A Message of Thanks to the Writers' on the Picket Line from One of Your Supporters

A Message of Thanks to the Writers' on the Picket Line from One of Your Supporters:	Feb. 13th, 2008 @ 12:47 pm

I am proud of the brothers and sisters at the WGA. You have done a good thing for the union movement. The level of solidarity of your unit is a lesson to us all. The use of new media to get your message out should be taken up as much as possible by all unions. The level of strike support by non-WGA members should bring hope to all of our union brothers and sisters.

A strike is never won completely. You can never know for sure when victory is yours. I have seen great contracts signed after a unified strike and the actual long term prospects that the strike gave access to lost by frittering away of unity. I have seen mediocre contracts signed in the midst of contentious union in-fighting with the result that the specific union and the union movement as a whole has come away stronger and ready for future struggle. A strike is not won or lost on the day the strike ends. It will be the future that will tell. If this fight leads to a Hollywood more united against the conglomerates, to a SAG and WGA in continuous collaboration, to greater connections with the union movement as a whole, and to a spread of the lessons of this strike to other unions in Southern California and across the country, then the victory will not be just in the here and now for this contract but a permanent victory that will grow.

So this is what I have to say: Start organizing now for SAG, for the Teamsters, for other Hollywood unions and for your future contract. Don't forget the lessons you learned in this fight. You are writers, you should write those lessons down. Create a collective history so others can see.

I have a few hopes for the future, the future of the writers' at the WGA, of the website United Hollywood, and the future of the Hollywood union movement. I will list the obvious along with the not so obvious. I hope at later times to write two longer posts on "the measure of victory" and "the lessons for other unions of the WGA strike."

1) Most immediately you need to support SAG and the Teamsters in their upcoming contract negotiations. Do not fall asleep on this, especially in regard to the Teamsters.

2) You need to find a way to unite all Hollywood unions in one bargaining coalition. (I do not yet hope that there will be a single industrial wide union but that should be an aim of the most conscious union members.)

3) Is there any possibility that some tech savvy writers might volunteer to help other unions in need? Damn it! there have been a few organizing drives that I have been involved with, and one major strike here in NYC, that your kind of righteous propaganda, use of youtube, picket line interviews, web log-rolling could have helped us to get the news out to the public that we are not "greedy" truck drivers or transit workers, but just brothers and sisters making a living. (Also star power would help.)

4) I would like to know more about rank and file connections between Hollywood unions and other unions in Southern California.

5) I would like to hear some respectful but clear eyed discussion of IATSE and how to incorporate IATSE into a "United Hollywood" movement.

Going forward will prove the success of this strike. Don't let victory slip through your fingers by relaxing. As Verrone said, you must build on your unprecedented unity. Organize the unorganized! Join with other unions.

The strike captains I read on the internet, heard in interviews, and the ones I met on the picket line in New York were the backbone of this strike. Don't let anyone tell you that this strike wasn't yours because you made it yours. In my 30 years of involvement in the union movement I have rarely met a more motivated group of strike and line captains. They made it a pleasure for me to show up at the picket line in cold, rain, and sleet. I want to thank them.

I want to thank your leadership and your rank and file for giving the union movement a win that can be built upon.

Jerry Monaco

Tags: labor movement, picket lines, responsibility, solidarity, strike, strike tactics, strikes, tv, unions, wga, workers, writers, writers' strike, writing

Jurisdiction Over Animation & Reality and the Question of Victory or Defeat

Jurisdiction Over Animation & Reality and the Question of Victory or Defeat	Jan. 24th, 2008 @ 12:01 pm

In his latest post @ Working Life Jonathan Tasini wrote something that I completely agree with.

As I wrote the other day in looking at the deal reached with the Directors Guild of America, the question of future jurisdiction is crucial. I understand why the Guild has agreed to drop the demand that the contract cover reality and animation--there is pressure to make a deal. But I also understand, and agree wholeheartedly with the Guild leadership, why the Guild stuck with this proposal for so long. The more work that stays non-union, the worse the long-term prospects are for Guild members in five, ten, twenty years. It is self-evident to me, and I assume most people who have been around labor for long enough, that if you don't keep your jurisdiction at a high level, then, you will obviously get hurt at the bargaining table.

As a comment on this I want to talk about "victory." The end of most strike battles are muddy. It is never clear immediately who has won and who has lost. Only time can tell on some issues and especially on issues of organizing the unorganized. If the WGA comes out of this strike invigorated and believing that they have had an effect on their industry then it can become the spur for a transforming experience for the WGA and, perhaps, even for other Hollywood Unions.

I have tried to make this point in one of my posts at my journal:

First, of course, the writer's strike is important to the union movement in Southern California. It should be obvious to all people who know the history of the labor movement that the Southern California union movement often follows in the wake of the successes or failures of the Hollywood unions. This has been the case since the 1930s. At first, this was so, because the organization of the Hollywood unions was the big break for the union movement in an area of the country that was open shop, anti-union, and a locus for brutal union busting by the metropolitan authorities. Later, Hollywood workers' organizations were often a model for union success or for union failure in other industries. But one of the biggest reasons that Hollywood union success can spur on success in the Southern California region is because the Hollywood labor force includes among its members representatives from all important crafts in the economy as a whole -- carpenters, electricians, painters, designers and skilled workers of all sorts. Thus, for example, if painters organized a union with-in the studios in the 1930s this organization often spread to other painters in Southern California outside of the studios. If carpenters get a raise in the Hollywood unions this puts pressure on employers of carpenters through-out the region to raise wages.


