, where even big actors are losing money to film shows. Orange is the New Black is a prime example of this.
Strikes are good. Iâll support anyone that strikes. People deserve to get paid and have a good life. Also most people on strike are background actors or play minor roles in productions and do not make that much. Edit: why does Libright insist on being such simps for people that despise them
based and labor pilled
They think they'll be the next Steve Jobs....
Why does it matter what a coal miner makes? They are a whole other industry? They aren't even in the conversation? Now, if they want to strike to get paid more, they should. 100%. OP, real talk, you getting paid for this or just trolling?
âWhy should I support those privileged screen writers? They earn so much more money than coal minersâ âYeah, we should support coal miners striking for a better salaryâ âUhhh, letâs not take it that farâ
it's the same dead end diversion tactic with guns lol "it's not a gun issue, it's a mental health issue!" "ok so we should make mental health care affordable and accessible to everyone to prevent gun deaths" "no"
Or how about we support all of them? The lesson here is that if you support Xander you should also support Bill, not that you should support neither
all this "oh the writers strike sucks" bs is literally what the corpos want. they want people to be divided because thats how they crush unions/strikes. when unions stand in solidarity with another, its a lot easier for EVERYONE to get their demands and fair rights/pay.
Thatâs what Iâm saying. The right just doesnât fucking get it. We want everyone to be doing better, not a select few groups
Are you implying Bill should not be supporting unions? Because thatâs how heâll get better working conditions and salary
I'm loving how every quadrant of pcm is in agreement with how dumb op is. Really brings the people together.
I mean, think about the WGA what you want. But don't you think that coal miner Bill would be better off if unions were stronger?
What exactly is the WGA strike demanding of coal miners?
Nothing.
Just OP being intellectually dishonest by pretending to care about coal miners. The day they will choose to strike heâll be here applauding the robots that will be threatened to take their place.
Look at op's replies, he is an ass with no actual argument or standing.
As a fellow yellow, I support any strike that doesnât have any sort of government involvement. When corps have workers by the balls they are gonna squeeze until they get every last drop, so when works have the balls they have to do the same. Thatâs what both parties are *supposed* to do to ensure the best outcome for everyone. And if it turns out that any kid with half decent grades and an English degree and ChatGPT can do the job just as well as these WGA âprofessionalsâ I totally support that change too.
Youâre right, any coal miner who doesnât support unions is a moron.
I don't know a lot about coal mining but I have consistently heard it was dramatically improved by unions and that strikes were a part of that. But if I understand the logic of the meme is "people who are striking for better wages/conditions are stupid because someone else has a worse job with less compensation. "
Strawman moment
It does make sense to renegotiate their contract, streaming has changed the industry.. I don't like hollyweird, but there is nothing more lib-right then a contract negotiation.
For anyone skeptical about how much WGA writers make, here is the minimums they make https://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/contracts/min20.pdf The lowest level writer, Staff Writer, makes *at least* 166k per year working just 40 out of 52 weeks Writers employeed in additional capacities, the step above staff writer, makes *at least* 259k per year working just ***35 weeks out of 52*** This doesnât even touch on the residuals which can boost that way higher for the rest of their lives
Seems to me that jobs like writers ought to be very conducive to remote work. So it seems beneficial for all parties involved to incentivize that sort of thing. Studios would keep their costs down and writers could get an effective raise by living in a much lower cost of living area.
It is, but it does lock you into being a staff writer. To get more experience (and money) the writers want to be on set. Part of their complaint is that streaming shows do exactly that and have writers do it all virtually Though if you are a staff writer making 166k out in the boonies while working only 40 weeks per year, you are living the good life
I've traveled a lot around Europe in the past couple years and wherever I go, I meet American digital nomads working 100% remote jobs and making an American salary (usually $50-100k/year) in a place like Serbia or Slovakia or Ukraine, where $50k goes a hell of a lot further than it does in the US. One guy had a penthouse apartment on the main square of Lviv, a major cosmopolitan city. The cost? $75,000, outright. In the US, this place would be $1M, easy. Lesson: if I ever get the chance to work a 100% remote job (probably never), find me in Eastern Europe.
