The WGA had already been on strike for more than 70 days when Deadline published an article with unnamed studio sources, talking about the strategy behind their approach to talks with the WGA. Long story short, those studio executives were absolutely, 100% against coming into the negotiations in good faith. One studio executive told Deadline that the studios wanted to drag out the strike for months longer and: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” They explicitly want to “break the WGA.” Within 24 hours of the publication of that Deadline piece, SAG-AFTRA walked away from their negotiations with AMPTP and on Thursday, SAG-AFTRA officially went on strike.
Actors have the exact same issues as the writers: streaming broke the system and they’re not being paid fairly. Residuals are non-existent and streamers are under no obligation to share their streaming data or any data of the popularity of their films or TV shows. Studios are in open contempt of the creators who have built their companies’ reputations. Studio executives want to give themselves eight-figure bonuses, all while showing disgust and hostility towards working actors and writers who simply want to OWN A HOME. Anyway, that Deadline quote has been rattling around Hollywood for a week, and Ron Perlman had the best reaction to it. He deleted this later, but tons of people saved it:
“Listen to me motherfucker, there’s a lot of ways to lose a house.”
Now deleted; still true pic.twitter.com/Tn0Y01ibHF
— Jorts (and Jean) (@JortsTheCat) July 14, 2023
“Listen to me, motherf–ker: there’s a lot of ways to lose your house. Some of it is financial. Some of it is karma. And some of it is just figuring out who the f–k said that. And we know who said that…there’s a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people? You wish that families starve while you’re making twenty seven f–king million dollars a year for creating nothing? Be careful, motherf–ker. Be really careful. Because that’s the kind of sh-t that stirs sh-t up.” Just… perfect. Amazing. No notes.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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- Former Jury president Ron Perlman attend a photocall during the 61st Monte Carlo TV Festival. On June 19, 2022 in Monte-Carlo,,Image: 701010094, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Olivier Huitel / Avalon
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- 61st Television Festival of Monte-Carlo Closing ceremony red carpet. Ron Perlman.,Image: 701790866, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Olivier Huitel / Avalon
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- LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 17: Ron Perlman attends the Los Angeles premiere for the Peacock original series “Poker Face” at Hollywood Legion Theater on January 17, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.,Image: 750378213, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Pictured: Ron Perlman, Credit line: Jeffrey Mayer / Avalon
Righteous rant. More please
YES. Louder, Ron! 👏
Holy crap, you could make a whole movie just from this clip. That “m-f-cker” should be cowering in his fancy wine cellar.
They kinda did. He full on channeled Sons of Anarchy right there. It’s based on Hamlet and all about revenge.
Lol, thanks. I only know him from Beauty and the Beast and the Hellboy movies. But it does seem like this clip could be the opening scene for a Hollywood war.
He has this ability to make himself understood and to get his emotions across, even when he’s covered in hours of prosthetics for a role (Beauty and the Beast, Hellboy). Or has little or no dialogue (City of Lost Children, Gnarlack in Fantastic Beasts). He’s had some big breaks but he’s mostly been a journeyman for decades doing whatever he can to earn a living.
He’s brilliant. I haven’t watch Beauty and the Best since it first aired in my childhood, but Sons of Anarchy was one of the first truly great shows of the prestige era, laying the foundation for the increasingly daring approaches to tv writing to follow. He played a very complex villain the king against whom the prince must exact his vengeance, but he was also the head and mastermind of an outlaw kingdom. And he had all the passion displayed in this one video.
City of lost children! Can’t tell you how many times my brother and I watched that as teens. It made an impression.
Go Ron Go!
I literally heard this in Clay’s voice. It’s terrifying. However these execs need to be a little scared
I’ve loved Ron since his Beauty and the Beast days. I used to say he could read the telephone book to me and I’d be happy. This clip says it all.
Good for Ron. Not negotiating until people start being evicted and losing homes is just violence in my opinion and what Ron said was just responding to that violence. The greed in their industry is beyond words.
Explain this too me like I’m a child. Why weren’t residuals built into streaming platforms from the start? It’s never been easier to pull data on viewings.