What is not largely recognized, at least by those outside the industry (and unfortunately by many IATSE members), is that the writers' union has always been a wedge union in Hollywood. It was a target of the studio bosses in Hollywood's classical period, it was a major target of blacklisting in the '50s, and it has often been the union that the corporate bosses first took aim at when intending to undercut "below the line" unions. In the immediate post-war years below the line unions showed the potential to form an industry wide union. It was the SWG [Screenwriters Guild], among all of the creative unions, which was most supportive of below the line militancy, and paid the heaviest price for its support. In the vision of those days the IA progressives and the SWG were united in a perspective for an industrial union that would include the creative workers, from writers to painters. In this fight against an industrial wide union the bosses considered the SWG a major threat to the moguls' creative control. The leadership of the SWG was the most militant supporters of the striking carpenters and painters at the heart of the struggle.

What has not been recognized as an important consequence of the WGA strike is that for the first time since 1948 members of major unions in Hollywood have been talking about the need for an industry wide union. This has not happened since the union upsurge in the immediate post-war years in Hollywood, and at that time members of the old Scriptwriters Guild were leading the way. The fact that I have heard many writers say things similar to what David Latt said at United Hollywood:

What's needed now is clear-headed, strategic thinking. We've always known that we are one Guild among many and that, unlike other American corporations, the Hollywood congloms get to speak with one voice, using their superior resources to obstruct our objectives. Structurally, that puts us at an incredible disadvantage. What if all the Hollywood unions were, like the United Auto Workers, negotiating with one voice, picking off the studios, one at a time? What kind of deal would we have then?

No matter what the specific details of the deal the WGA agrees to at the conclusion of this strike, If the need for stronger and united unions is recognized by thinking union supporters in SAG, and can make some headway with other unions in the industry. then the long term victory of Hollywood workers will be traced back to this strike and to the current perspective of the WGA leadership, from Patric Verrone to the strike captains at United Hollywood.

The reason I say this in a forum for non-WGA readers, is that it is not generally recognized how unclear the aftermath of a strike can look. There has been a lot of energy produced by fans of the writers in support of the WGA. I do not wish for that energy to be dissipated in a misplaced sense of defeat. The writers will not win the organization of animation and reality writers as a result of this strike, and I, like Tasini, believe that this was a righteous goal. But as an observer I am not yet willing to admit there has been a lack of a victory even on this issue. If this strike raises the consciousness of other workers in the entertainment industry it could have effects far beyond this strike and in fact far beyond Hollywood.

Jerry Monaco
24 January 2008
New York City






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Tags: capitalism, corporations, defeat, economics, ideology, industrial unionism, jurisdiction, organization, politics, strikes, victory, wga, workers, writers, writers' strike

The most dangerous man in Hollywood?

The most dangerous man in Hollywood?	Jan. 11th, 2008 @ 06:22 pm

There is a good article on the writers' strike by Nelson Lichtenstein at The Guardian . Lichtenstein wrote one of my favorite biographies: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. I recommend this book to anyone who would like to get a longer view of the labor movement. It will give some perspective on the tactics and strategies and long range goals of any union on strike.

I mentioned in one of my posts (monacojerry The WGA and the Attempt to Organize the Unorganized ) that Patric Verrone, the President of WGAw, has been treated by the media moguls as if he were Walter Reuther. Like Walter Reuther, who was called the "most dangerous man in Detroit", there are those among the AMPTP masters of the universe who believe the WGAw president is the most dangerous man in Hollywood. Such people are only those who wish that writers and all workers in Hollywood would just sit-down, shut-up and do as they are told.

The rest of us who support this strike, should know that there are great things at stake in the WGA strike and Verrone is only being the best representative he can for the writers in Hollywood and, I believe, for all of labor in the Hollywood industry. The WGA writers are making a stand for things that are worth fighting for.

Nelson Lichtenstein's article puts into a larger context some of what the WGA and the creative workers in Hollywood are fighting for.

A little knowledge

by Nelson Lichtenstein

The US writers strike proves that the new 'knowledge workers' of the 21st century still need to fight old battles for a fair share of their output

January 3, 2008 5:00 PM



Win, lose or draw, Hollywood's striking writers have written finis to one long-running episode in American cultural and intellectual history. For years the most sophisticated prognosticators writing about the global economy have assured us that in our creative, cyber-oriented world new forms of work and enterprise would put an end to the old conflicts and controversies that once plagued industrial America. Contests over money, power and status, not to mention strikes, unions and hard-nosed bargaining sessions, were increasingly played out. They were so rust belt, certainly out of place in the hip and hyper-innovative world spawned by new media, iPod downloads and hyper-educated workers.

Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's first secretary of labour, forecast an America in which legions of newly minted "symbolic analysts" made the United States globally competitive once again, even as they transformed the old corporate hierarchies into a system that was "more collaborative, participatory, and egalitarian than is high-volume, standardized production."

Read More at The Guardian:

music: DocArchive: Assignment - Taxi to the Dark Side 3 Jan 2008

Tags: historian, intellectual property, intellectuals, organizing, strike, strikes, unions, wga, workers, writers, writers' strike

The Social Economy of a Hollywood Strike, Part 2: What is at Stake!

