Hollywood Bust: Technicians, Craftsmen, and Below-the-Line Workers Being Laid Off in Droves

Before getting to that, Strong and Diverse Plank of Zero-Charisma Wood Amandla (Amandla, lol) Stenberg has some Thoughts about why her piece-of-shit garbage-fire show failed so badly:

The Acolyte star Amandla Stenberg revealed that she is "not surprised" that the Disney+ series set in the Star Wars universe was canceled after one season following the "vitriol, prejudice, hatred and fateful language" that the cast received from internet trolls since the series was announced and through its cancelation earlier this month.

Stenberg had dual roles in The Acolyte, as twins Osha and Mae, who fall on opposite sides of The Force. The actress spoke out on her Instagram Stories on Wednesday night about her experience with fans, whose relentless vitriol made her feel compelled to respond to, as she says, "honor my value system."

"I'm going to be really transparent and say that it's not a huge shock for me," Stenberg told her fans of the show's cancellation after one season. "Of course, I live in the bubble of my own reality, but for those who aren't aware, there has been a rampage of vitriol that we have faced since the show was even announced -- when it was still just a concept. No one had even seen it. That's when we started experiencing a rampage of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language toward us."

One of the most important skills needed to improve and succeed is the ability to take criticism, evaluate it as either valid or invalid, and then adjust one's performance and improve oneself as needed to improve.

DEI mandates that no criticism of any Privileged Minority is ever valid, and thus they never feel the need to improve.

It's one thing for a talentless actress like Amandla Stenberg to sleepwalk through yet another crap piece of Disney Star Wars "content." The real problem is with DEI "doctors" who think it's racist that you expected them to know that this medicine could cause potentially-fatal allergic reaction, or this DEI engineer who thinks it's sexist to expect her to accurate calculate the maximum load of a bridge's supports.

On to the layoffs.

Much of the slump in Hollywood has nothing to do with politics. Studios and streaming services overpaid and overproduced "content" to fill their streaming start-ups with. It was never sustainable for these companies to spend literally billions on streaming "content." It was all a loss-leader -- they all overspent to attempt to be one of the two or three companies that survived the Streaming Wars. All that had to end eventually.

Hollywood also bet big on the idea that if it produced expensive IP exploitation films crammed with CGI, they would spend $200 million to make a movie, but be virtually guaranteed to make $500 million to a billion plus.

This bet has turned very sour over the past few years. People are no longer impressed by CGI and are sick of the simplistic, shallow, machine-like stories that are told by almost all CGI-driven movies. So that was also a crash that was bound to arrive sooner than later.

That said, the fact that half the country loathes Hollywood and wishes to boycott them doesn't help.

LA Times: It's a Summer of Layoffs in Hollywood.

Last year, Hollywood braved the summer of strikes. This year, a cruel mirror image has appeared: a brutal season of layoffs.

The entertainment industry is reeling from cuts at Paramount Global, which last week began a deep cost-cutting effort that is expected to eliminate 2,000 jobs, or 15% of staff, by year's end ahead of a long-in-the-works ownership change.

...

The workforce reduction is just another example of the full-on reset the film and TV business is enduring in the aftermath of the streaming wars. Debt-saddled Warner Bros. Discovery recently targeted nearly 1,000 cuts in its latest round of downsizing. Walt Disney Co.'s TV division last month shed 140 workers, the latest in a round of layoffs at the Burbank company.

Studios used the writers' and actors' strikes as cover to reduce their spending after losing billions of dollars trying to catch up with Netflix. All the while, the cable TV business continued to disintegrate, like a slowly melting glacier that suddenly broke into pieces.

I'm very happy I cut the cord. I recommend it to everyone. Cutting the cord is like shedding thirty pounds overnight.

Paramount's and Warner Bros. Discovery's decisions to write down the value of their cable networks felt like an admission that the TV business had reached a point of no return, and that once formidable brands including TNT, HGTV, MTV and Comedy Central had lost relevance.

...

For the workers in the entertainment industry who've been struggling to find jobs since the "hot labor summer" and fall concluded, there's been little relief so far. Only recently have glimmers of hope started to emerge, and optimism has been blunted by the sense that the business is smaller than it was a few years ago, when companies simply couldn't get enough content.

...

[G]reen light activity was still down 9.9% compared with the first half of 2023, according to Ampere data. Even more dire are comparisons with the first half of "peak TV" year 2022, when the companies commissioned 1,515 programs in the U.S. and Canada. Taking a more global view, the data also show that a large portion of the newly commissioned shows and streaming movies are being produced abroad and for less money.

...

There's a reason "Survive till '25" has for months been the mantra of below-the-line workers, writers, actors and others looking to get on with the business of making shows and movies. The phrase echoes the refrain of fans of beleaguered sports teams and people waiting for an $11-billion annual box office: "We'll get 'em next year."

Hollywood is slowly getting back to work, but the days of peak TV aren't coming back. Some entertainment companies are commissioning more shows again, but the comeback remains incredibly slow. When will Hollywood workers struggling to find work get some relief?

Unfortunately, it's the more blue collar workers -- who are not nearly as left-looney as the higher-paid actors and soulless producers -- who are bearing the brunt of the recession.

Production designer Dave Blass wrapped his last big project, filming the Paramount+ series "Star Trek: Picard" in Toronto in 2022 before the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA walkouts hit last year. Even now, almost a year after those strikes ended, the two-time Emmy nominee for "Justified" says Hollywood's production designers, set decorators and their crews still have little work.

"I'm just trying to stay positive and get through this," says Blass, 55, adding that others are far worse off. "Most people have been hanging on by their fingernails, and they're running out of fingernails. I know Emmy Award winners who are driving around delivering auto parts."

To pay bills, Blass has taken short-term graphic design gigs and sold autographs at "Star Trek" conventions. He is taking lessons to become a FAA-licensed drone photographer for real estate listings. "It's like you're starting from scratch," he says.
As a member of what is broadly known as the art department -- production designers, set decorators, art directors, graphic artists, illustrators, model makers, scenic painters, construction crews and more -- Blass belongs to the vast pool of below-the-line talent who do not earn profit participation or residuals. Nevertheless, during the 2023 strikes, these artisans picketed in solidarity with the writers and actors who continue to make money after the final frames are shot.

The hourly workers (with rates that start around $40 an hour) and flat-fee weekly contract players of the art department are responsible for transforming the blank canvases of soundstages and back lots into the suburban cul-de-sacs and intergalactic space stations you see on-screen. Yet despite the recent ratification of their own union contracts, with a 7% pay bump in hourly rates for the first year, many art department workers are still looking at plummeting bank balances and blank work schedules as Hollywood's TV and film businesses contract and the flight of production overseas contributes to a painful industry slowdown.

...

After 18 years, Jennifer Fulmer, a set decorator on four seasons of ABC's "black-ish" spinoff "Grown-ish," says the slowdown has made her feel like she's stepped back in time to the early years of her career. She hasn't worked since March, and her income has dropped by half.

"I know a lot of people who have moved. One set dresser I know is working as a lifeguard this summer," she says. Fulmer earns money from an Airbnb in Big Bear that she owns and decorated, and she has been considering a side hustle helping people decorate their Airbnbs or doing event planning.

I'm not happy about innocent people losing their jobs, but there's no other way to teach the higher-ups a lesson.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:00 PM

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