I looked it up and the formula is complicated and based on the streamer’s subscribers, not times the show is watched. Here’s a link.
https://www.wga.org/members/finances/residuals/hbsvod-programs
It makes me feel complicit in the switch from cable to streaming. I hate that I’ve participated in making the CEOs of Netflix, Amazon, Facebook billionaires while everywhere regular people (myself included) are in a day to day struggle to get by.
That is crazy. Residuals are passive income but it’s an industry with a lot of downtime and $20k is starvation wages in LA/New York. If you’re earning residuals on three shows, while making a standard salary in a fourth show in production, a writer might be earning say $150-200k. While the execs are earning 10s of millions. Wow. And for anyone thinking $200k sounds good, try paying a mortgage and supporting children on that in LA. You’re scraping by and the work could dry up at any moment. A show is nothing without strong writing.
And from what I’ve read, the streaming companies aren’t required to share those numbers, therefore they don’t.
The contracts last for three years. It wasn’t as clear then that streaming was going to be the only game in town and that the contracts needed to be updated so that people got paid and could build careers in the streaming world.
Thank you. That actually makes a lot of sense. Technology is advancing at a more rapid pace than ever before. Ai can do exponentially more now than six months ago, so it’s understandable that streaming wasn’t addressed as quickly as it should have been. I was still renting from RedBox ten years ago.
Yeah, pay the writers and actors.
Chicken or egg scenario here: do you have to be a sociopath to be a CEO, or does being a CEO make you a sociopath?
This question will haunt me for the rest of the day. 🤔🙁
Saw a great quote this week – “If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people they gave it to.” (though I am not one for the God is a person sitting on clouds deciding our fates model, I still liked the quote). I vote that sociopath comes first. Good people want to distribute the fruits of labor to those doing the work and how far can that get you?
ITA. Most of us don’t have what it takes to crush other people. Even teaching/training adult learners it hurts when there’s a student who I just can’t reach.
I think they also have a great ability to lie to themselves. I just finished the book, Billionaire Wilderness, and the rich interviewed for the book still believe that they worked harder than those poorer than them and that they are doing a service by supplying jobs.
Neither one of those things are true, but they are still parroting those tired old lines.
To nerd out for a second, you are a sociopath first- as people get promoted through the ranks of a corporation, they literally become less nice. I teach this in my university Org Behavior. classes.
Actually someone has done the research on this exact issue. It is estimated that at least 21% of CEO’s are psychopaths. It’s also estimated that 18% of CEO’s are narcissists. It’s those qualities that help them climb the ladder.
You have to be a sociopath, or at least have sociopathic traits. In order to rise to the levels that these execs are at, it is not enough to “be good at your job”. You have to be willing to make decision after decision after decision that you KNOW will cause the exploitation and suffering of people lower on the corporate food chain than you. Whether that’s shutting down factories and firing tens of thousands of people who have been loyally working for your company for decades in order to outsource the jobs to places with cheaper labor, or squeezing a union to minimize compensation to the actual human beings who make your products work/worthwhile.
CEOs (and companies generally) who aren’t willing to do that will never rise to the level of Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Monsanto, Apple, etc.
Combo. The sociopathic traits were there from the start, but the corporate c-suite ladder sharpens then until it’s something borderline diagnosable.
Now that is an amazing question. You have to stomp on a lot of people to get to the top. You have to stay on top by being a piece of shit sometimes. So I guess the answer is BOTH.
THIS is the energy that labor needs in 2023.
I’ve been thinking: how can we all participate in a way that absolutely BREAKS the studio/streaming system while simultaneously supports artists’ livelihoods and the arts that we all so desperately need? Maybe I need to cancel streaming and buy all the theater tickets I can afford? How can we all move collectively on this?
That’s my question as well.
I agree, however, currently the writers/actors are not asking the public to boycott theaters or streaming. They just ask for understanding, patience, solidarity, and if possible, to donate to the strike fund.
I pay for a lot of streaming services. I finally canceled Max in June after one too many comments from Zaslov. Seeing Iger at Sun Valley and hearing his comments, also had me canceling Disney. I started thinking about the 2 Netflix CEOs and their 50 million plus payments and canceled Netflix too.
The unions may not be asking for a boycott, but the behavior from these CEOs is so blatantly awful, I started questioning what I’m doing with all of these streaming services. I don’t think I’ll be subscribing long term to any services anymore. I’ll probably just bounce around.