The Social Economy of a Hollywood Strike, Part 2: What is at Stake!	Jan. 9th, 2008 @ 07:10 am

[Note: Part 1 is Auteurs and Managers: Class Struggle, Blacklists, Business Models, and Film Theory - :The following post grew from responses to contributions at the must read weblog United Hollywood. Alfredo Barrios's "The Strike Is a Lawyers' Game: How to Play to Win" is an explanation of the current negotiation situation between the WGA and AMPTP. BTL Guy's "Modest Proposal: Truce?" was a thoughtful proposal to get people back to work immediately and still let the WGA negotiate its own contract. The limits of "the lawyers' perspective" on the writers' strike (or any strike) and BTL Guy's union negotiation perspective inspired me to write a broad explanation for the "irrational intransigence" of the majors in the AMPTP. In order to understand what is going on in this strike it is necessary to realize that for the corporations there is more at stake than the economics of the entertainment industry or compensation of unionized workers. Personal Note: I am not a member of the WGA. I am not employed in the entertainment industry. I am pro-union and my politics should be obvious to anyone who reads my posts. Jerry Monaco]

The Social Economy of a Hollywood Strike, Part 2: What is at Stake!
What is at Stake for the WGA, for Hollywood, for the Labor Movement, for the Corporations, and for the Rest of Us in the WGA Strke or the Importance of the Writers' Strike:

The importance of the writers' strike to the multinational corporations can be summed up in a few sentences: The corporations that dominate the entertainment industry are fighting a battle for control of labor and creative products. In this battle they are the vanguard of a fight in which many other corporations also have a stake. All corporations in the so-called "post-industrial" economy look at the battle of the "The Hollywood Industry" as their battle. What makes this fight crucial for the owners and managers, is that what is on the line is not only the corporate interests of Viacom and Sony, but, to a large extent, Microsoft and Monsanto.

The implications of the WGA-AMPTP strike for the union movement in the United States deserves a longer explanation. It must take into account the changing economy in Hollywood and through-out the U.S. The significance of the writers' strike goes far beyond the workers in the entertainment industry. Sometimes I think the writers on strike and the workers in the industry do not themselves know the importance of this battle to the labor movement as a whole and to all creative people in our society. Unfortunately, my brothers and sisters in the union movement have also not recognized the full implications of this strike for the future of our movement.

First, of course, the writer's strike is important to the union movement in Southern California. It should be obvious to all people who know the history of the labor movement that the Southern California union movement often follows in the wake of the successes or failures of the Hollywood unions. This has been the case since the 1930s. At first, this was so, because the organization of the Hollywood unions was the big break for the union movement in an area of the country that was open shop, anti-union, and a locus for brutal union busting by the metropolitan authorities. Later, Hollywood workers' organizations were often a model for union success or for union failure in other industries. But one of the biggest reasons that Hollywood union success can spur on success in the Southern California region is because the Hollywood labor force includes among their members representatives from all important crafts in the economy as a whole -- carpenters, electricians, painters, designers and skilled workers of all sorts. Thus, for example, if painters organized a union with-in the studios in the 1930s this organization often spread to other painters in Southern California outside of the studios. If carpenters get a raise in the Hollywood unions this puts pressure on employers of carpenters through-out the region to raise wages.

What is not largely recognized, at least by those outside the industry (and unfortunately by many IATSE members), is that the writers' union has always been a wedge union in Hollywood. It was a target of the studio bosses in Hollywood's classical period, it was a major target of blacklisting in the '50s, and it has often been the union that the corporate bosses first took aim at when intending to undercut "below the line" unions. In the immediate post-war years below the line unions showed the potential to form an industry wide union. It was the SWG, among all of the creative unions, which was most supportive of below the line militancy, and paid the heaviest price for their support. In the vision of those days the IA progressives and the SWG were united in a perspective for an industrial union that would include the creative workers, from writers to painters. In this fight against an industrial wide union the bosses considered the SWG a major threat to the moguls' creative control. The leadership of the SWG was the most militant supporters of the striking carpenters and painters at the heart of the struggle.

It is important to know why the bosses have targeted the writers' union in the past, and are doing so now. Writers are at the heart of the central contradiction of the Hollywood system. Creative work is necessarily a free-flowing process that does not follow the rigid rules of business management. At the same time business management insists upon standardization and labor discipline. The prime motive of the business managers is profit and control. The prime motive of writers is often enough to create something that compels them. Writers, whose skills are not bounded by the specialties of screenwriting and television writing, are at the same time necessary to all forms of story-making of the movie and television industries. This often makes writers the weakest link in the business manager's plans. It is my contention that all members of the entertainment industry suffer from this same conflict between craft and creativity, on the one hand, and the effort of the owners and managers to impose labor discipline, on the other hand. For the managers and the owners of the Hollywood industries, the writers are at the heart of this conflict, and thus the writers' union has often been the main target of the Hollywood bosses.

The current situation in Hollywood has more than regional importance. It is important nationally, and, because of the companies involved, internationally. Unfortunately, the labor movement across the U.S. has not discovered the importance of this strike to their interests. To put it simply, many of the peculiarities of the "Hollywood" economic structure have become standard for the U.S. economy.

