They Were Wrong
My first job in Hollywood was as a gofer for a fading Hollywood producer in 1981. He resembled a sartorially driven Toad of Toad Hall, and he had made and lost a few fortunes in both the music and movie business from the early sixties up until the late seventies. He had been agent, record company owner, and now was a tax-shelter promoter, and the genius inventor of a very dubious "tax product" consisting of the hilariously over-appraised master recordings of children's bible story records, records to be sold at K-Mart for peanuts. ("Sodom & Gomorrah - what it was like!!!" Usually written by me and several drug-addled Boho playwright friends of mine.)
The law looked at his gig, and shook itself out of its customary lethargy. By the time I got to the scene, my guy was dancing one step ahead of both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the good offices of the IRS. My first directive on my first day at the job was to "never ever pick up the phone, always let it go to the service." Advice I follow to this day.
Toad of Toad Hall was fueled by Dostoevskian despairs and Bellow-like hungers. His inner monologue was "I want, I want, I know not what I want." He was too smart to buy the glamour, having come out of the south side of Chicago and fought his way up into the dream factory, yet he collected Picabia paintings and handmade shoes. He loved his kids and was generous and loving to them. He had a great and wildly entertaining contempt for the earnest and the straight, the believers and the good-guys. He despised the powerful and the tanned, having been one of them once, and his crowd consisted mostly of fellow travelers in the hustle and jive business that thrives on the edges of the movies.
One of his best friends was a producer who was famed for running out of Harrods with a toaster, one step ahead of store security. He fired me one fall day in 1984, in the lobby of the Washington Hilton after I laughed at a joke someone made about him. (An actress, the ex-wife of one of his cohorts, she had won an Oscar a decade prior. He had been goading her about her retreat to Virgina farm country. )
My guy was in the capital to try and deflect the onslaught from the government. It didn't work. He had gotten it totally wrong. Totally. They were not going to be distracted by a Lenny Bruce type from a sunny canyon, a grifter with a good lawyer, and they took him on without relenting. It turned ugly and then it turned worse. The trips out of the country (to Grand Cayman, etc), were no longer funny, but deadly serious. Each day's take was perhaps the last. The last centime the man would ever make. His comedic rage about the business turned into something harder and more paranoid. He seemed less Bellow and more Edward G. Robinson as the deal got harder to hold together. The lawyers letters. The lawsuits. The charges.
After he fired me, (a relief, and he meant it as such), I wrote a play about him. My first. He came to see it, and remarked, "Well, I'm a lot worse than the guy in the play" and took off into the Hollywood night. Soon thereafter, he escaped to Paris with his gorgeous Estonian wife, where he ignored the pain in his gut just long enough for it to be too late to fix. He came back to L.A. to die.
I loved and respected him, and he taught me my first lessons about good taste, plot lines and most importantly, the criminal mind in Hollywood. Like those in the Pentagon or other places where power invariably loses touch, in Hollywood, the most fatal mistake a leader can make is to underestimate the adversary. And though my guy wasn't in the same league as the Murdochs and the Redstones, the underlying pathology has certain immutable similarities.
As an amateur sinologist of Hollywood manners, I am making a pretty safe bet: that right now, the studio guys are figuring out who amongst them is going to get humiliated first. Because somewhere up in Parnasus, it's starting to become abundantly clear that they thought they were untouchable. And now they know: they were wrong. About too many big issues.
The Studio Heads thought that there was no way the writers would be able to organize themselves coherently. They were wrong. They thought the writers would be too scared to give up the rich deals, and the option payments and the easy living. They were wrong. They thought the writers didn't have the earnest and heartfelt certitude to maintain solidarity for a day, let alone five weeks. They thought that the studio machinery and the big media outlets they owned could control and get ahead of the story. And they were shocked and appalled to see how wrong they were about that. They were wrong.
They were wrong about who the writers are, and now they know it. And now we watch. Watch as the factions amongst the studio players start to push and pull in a quiet and volatile war for primacy. Watch as the moderates on their team, who are aware of the ticking clocks, aware of the crews who are suffering, and the cost to their industry, try to slowly wrestle the gavel away from the hard-liners. Watch as the peace-makers and diplomats continue to press for resolution, emboldened but with patience and calm, but also, with long memories. Especially if they feel they are being played.