One of the writers was saying not to cancel, because that just bolsters the studio claim that streaming services aren’t a steady income for the studios, therefore they have no money to pay the writers and actors.
I just cancelled Max today. I consider it a pause. The quality of original programming is so strong it’s a must have for me. But I’m not giving them a dime while production is in limbo. Pay your writers and actors!
Here’s a link to support picket lines at Sony: https://givebutter.com/sonypicketlines?fbclid=IwAR2RXf2VfvDiqsgzuSQaKtHQvntmcuITEYVKy-bFEiGM-uXvuNjtdxUXK-g
@Beana
I cancelled MGM today and am giving Netflix until the end of the week.
I’ve been wanting to cancel Netflix out of principal due to the password, sharing crack down, which I don’t violate, but I’m already paying for more than one screen, which is just stupid.
We can do our small part.
100% he’s talking about Disney’s CEO.
Disney has always been pretty right wing, only updating their content to meet market demands for diversity. (When the theme song for Aladdin was rewritten to be less insulting to the middle east, it unleashed a major right wing backlash against “political correctness” but it was jut a response to the free market. Disney was still plenty racist). Weirdly, the parks division is on the front lines fighting against Florida fascism.
Knowledge is power, and we can’t have that!
How on earth did studios think they would get away with scanning actors’ bodies and keeping the rights & IP to those images for free & forever?!
Because insane amounts of money and power make them think they are invincible. Throw a lot of money into the judiciary to lock down everything that moves…and Bob’s your uncle. Hey, 18th century French and 20th century Russian nobility thought they had everything under control, too—and that average people would keep taking crap forever…
omg I LOVE it
The greed. The already wealthy, who do not see anything but getting more, more, more.
I hope the Union wins every point they are fighting for.
Sadly, the way the big wigs at the studios control things, Iger will probably give himself a bonus somehow.
I love Ron Perlman! I’m pretty sure the one he’s referencing has a mouse icon on it.
You can give to support writers and actors at the entertainment community fund. https://entertainmentcommunity.org/
There’s an emergency assistance fund for writers and actors.
Don’t forget about the production crews in all of this they’re not striking, but they’re not working The strikes been going since may but the studios decided not to start up productions like they normally do every January. My husband is crew and for the first time in 20+ years he hasn’t worked since mid December. Projects usually wrap up between Thanksgiving and Christmas and if you don’t have a job before Thanksgiving you won’t get one until January. But this January nothing started because the studios decided to “starve everyone” before they even negotiated. We have savings, but it will run out. What’s more scary as our daughter has health issues is that our health insurance is going to run out soon. Because if you don’t work, you don’t get hours towards your health insurance.
@Anon
We hear you,
Are production teams unionized the way writers and actors are? If so, is the union helping? Are there funds, like the strike funds, to donate to?
The audacity of what these execs are saying. Starve them out. Make them lose they’re homes. How fucking dare they while sitting on yachts with so much money. They don’t look good at all. May karma come upon them hard.
Ron Perlman is a fucking BOSS. Great actor and LOVED him on Poker Face. Fire speech!!!!
Bob Iger (Disney) is making $27mil/year
I asked my husband if he heard this. He said, yeah I heard that yesterday. If I was the guy who said it I’d be s**** my pants. Never heard my husband use that phrase before. Lol. So, I’m old and loved Ron and Linda Hamilton in Beauty and the Beast, I also watched quite a bit of Sons of Anarchy.
Heh—those execs think Perlman is bad. Do they really want Biden/the Feds to start knocking heads? Because they seem to be pushing for that endgame…
I see RP riding around LA on his cycle all the time. He is 10000% a legit badass.
Elle P, I bet Iger is making way MORE than 27 million a year, but a lot of that is not in direct salary, but stock options, bonuses, etc. The wealthy hide the ways they make their wealth. I bet he’s making AT LEAST 100 million a year and probably more. Top executives treat themselves VERY well.
I absolutely loved Ron Perlman since Hellboy and finding out he’s a native New Yorker, born and raised here like me! He’s still got that NYC/uptown grit. Go get ’em Ron. We’re with you!