One example is the economic stratification of the star-system. Star-system economics often looks like a three-tier system -- the great stars at the top, followed by a lot of people hanging on to employment at the bottom, and below them the economically disenfranchised trying to grab on to the first rung of the ladder. This system of economics was basically modeled in the U.S. by Hollywood and transferred, from there, to the corporate sector. The real stars in today's economic system are the CEOs. All the rest who may think of themselves as stars, are mere celebrities, who, as far as the CEOs are concerned, are fit for Hollywood Squares, and can be traded like properties.

Another example of Hollywood peculiarities becoming the national economic standard relates to the problem of what is amusingly called "intellectual property." The very term "intellectual property" has to be questioned because rights to ownership of these intangibles are a result of a socially granted monopoly for a supposedly limited number of years. Intellectual property is "property" in the same way that corporations are "producers" of movies; in both cases what we are dealing with are legal fictions that are taken for reality. The fact is that Hollywood has led the charge for the constant expansion and lengthening of the idea of intellectual property. There are some aspects of the current WGA strike that can be called the "Sonny Bono Lockout." Because of Sonny Bono and Mickey Mouse, corporations now own the copyright to a work for 95 years. If a corporation "creates" a work "for hire" today the corporation will hold the copyright until 2113. Consider that there is not a human being on this earth that can predict which works created today will be valuable tomorrow or 25 years from now and certainly not 75 years from now. Further, no corporate prognosticator can predict what types of media will be the modes of transmission in 25 or 50- years. Again writers' who traditionally expected to own the copyright to their work are at the heart of this struggle. The wish of the current corporate moguls is to treat today's cohort of writers in the same way that the old blues artists were treated -- buy a bunch songs today for $20 and hope that tomorrow they will be worth something. In the meantime the "owners" take all the credit leaving nothing for the artist.

The important point is that in the emerging "intellectual property" regime this is the fate of all creators of work, whether they are computer programmers, comic book artists, or workers in the Hollywood industry. If the major corporations in the AMPTP are intransigent it is because they realize what they are fighting for, i.e. "properties" that will be their exclusive monopoly for almost a century. The fight over new media is not the fight over new media alone, it is in fact a fight for control and ownership of all new "properties." It is a fight that every single corporation involved in making "intellectual property" "for hire" has an interest in winning. The owners and bosses of these corporations believe that the creative work of others is their property alone, and any limits imposed on the fee simple of ownership is a "socialistic" encroachment on their property rights. This last point cannot be emphasized too much; the Hollywood model of the division between "creativity" and "ownership" has become the model for all sectors of the economy dominated by corporations.

Major coporations are scrutinizing this strike carefully and there is a high level of support for the intransigence of the AMPTP majors amng the corporate classes. Such support is not merely symbolic but a realization that the fight of the AMPTP multinationals is the fight of all corporations. The level of importance of this strike are parallel on both sides of the picket line. The AMPTP majors are fighting a battle that is important to all corporate owners and the WGA is fighting a battle that is important to all Hollywood unions, a battle that should be important to the whole of the labor movement. The difference is that the bosses of the multinational corporations seem to know what is at stake for them while the union movement has not realized the full importance of this strike.

Alfredo Barrios correctly tries to answer the question "why are the studios acting so insanely? Our demands are reasonable. Don't they understand that they have a lot to lose? Surely, it's the hardliners [at the WGA] who are holding things up, right?"

But the answer to this question, is not only a matter of negotiation strategy or even of simple economics, but rather of the overall interests of the corporations represented in this dispute. Legally, incorporated businesses are not supposed to consider the interests of the owners of corporations in general. Legally, they are only supposed to focus on the interest of their stockholders to the exclusion of all other stake-holders, such as employees or communities, etc. But legal obligations and practical policies often do not coincide. This is one reason why looking at a strike strictly from the point of view of legal negotiations severely limits both the importance of the strike to everyone involved and the strategy and tactics needed to win. In order to understand why these specific corporations are acting seemingly against their immediate economic interests it is necessary to understand what is at stake from their point of view.

Given the above discussion of the crucial division between the creators of "intellectual property" and the owners of that property it is necessary to bring up an impolite criticism of the Hollywood unions, and especially of the "creative unions." The very divide between "creative unions" and "below the line" unions is artificial. Most of the workers in Hollywood are "creative" in one way or another and deserve to be considered so. They also deserve "creative" ownership of the collective work of movies and television shows, etc. This notion of creative ownership needs to go beyond the simple funneling of residuals into the health and pension funds of below the line workers. Such a battle for the expansion of creative ownership to "below the line" workers cannot be won with this strike but all of the "creative" unions should take up this fight. As a practical matter it is necessary to unite all Hollywood unions in order to deal with the massive multinational corporations who own the entertainment industry. The rank and file of IATSE and other below the line unions must be won over to the fights of the creative unions, and vice-versa, or else any gains in this battle will always be under threat. Ultimately, the aim should be to create an industry wide union containing everyone from the great stars to the maintenance workers. The so-called "creative" unions must take some of the first steps to spread the idea that creative ownership is shared by all who work on a movie or show.

I come to the conclusion about the artificiality of the divide between creative and below the line workers after studying the history of set designers and their attempts to unionize in the old Congress of Studio Unions. When the set designers were most powerful in their union -- roughly during the period of World War II -- they asserted real creative influence over the movies they were involved in and could be considered one part of a "collective of authors." (I have written about these subjects at length at my weblog. In short the "auteur theory" is mostly a description of the result of an historical struggle which acknowledged the "managerial" cult of the director-as-unit-foreman instead of investigating how collective authorship could be credited to all creative workers.) In other words, if copyright exists in creative works produced by the entertainment industry, then all workers should share in the continuing benefits of those copyrights during the whole life and in all the uses of that copyright.