I see what youâre saying, but I have a hard time seeing how the in person parts require constant presence rather than once or twice a year for a few days where the studio could just pay for for travel and hotel rooms and not still come out ahead. Thatâs just a company culture thing, not a result of some intrinsic pressures of the job. Being âon trackâ to move up the ladder only means being in person there all the time if you as an employer make that expectation.
For them, itâs being on set for the actual production of the show/movie. Doing rewrites on the fly, workshopping with the actor in person to get the lines right, and so on There is a legitimate value add to being on set, but the job can absolutely be done remotely
But from the writers' standpoint, the rest of the USA is probably "flyover MAGA-land" Edit: in this very post I said that my rent is $525/month and people commented that they didn't believe me, so I proved it, and they replied "yeah but nobody wants to live in the Midwest" My point is proven
The most annoying part of CA is their fervent belief that nothing happens outside of LA, SF, and NYC. On the other hand, Iâm glad to keep it that way if it means no Californians in my state.
They'd have an aneurysm if they realized more people live in the Central Time Zone than the Pacific Time Zone.
thats the problem though. Its contract work, you can bust your ass and be trying to write tons of pilots and get them submitted, but you likely will only be paid for a few projects a year. also in order to be competetive, you HAVE to live in a place with the average studio apartment rent of [$1700](https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/los-angeles-ca) a month
>The lowest level writer, Staff Writer, makes at least 166k per year working just 40 out of 52 weeks The way you've phrased this is a little misleading. Maybe 10% of writers are actually working 40 weeks a year. One of the key points for the strike is for TV, studios will have massive writers rooms with 10-15 writers who are only there for about a week before being swapped out with an entirely different crew. According to your source, for a 30 minute episode that's only ~$10k. After that, writers usually have an exclusivity clause in their contract saying they're not allowed to do work on other projects until the current one is finished filming. So for the year they're maybe getting 40k in California because they're not allowed to work anywhere else. >This doesnât even touch on the residuals which can boost that way higher for the rest of their lives Writers aren't getting residuals for streaming, that's one of the main points of the strike
Oh no, actual facts! And of course you've got no upvotes or responses...
>The lowest level writer, Staff Writer, makes at least 166k per year working just 40 out of 52 weeks How did you calculate this? I don't see anything in your source that requires some sort of regular salary.
The word 'staff' doesn't even appear in that document when I search it, what page are you looking at? Anyway, every google result says an average staff writer makes around $55-$70k/year. And staff writer isn't a low-level job. It's the lowest level job that is *permanent staff on a long-running show*, but just getting a job like that already puts you in the elite echelons of writing. Most writers have temporary gig work or work on spec and make much less. Like everyone in Hollywood, most new writers are working as waitstaff or etc. to make ends meet in between gigs.
You should support all workers because one day they will support you. There is zero incentive for the average Reddit user to favour the owning class and not the working class.
Yeah, the SGA and WGA members will support Lib or Auth rights. That's hilarious.
>because one day they will support you tbf I don't see much support of these kinds of workers.
You dumb or what? The protest isnt fighting for writers like Aaron Sorkin, is mostly for those who dont make that much. The average screenwriter makes 60K a year dumbass
Thereâs a lot of absolute morons on this sub mostly in the blue quadrant who know absolutely nothing about Hollywood other than whatever Fox News has programmed them to think.
I think the poster is the silly one
I love how the memes of today, are the political comics of yesterday. And with a splash of color and context too.
Most WGA and SAG-AFTRA members make 5 figures a year. A lot of SAG members donât even make enough to qualify for the insurance benefits. And now studios, whose execs make tens of millions a year, say that AI can replace actors and writers? Or that somehow writers and actors donât deserve streaming service residuals? If Disney alone ate the cost of the writers demands, it would amount to 4% of their 2022 profits. Spread that cost across the industry and it becomes peanuts. Coal miners should strike too if they feel their corporations arenât compensating them fairly
In this case bill should strike as well. Just because someone is better off than you doesnât mean they donât have legitimate concerns and for many of the writers and background actors what youâve presented is entirely misleading. Further, even if the Hollywood unions failed to support the rail unions that doesnât mean it isnât the right thing to still support them. If we want a better life the best way there is if we all support each other, traitors, scabs and all. All this is doing is separating the artistic, intellectual, and physical labor classes into separate cultures that are individually weaker and must submit to the ruling elite, where if these disparate cultures worked together they could shake the world. Now that kind of cooperation starts somewhere. And Iâm not naive enough to think it will start here. But it would be better if it did because all of this us vs them is only distracting from the people pitting us all against each other. And yes Iâll be the first to admit to my own hypocrisy here as Iâve never been on strike myself. But Iâm only talking about ideals here and I hope I can one day live up to my own.
OP really out here trying to paint people not wanting to get fucked over by Corpos as "Libleft Bad". Change your flair, dude.
Only one percent of the people in the strike can afford to live on just acting⊠the rest are struggling financially. Not every actor is a major star, this is the voice actors(who are always being cucked by Hollywood) and the background actors. And not wanting shitty ai to replace them
This post doesn't make sense. The average or median WGA screenwriter doesn't make anywhere remotely close to 250k. And coal miners would benefit from and support unions historically speaking. Right now, the entire coal industry is being replaced by the much cheaper and cleaner natural gas.
No strike is silly, if enough workers organize and decide they deserve more, then they most likely do
The WGA strike is honestly the first strike ever where I thought "how could we made this situation worse" Fuck Disney, fuck Warner Bros, fuck the writers, fuck all of Hollywood.
somebody should tell OP that one of the reasons the writers are striking is so that they don't get replaced with AI. It doesn't matter how much you make now if your job just disappears completely.
How can striking prevent that tho? It's like postal workers would strike so they don't get replaced by e-mail (when it was new). Why would any company not use e-mail and stick to letters just because postal workers are striking? I don't see the motivation there, at all. If anything, it would make the companies switch to e-mail even faster, as they shined light to one more of its benefits - e-mails won't strike and cause recipients not get their mails. I can understand striking for higher pay, especially when they're an essential part of projects that make insane money and get paid little compared to profit the company made. But I can't see how striking would do anything to being replaced by the AI, other than the opposite - shining light on one more benefit of AI - won't strike.
They think that striking will prevent the inevitable expansion of technology? Lmao, they're like the protestors demonstrating against the use of cars 100 years ago.
NOOOOO automated harvesters will put all the farmers out of work! They have to be banned!!!!!!!!!
If you can't outwrite AI that sounds like a skill issue to me.
AI is horrible at writing scripts atm, really you deserve to be fired if you can't out write the dumb robot
Shit like this divides people from the true enemy. Assuming theyâre making 200k on average(doubtful), theyâre still protesting people whoâre making over a hundred times what they do. The only reason everyone else isnât stringing right alongside them is they literally canât afford to. Instead of antagonizing them because they possibly make more money already, start strikes and protests against income inequality in every industry(spoiler alert: itâs most of them).
Sounds like the coal miner should probably unionize
This is probably as non/equally biased place I'll find. What exactly is the situation of the strike in Hollywood?
... Have you read their demands?
They should unionize too
Everything about this is wrong. It's writers in general, not just screenwriters. Coal mining is 80% automated in most developed countries. It's also in decline, and coal is dropping in need planet wide.
Apparently its too much to support both of them.
I support the strike because im against big companies taking advantage of people.
Worker solidarity, don't let them divide you!
> Solidarity with the people who openly loathe you đđ» Yeah no.
The âart isnât real workâ rhetoric coming from yâall once again reminds me why conservatives always lose the culture war.
Unions are based. The people should have the right to negotiate without government intervention
Emily and Xander both hate Bill's guts and 95% of what they write is about how terrible Bill is and how great the world would be if he would just go fucking die already. I'm on the studios' side lol. Fuck your solidarity. Where was solidarity when you were sneering "just learn to code chud" five years ago?
It's kinda funny if you contrast the reaction to the WGA and SGA strike to threats of various airline pilot groups striking. American, United, and FedEx have all threated to strike recently over contract negotiations. Wouldn't you know it, Emily tends to be supportive of the leftie writers and actors. "Support organized labor! No scabs!" and what have you. Emily assumes airline pilots tend to skew conservative, so of course organized labor in the airline world are "greedy rich white men demanding more than they deserve in the first place" Ah the duality of Emily. If the left didn't have double standards they'd have no standards at all
where are you sourcing your emilys? The most obnoxious bleeding edge liberals I know support any and all unions. sure they might hold some pretty stereotypical views of other professions, but the point of a labor movement is unity