And the peace makers in this story are not pacifists. If you get my drift. As this week ends and an agreement is not reached, I wouldn't look to any day in what is left of this unfortunate year for a resolution. The hard candy of bad faith negotiating and slightly amateurish pageantry from the studio side has done nothing but further strengthen the resolve of the writers. Like my beloved old boss and mentor, they stepped forward in contempt, and in greed, and now we watch the proverbial chickens come home to roost. I think this labor action should serve to put the purveyors of mega-new media corporatism on notice that the old game, the old trope of "schmucks with Underwoods" is at this point, in the 21st century, almost entirely denuded of any truth or viability.
And now? What next? Now it is up to one group of slowly awakening studio heads to find a firm and politic way to introduce another group of paleoconservative media barons to the hard and bitter fact that it is a new day and a new ball game. And the old bets are all off.
Read more thoughts about the strike on the Huffington Post's writers' strike opinion page
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What strikes me about this column is the contrast between the elegant writing here compared to the verbal swill that comes out of so many movies and television shows, thanks to the writers. I know they are writing to put food on the table, but articles like this make the contrast so evident!
Speaking of Saul Bellow, I have found more wonderful time to curl up with a great Bellow classic, "Herzog," now that the latest canned jokes of Letterman et al are no longer available to us.
While I support the writers wholeheartedly in their labor struggles, I can't help but enjoy being liberated from more mediocre television product.
Broadcast television is headed in the same direction that broadcast am-radio went a long time ago. Multiple signal broadcast and bad bad programing in HD is still crap. It helps not that you have packaged it with a bow tied around it. It still smells.
Corporate ownership by mega corporations isn't even about making a profit so much as it is about paying for itself. The reason Corporations own these properties is that they need to control the way the public sees their corporate flaws and they need to steer how the public see's their Corporate ownership of Washington Politics. The first step to change is removal of the concept that corporations "have all the rights and priviledge of a person" when they stand in front of the legal system. They're not people. And they're not responsible. They're a greedy branch of government all their own.
You don't have to do anything to destroy them. They're doing it themselves. They public is finding on the internet what Corporate communications does not provide. You may as well throw your efforts behind a new distribution mechanism with new technologies for higher quality and uncensored ideas. These corporations are already taking their positions on broadcasting their current crop of crap via the internet. what they don't have to offer is anything but the same garbage that's over the air.
The writer has always been king of the hill even if they didn't know how to gain credit for the foundation they lay for the pyramid that entertainment's pay scale has provided for the few that grab the decision making of who get the chance to be seen and heard by the audience. This is what the internet offers to writers: the opportunity to present themselves to an audience without the filtering of a few networks or movie distribution smucks. These corporations can be economically destroyed by the writers presenting themselves directly to the public while the writers almost give themselves away and still collect greater monetary rewards than they ever dreamed to get from the filtered process.
Go and check out the greatest Play to ever hit Broadway since Albee's Virginia Woolf. Tracy Lett's August : Osage County. It's Brilliant!!!!
Good for the writers. I hope you get everything you want.
But the fact is that labor needs some changes to regain its power in our society. When you've got, for example, a handful of wealthy people owning most of the newspapers, then it no longer makes sense to have the people at one newspaper go on strike, since their opponent has nationwide income, while the local folks only have their local group.
That's why we need to give "our" politicians a list of laws to be passed to benefit all working people. So that every little local is not forced to go on strike, and go broke, just to try to maintain a decent living for its people. Because what seems to happen is that every time there is a strike, management comes out with the two-tiered compensation package by which new hires will get a lot less. Then once the strike is settled, they get rid of the old timers and replace them with the lower-wage new hires.
For example, Hillary makes much of her support of the right of working people to organize. I've got a better idea. Why not give working people the right to continued employment by eliminating the entire conservati
Let's have a real minimum wage of $15/hour for anyone over the age of 18. How about a national law providing all working people with 1 month vacation, 2 weeks sick leave, and 1 months' pay for their IRA?
We know the money is all there, and is all being stashed into the pockets of the upper class. Let's tell the Democrats to stop their nonsensical "hearings" in which they do nothing, and start passing laws to help working people.