But all of that is only a perspective for the future.

So let us be clear, the fight here is not merely about compensation it is about control. Recently, while reading about the history of Hollywood unions I came across the following quote, about why the moguls have always been adamantly opposed to any union for writers.

The blood-letting between studio management and the SWG, which endured for nine years, showed where the real conflict in Hollywood lay, not over money, but over the control of moviemaking. The producers willingly paid gargantuan salaries to the best actors, directors, and screenwriters, but steadfastly resisted any encroachment on creative decision-making. (The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund)

The (non)negotiating strategy of Counter and Company, is not merely a result of a lawyer's "over-promising" to his clients; it is also a result of twenty years of change in The Industry.

One aspect of that change is the integration of all entertainment industries into the multinational corporate system. This is where the anomalies of Hollywood business practices have come into conflict with corporate standards. In other areas Hollywood has acted as a model of how to obtain control of the products of creative workers. But in the area of how deals are made Hollywood is a model of anarchy, at least from the point of view of the multinational CEO.

Consider the following: What happened to Las Vegas in the 1980s also happened to the entertainment industry in the same time period. The pre-1930s way to finance movies was to go to a bank to structure loans. The banks financed a bet on the future year of movie releases. Studios made movies in the same way that farmers grew crops. In the 1930s, when banking money dried up, the casino owners view of financing took over and much of the liquid financing came from "underground" investments from essentially tax-avoidance and money washing operations. (A little known aspect of depression era studio financing is how much of it came from the underground economy, especially bootleggers and gamblers.) But in the same ways that multinational corporations bought out the gangsters in Las Vegas, the multinationals bought out the deal-makers in Hollywood. The big executives at the multinationals might have understood the old studio-system business model, because essentially the studio system was a "Fordism" model, where the factory was based in Los Angeles and the business operations in New York. But to the CEO of General Electric the current Hollywood "deal making model" must look as if he were putting a number of free-wheeling middle managers in charge of mergers and acquisitions of 250 million dollar factory units. Further more these factory units are run by mad men and women - creative types and bohemian wannabes. And the crowning absurdity is that each factory unit is as temporary as a nightclub pick-up band, gathering employees and equipment and sets for eight months or five years and then breaking them down again. It must look to these new bosses as if a traveling three-ring circus has been hired by General Motors to assemble their cars on a year-to-year basis. It just doesn't make sense to them. In the long run their intention is to find a way to rationalize the political economy of deal making. And in this attempt at rationalization the Hollywood unions stand directly in the way.

So another aspect of the intransigence of the bosses in this fight is a long-term institutional conflict between the corporate owner-financiers and the way creative teams are assembled to do anything in the entertainment industry. In many aspects the formation of creative teams for the making of high-priced collective entertainment has not changed since Shakespeare's day. Making a movie or putting on a show is a matter of picking up an ensemble, from here and there, mostly through social networking. The project of this ensemble is based on the more or less intangible "narrative" of a creative individual or a team, often a writer or writers. None of this is "rational" from the point of view of the corporate bottom line.

In the old entertainment industry the "investors," the money-men, were always "external" to those who ended up "owning" the movies. One result of the finalization of corporate dominance in the '80s and '90s has been that the owners and the investors in the entertainment industry are now a part of the same business conglomerates. (In Roald Coase's terms investment functions have been "internalized.") This internalization of investment has brought out in fine relief the divide between the owners and the collective creators of entertainment.

Much of the history of Hollywood can be written as a tug-of-war between the creators and owners of the works of entertainment. But when the investors were external to the companies to the companies who owned the movie studios, and the companies presented themselves to the investors as borrowers for the next year's crop of movies, the investors did not have to concern themselves with the "irrationality" of creativity. "That is just the way they do things in those industries," the investors could say. The owners, and deal-makers, could themselves take a patronizing attitude to the creative types they gathered under the tent. But now that the owners, investors, and often enough, the sponsors, are all a part of the same interconnected companies, this kind of irrationality is unacceptable. And again, the great roadblock to rationalizing this system is the old craft and trade unions.

Barrios states correctly: "CEOs hate uncertainty. They run their businesses based on long-range plans that are based on long-range assumptions." But he fails to see all of the long range plans of the big conglomerates. The moguls are not only willing to inflict economic pain on the workers in their industry, especially the below the line workers, but they believe that this pain is necessary to enforce labor discipline. General Electric, Sony, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, have a perspective that goes far beyond this strike. Their perspective is that they wish to do to the WGA what Reagan did to PATCO, because the WGA must be held up as an example to all unions. Their perspective is that if they let the writers win here they will be opening the door to similar victories beyond the entertainment industry. Their perspective is that they can afford to lose a few billion dollars in order to stop the writers from earning a few pennies because more than short-term profits in this small industry are at stake. Their perspective is that they must enforce their new "rights" to all forms of intellectual "property" and that to give into workers here would be to allow a trespass on these new forms of "property". Their perspective is not limited to the entertainment industry; it is not only national it is also international. They believe that if they let creative artists and workers have a piece of the action here, then workers in other sectors of the economy, and in other places in the world, will also be looking for their share of these new forms of "property" that they have invented. Barrios fails to see that among the long range goals of the current CEOs in charge of the multinationals is maintaining control of the creative process itself. From the point of view of people such as Murdoch or Iger, the creative types inside the old "entrenched" unions are like the skilled workers who resisted industrialization. If the economic process is to be rationalized the creative types must be brought in line. For the Murdochs of the world, the long-term battle is to find a way to force these meddlesome unions to give up on any idea that people may actually own the works they create. The CEOs look at themselves as the masters of the universe, and the WGA especially threatens that mastery.

