Hollywood on strike
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Yes just seen in film forum thread that actors attending comic con cannot be asked about their work so that should be interesting Q&A
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Sounds like the other poster was right, you just hate actors or perhaps you don't know that much about the subject. In the real world becoming a very successful actor is more difficult than becoming a good doctor. Also becoming a successful writer in Hollywood is difficult.
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Thats always been the fact and it cant be any other way, train to be a doctor and you have 99.9% you will never be poor and you are guaranteed a high income, get into acting or music and you have probably a 1% chance of making it and otherwise you will be struggling financially or you get into behind the scenes work or have a plan B do dip out and get a proper career.
A belief in gender identity involves a level of faith as there is nothing tangible to prove its existence which, as something divorced from the physical body, is similar to the idea of a soul. - Colette Colfer
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Just to clarify, I know plenty of people who work in the arts. It's a proper career, it's just tough and not focused on making crazy money. There are plenty of professions that are calling, in this case it's a creative calling.
Anyway the VFX division of Disney is looking to unionize.
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Yeah there will always be a need for doctors, ample opportunities for work etc. Whereas acting/writing, being successful in Hollywood often comes down to just pure luck as much as working hard, natural talent etc. Just getting the right role/job at the right time can pretty much set you up for the rest of your career and put you ahead of so many others who just missed out.
Being a doctor is obviously a much more difficult job and requires far more studying, training, and knowledge, and the actual job is typically far more stenuous, difficult etc. but becoming a successful actor/writer in Hollywood, there are so many coin flips that have to land perfectly in your favour to get even a modicum of success, and before that is a lot of uncertainty, failed auditions, small roles to pay the bills etc.
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I remember someone describing the psychological affect of all these "coin flips" but for life of me I cant remember what the point was though I'd imagine its more soul destroying than edifying.
A belief in gender identity involves a level of faith as there is nothing tangible to prove its existence which, as something divorced from the physical body, is similar to the idea of a soul. - Colette Colfer
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I dont really hate "actors", I just see present era entertainers as sometimes being way above their natural station.
The entertainer throughout human history was a fairly lower-mid tier occupation. Because naturally its just not that important a role in society.
(If you were building a nation from scratch and you wanted it to survive and thrive 'actor' would come near last)
Bard, jester, stage actor, singer. The entertainer often requires little in the way of training, a lot of it is just experience and repetition. Anyone can be an actor, I can be an actor right now, give me a wig and a few lines. And where its not a case of "anyone" then its a case of 'a great many'.
I dont seek to denigrate these jobs, I just hope to see them returned to their appropriate place. Alongside any other jobs. Equally I dont hate carpenters or retail managers or tech support workers or chemists either, they just happen to be paid appropriately.
Entertainer is just another job. Thats the truth throughout history.
The reason that some might think that entertainers are special and deserving of a place outside of the hierarchy and grind which all other occupations must deal with, is largely circumstance and life long conditioning.
Technology came along and the entertainment industry happened to form in certain ways, and the end result was certain 'slightly better than the rest' entertainers now could stand on top of industry giants.
Hopefully theyll be brought back down. Theyre being made out to be gods and angels when actually theyre just not that important.
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Acting is far more than just being put in costume and reading lines you've learned from a script. Yes, anyone can do that, but nobody will be a successful actor by doing it.
The best actors work hard to really embody the character. To think carefully about the cadence of every line, the character's thought process behind everything they do, and to fill in the gaps where those things aren't explained in the script. To make sure all their movements seem natural for the character (eg. the star of The Bear said in an interview recently that he spent weeks/months working in kitchens in restaurants in order to accurately portray a chef, be able to use knives etc like a chef would). And then every line of dialogue the actor says has to feel like they just thought of it in the moment, that they're reacting entirely naturally to what's happening even though it's all planned/scripted.
Anyone can get into costume and repeat lines of dialogue they've memorised. Not everyone can act convincingly. I think it's an extraordinary skill/talent to have and takes a lot of background work which is rarely ever mentioned to truly give a performance that can stand out. To truly embody the character they're playing and sell the story & emotions convincingly.
The reason they get paid so much is due to a) the perceived value they may bring to a project because some people will be more interested in a film if an actor they like is in it, popularity, interviews etc, and b) demand, where a popular actor can command a higher fee due to being able to choose from multiple offers.
There are certainly issues with fame and how famous people can be perceived etc, but that's a problem with society. Nobody is forcing anyone to treat celebrities as any greater or lesser than anyone else.
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Also, famous playwrights and writers have existed throughout history. Jump back to the 19th century and you had plenty of famous actors and it was far less accessible back then. Since the early twentieth century, we've had star actors, directors etc and the reality is the best have work that transcends generations. Buster Keaton, Orson Welles, Daniel Day Lewis, Scorsese, Tilda Swinton etc will all be remembered across generations.
Equally plenty of extraordinary creators didn't make millions but will be remembered for generations to come but the reality is their work was less profitable and marketable so they didn't make fortunes. Think Derek Jarman etc.
But overall the reality is creative people are important. I wouldn't be discounting art or literature or visual entertainment. And it'll cross more generations than the average profession.
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You can go back to Ancient Rome and Greece, where there are accounts written of the riches performers acquired. As soon as a civilization matures and acquires wealth Entertainers become a prized commodity. Unless civilization suddenly falls off a cliff, the top entertainers will always be more valuable than tradesmen , professionals.
Anyway the strike is more about how technology may destroy the part-time / background working actors and how streaming how resulted in actors being paid less for their work. No one seriously believes that the top stars will ever be paid as little as doctors / professionals.
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That's like saying anybody could be as good as Ronaldo or Messi were, all you need to do is just kick a football around. I wonder if I started rapping now would I be as good as Eminem by the end of the year. The difference between bad actors and good actors is tens of millions of dollars/euros in revenue and can sometimes be much more than that.