I'm reminded of the old saw about two farmers. One farmer takes a board and whacks his mule across the head with it. The other man said, "Why in the world did you do that?"
The first farmer replied, "First, you have to get his attention".
Don't drop your board until they start listening.
Your write so well and thoughtfully. Your words are always such a pleasure to read. I hope this strike comes to a successful end sooner than later, both for the lives of those who are fighting the good fight and selfishly for myself and others who miss most especially the Daily Show and the Colbert Report and access to fake news that is more informative than the so-called real thing.
well, o.k., here you go again, but, I'm down with it now. it's just your way. but, don't do the victory dance just yet. it comes down to numbers, and the wga counter offer of a tiered scale for internet reuse will either be embraced, or not. but that was the key. the suits wouldn't open the books via a percentage deal because then it would become public what we all know in... public. they're thieves. this gives them the space to continue to rob peter to pay paul in their "75% of all tv shows and movies fail" world. I see no reason it can't be resolved in the very near future, unless the hard-liners prolong it.
I'd also like to give a shout out to ElizaW and John Ridley for their staunch support.
Wow! Your words sounds incredibly hopeful. I couldn't be pleased more. I sincerely hope that you aren't just being ironic. I would really love to see a real shakedown; I think we are all tired of seeing those that don't deserve it get too much and those that do deserve it get nothing.
"Damn, you're good." Of course you are. You're a Writer. Great piece. Thoughtful. Pause.
Tthe story that you tell, about the halls of power and about the people who live in them just a few lifetimes too long to remember where they are, has a lot of parallels right now in other famous towns "where power inevitably loses touch." Where people are "played," and where people are underestimated. Where an entire nation shakes off its illusions, pulls the opinion poll ring out of its nose, and discovers its grit and its identity.
Sometimes I think my brain just shuts off. As I was reading your post, I kept thinking, "That story sounds so familiar; where have I heard it?" Of course, it was Mislansky/Zilinsky -- your play!
As ever, your writing and your insight are gifts. Thanks.
The strike won't last forever, and you writers will be stronger for the fortitude you have shown. Nietsche must be right SOME of the time, after all.
Robbie,
Love this piece. Loved the play. Angry and funny is a good place for you. The suits are trying to kill the streetfighters. Not so fast!
All of us who have worked in Hollywood or on Broadway have had at least one such producer - your Toad of Toad Hall - in our lives. It usually ends with a chase - trying to get the check that was never sent or was received and bounced. I, too, am proud of the fact that the WGA has shown "solidarity" - a 1930's word that has never been bettered. Please don't name the producer you wrote about. The aura of disreputable creep hangs over so many of them who fit comforably inside your brilliant description. Alas, the very fact that such people still occupy places of power within the industry - in better suits and haircuts - does not offer much hope for honorable negotiations. Still, one must hope as the old saying goes, "Hope never dies but it lives a troubled life." This strike will end, some progress will be made towards a just solution for the creators, and more Toads of Toad Hall will occupy seats of power. Onwards.
"The Studio Heads thought that there was no way the writers would be able to organize themselves coherently. They were wrong."
Really? You honestly believe the 'Studio Heads" thought so little of you and had such a bad read on the situation that the idea of writers organizing for even one day was preposterous and as such they didn't even consider the possibility?
"I think this labor action should serve to put the purveyors of mega-new media corporatism on notice that the old game, the old trope of "schmucks with Underwoods" is at this point, in the 21st century, almost entirely denuded of any truth or viability.
You're assuming they care. There's a lot of things "they should". However it seems regardless of whether or not the Emperor is naked they still control the paradigm. All the resolve in the world is seeming a bit futile as you say yourself:
"Now it is up to one group of slowly awakening studio heads to find a firm and politic way to introduce to another group of paleoconservative media barons that it is a new day and a new ball game."
Where are the writers and their representatives in that equation?
The notion that disbelief at that fact that the writers have shown unity is the predominant factor in the "studio heads" decision making seems a bit self serving. I would be careful what the union takes for victory is not just more of the same hidden in a veil of compromise.
Bravo.
I don't know fully what the strike is about, nor pretend to, but after reading this piece all I can say is I do admire and wish I could write like you.
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