[In my next post, I will attempt to show a perspective that can win this strike. It is important to be optimistic in our everyday actions but also to be realistic about the strength between the parties in conflict. I will sketch out how the above perspective of what is at stake leads to more than negotiating strategy for winning this strike.]

Jerry Monaco
9 January 2008
New York City

[Caveat: I am not a member of the WGA, nor do I speak for any of the officers or members of that union or any other union. I have been a member of other unions in the past and I am a supporter of a stronger union movement in the United States. J.M.]





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Tags: auteur theory, capitalism, cinema, creativity, csu, democracy, dga, elitism, ideology, intellectual property, intellectuals, organizing, patric verrone, picket lines, strike tactics, strikes, television, wga, workers, writers, writers' strike

Auteurs and Managers: Class Struggle, Blacklists, Business Models, and Film Theory	Jan. 5th, 2008 @ 12:53 pm

Auteurs and Managers: Class Struggle, Blacklists, Business Models, and Film Theory -
A Worker's Movement Perspective on the Authorship and Ownership of Creative Works

This is a post about unionization and artistic control in the Hollywood system. It is also a post about "film theory," and specifically about the ideological context of the auteur theory.

It is my contention that the auteur theory is essentially a managerial theory of film production. It is a theory of industrial production that masquerades as a theory of artistic creation; it is a description of executive authority which masquerades as advocacy for freedom of authorship. It seems to me that all of the important Hollywood struggles, including the current WGA strike, have been about "ownership" of the creative process. The constant battles by the so-called "producers" (studio executives, unit managers, and directors-as-foremen) to keep labor in line are actually class struggles over who will control the "stories" Hollywood tells.

When the Studios controlled the labor process completely, the real auteurs were the unit managers and producers. Then, as labor militancy increased, the Studios were forced to shift to a cooperative way of film-making. But with the decline of the studio system the struggle over who would control the creative process heated up again. As labor militancy declined, strong unions were gutted by blacklisting. Writers, camera operators, editors, set designers, were "brought into line" and became tools of the director, losing creative control in the cooperative labor process of movie making. The unions were purged, allowing the director to become the main "unit manager," the Hollywood equivalent of industrial foreman. I believe that any detailed look at the rise and fall of the various ways of production of movies and television, and their relationship to the social strength of working groups who created the movies and television shows, will reveal that the auteur theory is both justification and description of a certain kind of management style, that has been "necessary" since around 1946 in Hollywood. The necessity has been dictated by the needs of the owners to maintain control of their workforce.

These thoughts were suddenly triggered when I read a comment expressing the professional animosity between the director and the writer, at the essential writers' strike weblog United Hollywood:

January 3, 2008 6:02 PM
Jake Hollywood said...

Oh c'mon. It's okay to admit that the DGA always operates in their own self interest. They toss writers under the bus all the time. I mean, after all, they're the "authors" of every film ever made, right? Writers are essentially just glorified typist as far as the DGA is concerned--they're not unlike the AMPTP in this view of writers as, "schmucks with Underwoods". If the film is great or merely good, it's the director's "vision" that made it so; if the film is bad, it's always the writer's fault--"...you can't always fix a bad script."

This is the WGA's fight. And it's a battle we writers must win, if for no other reason than to regain what little respect the industry tosses our way.

I wonder if the writer with the nom de blog Jake Hollywood, realizes the full significance of stating his objections to the auteur theory in the context of a labor struggle. It is a little-considered aspect of film history.

The WGA strike has spurred me to think through some of my ideas on film "theory" and history. I have always been opposed to the "auteur theory." For those who don't know, "the auteur theory" is the notion that the director of a film is its "author." Gore Vidal once referred to the "auteur theory" as the "brother-in-law" theory of Hollywood movie making.

With certain exceptions (Alfred Hitchcock, for one), the directors were, at worst, brothers-in-law; at best, bright technicians. All in all, they were a cheery, unpretentious lot, and if anyone had told them that they were auteurs du cinéma, few could have coped with the concept, much less the French. They were technicians; proud commercialites, happy to serve what was optimistically known as The Industry. (Who Makes the Movies? By Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books, Volume 23, Number 19 · November 25, 1976)

I have always looked at movie making and narrative television as a cooperative art. Ideally the artistic works in these media would always be gathered under "collective authorship." In my view the proper "authorities" on any film or narrative television show are the writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, set designers, and then all the other technicians, not necessarily in that order. There are instances when a choreographer or set designer or (nowadays) a special effects designer can contribute more to a narrative work than the director.

Unfortunately in the United States system of movie making you also have to add the "money men," also known as "the producers".

