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Arleen Smelko
Two necessary disclosures: 1) I am not a member of the WGA or SAG-AFTRA, nor related studio motion picture industry unions, and cannot speak for their official positions. 2) The ongoing strikes are dynamic and many of the specifics may change by the time this essay is published. For the official statements of the striking unions, visit the WGA Strike Hub and sagaftrastrike.org .
I have the additional challenge of being inclined toward weird, fringe ideas inspired by weird, fringe, mostly unprofitable movies. I pair my concern that my movies are necessarily limited in audience with the insistence that that audience exists. If the audience is small, it requires the movies cost less1.
Working in independent film means being squeezed between the vice clamp of a studio system uninterested in your work unless it can sell merchandise, and a critical and impatient audience that has its expectations framed by the production values and advertising strength of that same studio system.
Meanwhile, streaming was growing, studios were digging ever deeper into their vaults for more content, DVD sales were saving television shows that were imperfectly scheduled from cancellation, and some studies offered manufacture-on-demand DVDs of some of their more obscure golden age productions.
All of this leads to the assumption that ever-cheapening costs of distribution in the digital era would create a long tail benefit to filmmakers and distributors. Everything would be available all the time, so some initial flops had the capacity to make their money back over time, audience attention otherwise equal. If someone discovered an obscure movie they liked and did a little research, they could end up going down a rabbit hole of film discovery.
So a SAG actor who gets a small speaking role in a few episodes of Law & Order gets their paycheck for the days they show up on set, but as those episodes are bought by DVD distributors or networks for reruns or foreign markets, the actor may at least pay the electrical bill while they audition for new roles using their Law & Order footage on their showreel.
The same is true with screenwriting. Writers would pitch shows on new episodes or attempt to write new concept scripts that could be optioned and maybe, as is the goal, produced. If the options kept renewing or the produced show or movie kept being distributed, the writers could get enough income to pay their electricity bill to keep the computer humming while they took the leap on the next script.
Even in that standard model, a creative career takes a ton of risk, and not everybody can make it. The terms of IP contracts are highly variable to things like your own due diligence, your pull or strength as a recognizable talent, and whether you have good agents and lawyers.
Speaking of the box office blockbuster, streaming has hollowed that out, too. When the audience can get thousands of movies on giant high definition screens at home for a dozen bucks per month, then the only people who are going to pay $20 for a single movie ticket on the big screen are there for personal attachment to the public cinema experience.
With far fewer people seeing far fewer movies, studios have less room to take risk. With less room to take risk, they double-down on proven franchises. To keep the franchises proven, they also need to risk-proof them.
Whereas it may be hard to imagine Tony Stark being performed by someone other than Robert Downey, Jr, if you look at things like the revolving cast of Hulks and the parade of Batmans in the new Flash movie, the studios have made it clear: any of these guys can be swapped out without over-reliance on continuity because *handwave* multiverse mumble mumble. And Flash featured performers Adam West, Christopher Reeves, George Reeves, and Jay Gerrick through deepfake technology. Easier not to pay a day rate if the person is dead.
But the immense difficulty in communicating and coordinating that rethink with the public and forcing a change in law and regulation, particularly while the frictionlessness of digital likeness grows by magnitudes on a yearly basis, means that SAG-AFTRA and the WGA can only focus on the on IP-generating efforts of working creatives in the motion picture industry.
In the meantime, we still have the audience, who wants a massive volume of good quality content for very cheap (or endless great content for free). How do we support the production of creative work so that creative workers can focus their efforts on delivering quality without going destitute?
To me the answer is for the audience to be more cognizant about purchasing work as directly from the artist as possible, whenever they can afford to. This is easy to convince people about in general, but more difficult once discussing how to support in specific ways.
I remember when Netflix was newer, a filmmaker friend of mine in Boston wrote a whole blog post doing the math on how Netflix is a no-brainer. In those years, Netflix was something like $5.99 a month for one disc at a time, $9.99 for three. The streaming service was just starting to roll out and was a bonus on top the regular subscription. Estimating 3-day mailing turnover at two discs at a time and one or two streaming options in between, he pointed out that he had access to a broader library of content than the sum of all his local rental stores for less than 50 a movie. Rental rates at that point were about $1, $4 for new releases.
BandCamp takes a flat 15% fee off direct purchases of digital tracks or albums up to $5000 USD, at which point the rate drops to 10%. Fees for physical items are always 10%. The rest goes to the musicians or label.
Luckily there seems to be a rise in theatres like Alamo Drafthouse and Nitehawk that are expanding the model by including food and alcohol. The overall experiential aspect of cinema is being tweaked. Larger cities typically have independent and even non-profit movie theatres that specialize in bringing unique movies to audiences, and my personal experiences in New York City is that those cinemas are much fuller than the AMC and Regal auditoriums are.
I personally hold no animus against studios for trying to create dependably profitable blockbuster spectacles, streamers trying to provide a full library of content for an affordable subscription cost, or to the audience for seeking available and frictionless entertainment. All of these things are okay.
A note that that doesn't necessarily mean that Blockbuster had 10000 distinct titles. Usually new releases would get a couple hundred copies that would slowly purge down to one or two regular rentals.
Genuinely interesting to see that even in the depths of the pandemic when film production was essentially completely shut down and was extremely challenging to do with social distancing and new COVID protocols, the United States still made about as many movies as it produced normally in 2001.
An in-the-weeds technical cool thing about BandCamp is that purchasers can also choose different formats of digital files, from large, uncompressed, full quality files to compressed, small, fast-play .mp3s. A filmmaker-friendly BandCamp would then offer streamable .mp4s and multiplatform accessible filetypes alongside industry standard DCPs, etc.
This impeccably researched and argued work deserves to be read carefully and then spread far and wide. I\u2019m biased but for me this is better than virtually all of the quality legacy media discussions on tech and cinema today, let alone all of the hot takes from the ill-informed and professionally outraged.
I am an independent filmmaker with a dream of \u2018making it\u2019 one day, which means having the opportunities and resources available to write and direct feature-length narrative films that can be sold to interested viewers in a commercial market. I go into this ambition clear-eyed that film production is a prestige industry with a steep Pareto distribution in which very few people get the bulk of the resources, attention, fame, glory, and above all financing to make their dream productions, on top of a wide base of largely working class and lower income workers who pay their bills off of a volatile gig economy.
On the other hand, independent filmmakers like me are motivated to carry on because independent film has always existed and filmmakers have found their audience somehow. Even while audiences are rolling their eyes at bankrupt movie theatre marquees saying \u201CPsh, Hollywood doesn\u2019t have any original ideas anymore,\u201D more independent films are being produced on a yearly basis than ever before.
The last time the WGA and SAG-AFTRA striked together, it was over residuals for television2. The 1980 SAG strike was over residuals for home-video and on-demand. The current WGA / SAG-AFTRA strike is largely about residuals from online streaming and AI. AI generative algorithms are just an expanded use of distributing original content and people\u2019s likeness through a newer medium. I will go into detail below.
Thus, any time a new distribution medium is developed, the studios use that opportunity to cut the rates given to both old and new makers of intellectual property. Their excuse is always that the audience pays less for it \u2013 television viewers don\u2019t pay ticket prices to access a broadcast, streaming subscribers only pay a small fixed rate for a library of content, AI is \u2018just a search engine\u2019 etc. Meanwhile the audience wants the deepest possible library of content for the cheapest possible price.
However that overall approach lands us in the quality - expense - convenience triangle: