Hollywood Confessional

Behind Closed Doors: A Studio Executive Confession

• Ninth Way Media • Season 2 • Episode 14

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Power talks behind closed doors. In this special confession, we hear from an executive at a streaming arm of a studio about what's actually being said and done inside the studios during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. 

How corporate chaos fostered by the streaming boom and the pandemic led to a desire among many to double down on control. How that desire manifests differently for the leadership than it does for the rank-and-file. How the disconnect is fostering an atmosphere of dissent within the studios, countered only by fear and the rise of an "us-versus-them" mentality.

Our confessor shares these truths along with some thoughts on how striking workers can most effectively counter the toxicity in this Hollywood Confessional "extra". Please help spread the word by sharing with others who want to make Hollywood a happier place.

#WGAStrong #SAGAFTRA #WGAStrike #UnionStrong 

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Hollywood Confessional is a Ninth Way Media production, produced by Meagan Daine and J.R. Zamora-Thal.

Sound Effects and Music provided by Zapsplat and Pixabay.

Keywords: filmmaking podcast, film podcast, screenwriting podcast, entertainment podcast, Hollywood, filmmaking, writerslife, actorslife, setlife

J.R.: In nomine cinema, TV, et spiritu streaming. Amen.

Meagan: Hello hello, Hollywood Faithful. I bet you are surprised to hear from us today. It is not our usual release day, but we have a very special episode, an “extra” as they called them –

J.R. Is that where that comes from?

Meagan: Yeah, like a million years ago, when there were newspapers and they came out at a certain time instead of being available online 24-seven. But yeah. We have received a confession from a studio executive who had a lot to get off their chest and, because it's pertaining to strike, we wanted to release this as soon as possible. But, at the same time, we are continuing to respect the SAG-AFTRA strike and not working with voice actors until those issues have been resolved. And so what we're going to do today is a little bit different. J.R. is going to be reading the written confession of this studio executive, and I will be your only priest. So you ready to do this, J.R.?

J.R.: It's time for me to confess.

Meagan: Who are you, and why should we care?

Confessor: I'm an executive at the streaming arm of a studio. I'm also a writer and I've been making strides to transitioning to writing professionally full time In the past few years. I managed to secure representation land my first pitch, but then the writers strike happened and literally overnight my rep dropped me and any projects I had in the pipeline went cold. So I found myself back at square one, but, unlike a lot of folks on the picket line, I still had a corporate job to fall back on. 

Writing is not part of what I do at my corporate job and I'm also not in the guild. I'm an exec who writes and is really invested in building better, more equitable systems in Hollywood, not just for the creatives but for everyone who's ever dreamed of making TV or movies from their living room in the middle of nowhere. So, all that being said, it was quite alarming when the writer strike began and there was no mention or acknowledgement from senior leaders in my company as to how it might impact our content, pipelines, platform growth and goals as a business.

Aside from some communication telling us to plan ahead and avoid delays getting into the office due to the demonstrations, everything else has been trying to keep up this very “business as usual” vibe. People are expected to keep their heads down, stay focused on hitting our targets and objectives and turning out bigger and better streaming experiences, without asking too many questions or too much pushback. At the same time, there's this added pressure and urgency from leadership to do everything at once. Everything is a priority, but also priorities are constantly shifting. Everything is urgent.

So while they're saying business is usual, the reality is anything but usual. It's actually been really brutal working on the inside because we're expected to deliver more, faster and with less people and fewer resources. 

Let me also say I don't come from money. I grew up around working class people and blue-collar hustlers, so I know you can listen to what people say, but if you really want to know what's up, you have to watch how they move. And right now I've seen studio leadership talking a big game both in our internal meetings and in the press. But their money moves reek of desperation and internally it seems like every month that the strike continues, that desperation kicks up a notch.

Meagan: What is the atmosphere like in the office, and how has it changed pre-strike to now?

Confessor: Internally, it's a weird time. I've been in the industry for over a decade and I definitely think the atmosphere inside ours and many other companies isn't all that different from what's happening in the rest of America. There's a real sense of existential dread, like the pandemic was traumatizing, and here we are three years later back in the office acting like it didn't happen. Between the strikes, inflation, political dissent, mass layoffs, social unrest, climate change, I think people inside these companies are trying to make sense of a world that feels like it's spinning out of control, and when people feel out of control, they double down on what they can control. For a lot of people, that's their work environment. I think that's true of the rank and file and the executives alike. How that manifests is different, though. For the individual worker it's a lot of. What does this mean for me, for the future of my job? How am I going to pay my bills, take care of my family? But for the C-suite and shareholders it looks like how are we going to keep making money, keep bringing in profits, despite economic volatility?

I've observed people getting very tribal and there's a clear us versus them mindset coming down from the executive leadership, but who the us is versus the them isn't always clear. It seems like we're at war with the other streamers, with the guilds, with the other teams in our organization, but at the end of the day we're all part of the same ecosystem, the same team, sometimes even the same company. So it's a little bit like chaos for chaos' sake. And at the same time the streamers have to show growth right More subscribers, more content, more engagement. So you have all these conflicts of interest and at the center of it it's not the people but the profits. It's not good for anyone, but least of all the people on the ground, the individuals actually delivering and doing the work on both sides in the corporations, and the creatives themselves. They're the ones being pushed to do more work in less time for less pay. Morale is low, people are burnt out and they're all raising these concerns. Hell, the writers are literally yelling on the streets and inside. Employees are saying this in employee surveys to their managers. People are quitting quietly and not so quietly. But leadership is double speaking, saying they care that they take the concerns seriously, mainly to appease disgruntled employees, but they aren't actually changing the behavior.