The studio system was a factory system, with the factories on the West Coast and the business headquarters mostly in New York. This was a business model that bankers understood and thus they were willing to front the Studios the money to raise their yearly crop of movies. During the depression most of the bankers' capital dried up and the Studio heads turned to organized crime (bootleggers were overflowing with money), rent seeking from politicians, and union busting to make up the difference. After the high times of World War II the studio system was busted apart by anti-trust actions and by television. By the time of the late 1950s the money men and women were often "the stars" of one type or another. By the late '70s The Industry had progressed to the point that the money was mostly gathered by agencies and their banking consorts who put together the deals. The wags have always said that deal-making is the true art of Hollywood. And if you look at how the deals get made you will know the relation between the capital collectors and the creators of narrative in Hollywood. The structure of these deals will often determine who the "authors" are in Hollywood.

Variations of the deal making business model have continued since the decline of the studio system. But multinational corporations now own The Industry. To them this model looks inefficient and quite suspicious.



What has to be understood is that what happened to Las Vegas in the 1980s also happened to Hollywood and New York entertainment. The pre-1930s way to finance movies was to go to a bank and structure loans. Studios made movies in the same way that farmers grew crops. But in the 1930s the Las Vegas view of financing took over and much of the liquid financing came from "underground" investments from essentially tax-avoidance and money washing operatons. But in the same ways that multinationals corporations bought out the gangsters in Las Vegas, the multinationals bought out the deal makers in Hollywood. The big executives at the multinationals could have understood the old studio system business model, because essentially the studio system was a "Fordism" model. But to the chairman of General Electric the Hollywood "deal making model" must look as if he were putting a number of free-wheeling middle managers in charge of mergers and acquisitions of 250 million dollar factory units. Further more these factory units are run by mad men and women - creative types and bohemian wanna-bes.. And the crowning absurdity is that each factory unit is temporarily picking up employees and equipment and sets for eight months or five years and then breaking them down again. It must look to these new bosses as if a traveling three ring circus has been hired by General Motors to assemble their cars on a year-to-year basis. It just doesn't make sense to them.

Part of the current crisis of Hollywood is a conflict between the creators of works and the new multinationals that don't believe that anything is created except for their profits and the "properties" they own. Peter Chernin of News Corp., Roger Iger of Disney, Barry Meyer of Warner Bros., Brad Grey of Paramont, Harry Sloan of MGM, Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal, and Michael Lunton of Sony are perfectly willing to let the public think that "directors" or "show runners" or "writers" or actors or any number of other people are creators. They even don't mind if those same people think of themselves as "creative". But they know that such people create nothing that is real. And what is real is what is profitable; what is real is what is "property" and "capital". These big boys consider themselves the people that build the products and obtain the properties ("intellectual property" in this case) for themselves and for the future corporate investors. For them the primary issue is control; control of the capital, the resulting "product," and the "(intellectual) property" that can be bought, sold and built upon. Their capital and their property must suffer no interference. Creative types are potential interference once they look at themselves as more than just employees. Now that corporations own the copyrights to "their" "intellectual property" for almost 95 years the stakes have become higher for them. They must have authority and control and they must teach everyone a lesson who gets in their way. Eventually the intention is to change what they consider the antiquated production process of the "deal making system". But in order to do this they must first neutralize or destroy the people who are in the best position to take control of a new creative production methods in Hollywood in New York. This is primarily the writers, but also directors, actors and, for the first time in a long time, below-the-line workers.

It is good to remember that it took almost fifteen years for the old studios to recognize that the writers could bargain as a group. It was only because the U.S. was in the midst of World War II and the Franklin Roosevelt administration was worried that Hollywood would not be ready for the propaganda effort to win the war that the Labor Secretary of the Roosevelt adminstration insisted that the studios recognize the writers union. So what was it about? Why were the studios so resistant to recognizing the old SWG? It is because they realized that since the coming of sound the writers were the creative fulcrum of Hollywood.

The blood-letting between studio management and the SWG, which endured for nine years, showed where the real conflict in Hollywood lay—not over money, but over the control of moviemaking. The producers willingly paid gargantuan salaries to the best actors, directors, and screenwriters, but steadfastly resisted any encroachment on creative decision-making. (The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund)

By the end of World War II the most important creative person in Hollywood was the writer and not the director. Directors who were also writers had an advantage but a director like Cuckor was nothing without the good script. Some writers such as Preston Sturges, Joseph Manckiewicz, and Robert Rossen became sick of having their scripts butchered by the brothers-in-law club and made bids to direct their own films. By the end of World War II the studios were losing control of the stories. The strength of the Hollywood unions meant that the unit producers were having less and less influence on the set and over the creative process as a whole. The decision making for the creation of movies, for the first time since the early days of United Artists, was more and more in the hands of a cooperative group of writers, directors, camera operators, set designers and editors. The writer was recognized by most as the creator of the story and thus for the director-story teller like Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock the most important aspect of their work was to supervise the script from origins to filming.

In a thoughtful article at a socialist website David Walsh states: "Since the early days of sound films writers have been perceived as a potential threat by their employers." He continues:

Writers and other film artists with integrity are impelled to report on life honestly. Such work is inevitably socially critical, sympathetic to the exploited, hostile to the rich and arrogant, outraged by injustice. It must always contain an element of protest. In the end, these sentiments and qualities are incompatible with the industry executives’ drive for profits and need to conceal the harshest social realities. The record of the struggle between these two imperatives, now out in the open, now concealed, is the history of Hollywood. (A socialist perspective for the film and television writers strike, by David Walsh, 5 January 2008.)

