Hollywood hypocrites should practice the socialism they preach

The simultaneous writers and actors strikes reveal the deplorable truth that Hollywood hotshots make thousands of times more than their less well known counterparts, who can barely afford to feed their families.  Now, they want you to pay more rather than them making less.

The entertainment world is reeling from back to back strikes that have shutdown production of most major movies, television shows, and more.  First, the Writer’s Guild, a union representing some 15,000 screenwriters, officially stopped work on May 2 after a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the largest work stoppage for the group since 2007.  Then, it was the performers’ turn when the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Motion Picture and Television Producers (SAG-AFTRA), which represents a larger cohort of 160,000, officially stopped work on July 14, the first time since 1980.  Needless to say, both the writers’ and actors’ cause has been championed by high profile celebrities.  George Clooney, for example, took it upon himself to man the barricades as it were and issue a statement to CNN.  “This is an inflection point in our industry,” he said. “Actors and writers in large numbers have lost their ability to make a living. For our industry to survive that has to change. For actors that journey starts now.”  Jason Sudeikis, of Ted Lasso fame, joined the picketers in New York City, chanting “Hey hey, ho ho corporate greed’s got to go” and “What do we want? Contracts. When do we want ‘em? Now!” while promising the strike would continue as long as it takes.  Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA claimed, “This is a fight for basic fairness. This is a fight on behalf of working people. This is not a fight on behalf of huge celebrities,” adding that the “vast majority are fighting to pay rent, mortgage, feed their family. This is a working person’s fight.”  Other wealthy celebrities joined the fray as well including, but not necessarily limited to Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, and Hillary Duff.

The root cause of both disputes is, of course, money.  Hamilton Nolan, writing for The Guardian, described the strike as a crusade against “suffocating inequality.”  “When you scrape away the relatively small surface layer of glitz and glamor and wealthy stars, entertainment is just another industry, full of regular people doing regular work. The vast majority of those who write scripts or act in shows (or do carpentry, or catering, or chauffeuring, or the zillion other jobs that Hollywood produces) are not rich and famous. The CEOs that the entertainment unions are negotiating with make hundreds of millions of dollars, while most Sag-Aftra members don’t make the $26,000 a year necessary to qualify for the union’s health insurance plan.”  This is undoubtedly true, but it doesn’t make the irony any less rich.  The entertainment industry as a whole is a bastion of progressivism.  Name the issue of the day, whether economic or cultural, and celebrities will line up to endorse the most extreme positions imaginable up to and including outright socialism.  These are the very people that support higher taxes for the rich, the redistribution of wealth, and endlessly lecture us on inequality and inequity.  Now, we learn those very same problems are rampant in their own industry, perhaps at a more insane level than in many of the industries they regularly rail against.  How many times have we heard progressives express shock and horror at the pay ratio between CEOs and lower level employees in the same company?  The progressive Economic Policy Institute put it this way in a 2021 study.  “Chief executive officers (CEOs) of the largest firms in the U.S. earn far more today than they did in the mid-1990s and many times what they earned in the 1960s or 1970s. They also earn far more than the typical worker, and their pay—which relies heavily on stock-related compensation—has grown much more rapidly than a typical worker’s pay. Importantly, rising CEO pay does not reflect a rising value of skills but rather CEOs’ use of their power to set their own pay. In economic terms, this means that CEO compensation reflects substantial ‘rents’ (income in excess of actual productivity). This is problematic since the growing earning power of CEOs has been driving income growth at the very top—a key dynamic in the overall growth of inequality. But it also means that CEO pay can be curtailed without damaging economy wide growth.”  The 2021 report put the ratio at 399 to 1.

George Clooney, meanwhile, has a net worth of approximately $500 million, earning around $20 million per picture while working along side actors who earn $26,000 per year for doing the exact same job, a ratio of 769 to one, almost double the “outrageous” corporate ratio, and likely even higher considering a top actor can star in two to three movies per year and/or receive a piece of the gross at the box office.  In other words, you can rewrite the Economy Policy Institute’s statement with “overpaid actors, producers, and directors” in place of CEO’s, but the situation is even worse than that.  CEOs, at least, arguably have additional skills and degrees lacking in some of their lower level employees.  A janitor, for example, does not do the same job as a Chief Executive responsible for the growth and profitability of the entire company, a borderline monstrous responsibility for a large organization.  An actor, however, might be more famous and well-known, but the job description is not meaningfully different whether you are working for free on an independent movie or raking in the big bucks like a superstar.  Putting this another way, the “rents,” that is income in excess of productivity, are orders of magnitude higher for celebrities, who make stratospheric cash for a job literally millions of other people can easily perform.  Mr. Clooney’s case is doubly ironic given that he’s previously championed pay equity for women in the wake of the Sony Studios hack back in 2015.  “One good thing that’s come out of [the Sony hack] is the conversation in very liberal Hollywood that women aren’t being paid the same and … there’s something like 15 female directors in a town of directors,” he said. “I think it’s a very good conversation that they’re starting to have.”  Apparently, Mr. Clooney never noticed many of the other actors he was working with, both men and women, were one step away from the poor house while he was living in the lap of luxury.  The cynic in me can’t help but think that pay equity for women in the industry was the hot topic then while overall pay for unknown actors and writers is the hot one today.

The situation gets even more confusing when you consider the explosion of content we have witnessed over the past decade with the rise of streaming services, as well as the explosion in budgets for mainstream movies.  There is more money being spent on narrative storytelling than ever before.  Netflix alone spends close to $17 billion a year, funding that simply didn’t exist the last time there was a strike in Hollywood.  Apple, Disney, Paramount Plus, Peacock, and others are also spending billions along with more established players like HBO, Showtime, and the major networks.  In principle, it should be the best time in history to be an actor or a screenwriter.  There is more work on more platforms and there should be more money, a lot of it, but now we learn that, in practice, almost none of this money is making its way to the working people in the industry.  How that is possible remains entirely unclear, but one suspects the top names are quite literally stealing all the money, especially when you look at the lucrative deals with producers and directors such as Christopher Nolan and Lisa Joy of Westworld fame, or D.B. Weiss and David Benioff of Game of Thrones.  Regardless, Mr. Clooney and others don’t seem to be interested in the underlying economics.  They just want more money for actors and writers, which essentially translates into you and me paying more for either streaming services or movie tickets.  In other words, they keep their millions, they keep making ever larger paychecks, and we foot the bill.  They won’t say that part out loud, of course, but what other outcome will there be if actors and writers get paid more with no other economic changes to the industry and while more money is flowing around than at any point in the history of entertainment?

Here’s a novel solution:  How about they practice the socialism that they preach and pay working actors out of their own exorbitant salaries?  We can envision a simple system fixing the pay ratio at a generous 100 to one.  The top stars can negotiate their contracts as they do now, but then the sum above the ratio would be put back into a pool to pay the actors and writers on the low end of the spectrum, this way everyone wins and gets a piece of the action.  Surely, such bonafide progressives can make do with a little less so their comrades can make a little more?  After all, that’s only what they’ve told us time and time again – when it comes to other people’s money, of course.  When it comes to their own money, it certainly seems to me that an entirely different standard applies.  “Hey hey, ho ho corporate greed’s got to go,” indeed, though it is better said as celebrity greed has got to go.