In some instances I've observed leaders actually being more aggressive in their demands of workers because, at the end of the day, the shareholders still want to see growth, more subscribers, more viewership because growth means more profits and they're not willing to compromise profit margins to get it. But the thing is there are only so many places you can make cuts and there are only so many subscribers to be acquired, only so many hours in a day to stream, and with people working more jobs or longer hours to try to keep up with the rising costs of living. If you're a business that's basing your success on growing hours streamed or subscribers, that doesn't make sense because eventually you're going to plateau, and this is where the economics of streaming don't scale. The economics of every studio having their own streaming service scale even less so. In a lot of ways, I feel like streaming was presented as this great area for growth and innovation in the industry, but what it's really done is turn Hollywood into an MLM. And now the market is oversaturated with streaming products. There aren't enough net new subscribers to sustain the kind of growth they need to keep generating profits. But yet the people at the top are still expecting to rake in money, hand over fist, quarter over quarter. Meanwhile, it's the folks at the bottom or even in the middle, who are responsible for building and pushing those products, but they aren't sharing in the massive amounts of wealth being generated off their labor or the shows themselves.

The thing you have to keep in mind about all this is that the studios put themselves in this situation. They like to blame the guilds, but this goes back before contract negotiations broke down. This started before the pandemic, when every studio was trying to keep up with Netflix and launch their own streaming service. But the thing about Netflix is they were built from day one to be a streaming platform. They are a tech company. They had the advantage of training their recommendation algorithms with everyone else's content.

Most of the major streamers built their platforms and content libraries from acquisitions costly acquisitions and I'm not just talking about the billions they spent to buy Fox or Sky or Star Plus, but the invisible costs, things like technical debt, outdated processes and legacy systems the things that make it difficult for them to move quickly, scale and innovate as a platform. So you have all these studios making these big acquisitions, spending billions, taking big risks, overextending themselves because they've got the theme parks and movies and merchandising as a cushion, so it'll be fine. And then the pandemic happens and all the air is gone from that cushion and the only thing that is still there is streaming. So they double down on that. But as I said before, acquisitions of companies and content are costly in more ways than one and the economics of streaming just don't scale. So now the studios are overextended and looking to reduce costs and recoup losses anywhere they can.

That looks like mass layoffs. That looks like shuttering divisions. It looks like big licensing deals on merchandise or content, like we saw recently with Warner Brothers licensing some HBO shows to other streamers. It looks like pushing your employees and creatives to do more for less. It looks like using fear and scarcity as a motivator Fear of replacement, fear of job loss, lack of psychological safety inside and outside of the studios. And don't get it twisted, this isn't about the fact that Hollywood doesn't value writers or actors or its employees.

The studios know the exact value of every single part of its pipeline For the writers. The studios know that content is king. As a streamer, we see higher subscriber cancellations during lulls and new content. They know writers and the content they create are foundational to the Hollywood success formula. But paying writers what they're worth and residuals is in direct conflict with the studio's objective of keeping profits high and recouping losses, not to mention doing this at scale, will eat into their profit margins, so they're looking for cost savings by devaluing a more expensive part of their pipeline. It's like when your favorite artisanal good gets acquired by a mass producer. All those hand-picked ingredients are expensive when you're talking about mass production, so the producer will find a more cost-effective substitute that allows them to produce a lot of the product at a low cost so they can sell it at a higher value and keep profit margins high.

So, in the case of the writer strike, I don't really believe the studios want to replace writers with AI. They know audiences are smarter than that. But given some of the things that have been said in the press, I think they're trying to use fear of replacement as a tactic to get the guild to accept less and they can make more. Basically, they want you afraid because when you're scared, you make desperate decisions, and they want you desperate because the truth is they're desperate. And the thing that's crazy to me is that we've seen this before in Hollywood history, right? So it was this kind of eat the world behavior that led to the end of the old Hollywood system, where studios were vertically integrated and owned their own theaters. We've seen how this kind of behavior creates oligopolies, where the market is split between a small number of producers and sellers, and we know it's bad for business. This is why the Paramount Decree was created in the first place, and it's no coincidence that you're seeing this cycle play out again now that the Paramount Decree has been repealed.

Meagan: So how do we get out of this with at least a shred of dignity?

Confessor: My feeling is that nobody wants this to be a long strike, but I don't think the studios are afraid of that either. If it gets too bad, they'll just sell to Apple or whoever, and the cycle will continue. So I say, settle in, but don't settle, and maybe don't stream, I don't know. I've just gotten so many emails recently like the price is going up on almost every subscription I have, but what am I getting for that increase? Is the content quality going up? The platform improving? Clearly you aren't paying the creatives. You want them hungry and homeless, so why do you need my money to help do that? Maybe a few months of consistent subscriber loss and low viewership will have them coming back to the table ready to have a real conversation. Or also, maybe we will all need to go on strike. You kill a capitalist in a cannibal the same way. Starve them. If the pandemic taught us anything, it's that the working class people are the ones who keep these companies afloat, so maybe we need to starve them out.

Meagan: Wow. We want to say thank you so much to the executive, who shared these thoughts with us, and we hope that the strike will be resolved, obviously, and that you and all of us will be able to go and create in peace.

J.R.: The Hollywood Confessional is produced by Megan Dane and JR Zamora-Thal, special effects provided by Zapp Splat and Pixabay. Hollywood Confessional is a Ninth
Way Media production. Follow us on socials @fessuphollywood.