This states the situation clearly. It is a conflict between those who create and those who look at those creations as their property, and all who work for them as tools to serve the purpose of profit without disruption of the social structure. Granting creative power to writers is a threat to the bosses'] world view. In 1945 the writers had begun to gain some measure of control over the creative process. So what changed?

Gore Vidal says

Then out of France came the dreadful news: all those brothers-in-law of the classic era were really autonomous and original artists. Apparently each had his own style that impressed itself on every frame of any film he worked on. Proof? Since the director was the same person from film to film, each image of his oeuvre must then be stamped with his authorship. The argument was circular but no less overwhelming in its implications. Much quoted was Giraudoux's solemn inanity: "There are no works, there are only auteurs."

Vidal goes on to say that soon young intellectuals, art historians, and graduate students were interviewing directors and treating them as "authors" while the writer fell by the side. There is some truth in this but all and all this gets the reception in the United States of the "auteur theory" a bit backwards. There was a point in Hollywood history of about seven years, during the period of classical Hollywood cinema when writers were the effective "authorities" of story telling in Hollywood. That changed because first some of the below-the-line unions were broken and purged of "reds." For the studio bosses the term "reds" was not a designation of people who were socialist or communist but of all people who wanted to maintain some control over the industrial (creative) process. The Congress of Studio Unions was the first union to go, and the set designers as members of this union were the first of the creative people to lose their part in decision-making in films.

In 1945 the bosses of business across the U.S. were complaining that they had lost control over the shop floor. The shop stewards were the main authorities on the shop floor and the foremen simply watched over the shop stewards. In the movie business this meant that the unit producer and director had lost control over the production unit and had to act in true cooperation with the creative people. The bosses attempted to stop this trend. And the model for stopping it came out of Hollywood in 1945 and 1946 when the militant Congress of Studio Unions was busted. Gerald Horne says it best in his book Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950.

Executives all over the nation were complaining about the perceived erosion of management's rights and repsonsibilities, but the jurisdictional spat between the CSU and IATSE gave Hollywood's version of this story special resonance. By ridding itself of the CSU, the moguls were able to reassert almost absolute control over the production process and thus to make the movies look the way they wanted them to look, while avoiding the restraints imposed by "union auteurs".

And then the writers' union was purged of any person who was in favor of a militant union. The main issue was supposedly "communism." But the greater issue was whether the business men would control the creative process. The purging of the writers' union meant a decline in overtly socially conscious writing. Fudamental social criticism was censored from Hollywood production for almost a decade, occasionally finding release in allegory.

The Hollywood studios made a deliberate decison to put directors in charge of their production units. Directors were, after all, close to management. Directors were often the equivalent of factory floor managers or foremen. This coincided with the decline of the studio system as a factory model and the rise of the deal-making model of Hollywood production. The director as "auteur" is a contingent fact of the history of the industrial process. It is neither inevitable nor desirable. The auteur theory is the ex post facto justification of this contingent fact.

I am not saying that the auteur theory is completely wrong. My belief is that in the narrative arts "telling the story" is the most important aspect of movie making. How you determine who is responsible for "story making" and "story telling" is a question not of principle but of empirical investigation. It is also contingent on historical and economic struggle. The reason that the auteur theory appropriately came out of France is also contingent. The structure of the industrial process of film making in France gave some reality to the idea that directors were "authors" in that country, and in most countries in Western and Central Europe. Directors in France, by force of circumstance, also had to be unit managers, fund raisers, executive producers, and often enough editors and writers. The reception of the auteur theory in the U.S. was also contingent on social circumstances. It became a description of reality, behind the back of the promoters of the theory. But in fact it became a description of the results of a industrial process that was created through strike breaking, union busting, purges, blacklists, marginalization of workers, and other methods of bosses to impose control over "their" factories.

Let me close with some more promised quotes from Gerald Horne's book Class Struggle in Hollywood:

"Nevertheless, as Thomas Guback has reminded us, moviemaking is a collaborative, labor-intensive industry; film analysis often stresses only content -- which it ascribes solely to member of the "talent guilds," notably directors and actors and screenwriters, ignoring production relations. However, factoring the latter into the equation 'shifts the terms of analysis from what we see to the social relation that are implicit in the industry and that govern the terms on which the industry operates.'

"An analysis of production relations inevitably prompts an analysis fo labor, the too often forgotten 'actor' in the production of films. Michael Nielsen has observed that 'if one single quality distinguishes Hollywood's product from the bulk of world cinema productions, it is the quality of unobtrusiveness -- the refusal of the film to draw attention to the process of filmaking itself by weaving a seamless whole that engages the viewers' attention completely. The quality is rooted in the craftmansship [sic] at every level of production.'"

I highly recommend Class Struggle In Hollywood, 1930 – 1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists by Gerald Horne for anyone who wishes to gain an historical perspective on the current situation that led to the WGA strike and in union movements in general.



Jerry Monaco
5 January 2008
New York City

[Caveat: I am not a member of the WGA, nor do I speak for any of the officers or members of that union or any other union. I have been a member of other unions in the past and I am a supporter of a stronger union movement in the United States. J.M.]





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Tags: auteur theory, cinema, democracy, economics, film theory, ideology, los angeles, picket lines, post-war, scabs, strike breakers, television, wga, workers, writers