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Even carpentry, to use one of the examples in his post. You can hire someone who has all the tools, but the difference between even an average carpenter and a great carpenter can be night and day, and great carpenters who have a great reputation can charge a premium for their work.
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Football and sport in general is as close to a meritocracy as there is, it's about as far away from acting or music as can be. Some people might make more money because their social standing or how many followers they've got on Instagram but they're not getting the job for that.
Doesn't matter who your daddy is you're not playing in the top tier of any competitive sport, can't say the same for film, TV, or Music.
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Nepotism can only get you so far . Top film, Tv and Music The top artists like Taylor Swift, Tom cruise and Robert Odenkirk are there on merit. There are plenty of top paid football stars who are rubbish, like Harry Maguire. Especially in team sports.
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Its almost like youre trying hard to miss the point.
Basically there is a normal hierarchy and system for ... well basically any job other than entertainers, and maybe politicians and bankers, and entrepreneurs.
We could perhaps say that the vast majority of these normal roles are within the natural, or organic system. So that in general your efforts and intelligence and devotion to study will find you somewhere in the normal-ish range of income, with the higher tiers normally occupied by those with highly specialized training, strong academic abilities, and industry experience, expect to see surgeons and judges and ceos up here.
Thats natural. The more scarce and specialized you are, the higher you move up. Thats the general rule, rare exceptions excluded
And then as we go down we find less in the way of specialization, qualifications and academic ability.
Anyway, traditionally entertainers would be down in the lower ranks, as theres not that much involved in a lot of the arts that joe public cant do.
(Or if not joe public then not much which another artist cant replicate close enough so that it doesnt really matter).
The ability to play a role or sing or dance typically being not a very scarce or important ability.
Entertainers were also traditionally part of this normal/organic system. But over a few generations changes occured, and entertainers were decimated as a market by new forms of media.
Now only a few choice entertainers were needed, and they would be held up by an industry as being fcking marvellous, because its in the interest of the corporation selling them to you to tell you so.
This also had the effect of skyrocketing a few entertainers earnings into the stratosphere, along with their egos. Now they belonged to an artificial system. In the artificial system this normally otherwise trivial/everyday job was made artificially scarce and valuable by industry and technology. So that by having a certain look, a bit of talent ... and I do mean a bit, and by being in the right place at the right time you could earn way more than 10 heart surgeons.
But that was the free market. So hey ho deal with it. And we did.
But its looking increasingly like the same tech which gave to the humble entertainer may well take away too. By more and more market saturation and more niches and new AI capabilities.
Am I wrong to celebrate that,... no i dont think so.
Why the actor? Why not the farmer, or the house painter, or the factory supervisor.
Other than free market dynamics I see no other reason. Are they better people? More deserving than others, no. They just made it out of the normal system for a few generations. Then they grew to become preachy and narcissitic and annoying, while in reality not even being that important or even particularly skilled. Even negative to society at times.
So yeah, i hope for many millions of entertainment options, so that none are seen as anything more than what they actually are ... just another bum like the rest of us. And paid appropriately.
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Was this post made by a machine or a person, I wonder?
Great films and TV shows have the power to make people feel emotions and give joy. It sounds like this post was made by someone who has never watched a great film/TV show, read a great book or listened to a great piece of music.
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The thing is, the AI tech we're discussing here is more likely to hit the lower echelons of the industry. On top of that, if we start stripping the humanity out of performances or writing then we're pretty much destroying the human act of creativity. Plus the way in which LLM works, it's effectively just plagiarising from a load of existing creators.
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Where exactly would you draw the limits? Embrace AI literature, film, tv and music over actual creativity? Personally speaking, I prefer the actual human dimension in whatever form it takes rather than viewing AI as some necessary rebalancing.
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Not having experienced much or any ai content (as far as i know) I dont have much of an opinion in response.
I see little of any human element in large parts of the entertainment media as it is already.
They didnt need AI for that. They figured out the formulas for themselves over time.
But if youre for the human element then by all means, let us have 1000 times more humans. Lets widen out the focus of the limelight so that its a wide dim floodlight, rather than a narrow focused beam shining down on a few folks who were standing in the right spot at the right time.
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Your issue seems primarily focused on just fame in general. If anything you sound like the bad guy from The Incredibles; "And when everyone is super.... no one will be...."
Again, the top actors get paid so much because it's generally believed that their inclusion will bring an amount of revenue to the film/show which will be greater than their salary. You can't compare it to what entertainers used to be decades ago because the value and revenue of the entertainment industry has changed dramatically. You can't compare it to what farmers and house-painters earn because the revenue entertainers can generate for the studios they work for is on a completely different level. Yes, some of the top actors get paid obscene amounts of money for relatively little work compared to people who do manual labour jobs. But people can command the salaries that employers are willing to pay them. The same is true for every industry. You may look at Matthew McConnaghey and think "Sure I can do that", but you can't. Nor can an actor who appeared in 3 episodes of say Malcolm in the Middle, because while that hypothetical guy might be a great actor, he's not going to bring the attention, fanbase and ticket sales that McConnaghey does.
Regardless, it has little to do with the strikes, because the strikes are more about earning rights and protections for the people way down the ladder. The actors who are begging for any small role just to pay a few bills. The writers who are constantly being forced to churn out more material without even knowing if the show will be picked up and they'll get fully paid. And all actors/writers who are having their careers and residuals threatened by studios who hide viewer numbers or remove content to reduce the residuals they have to pay out and who want to use AI to reduce the human element in the arts so they can churn out more content without having to pay as much.
And when you reduce the human element, content gets worse and worse. You may say you see little human elements in large parts of the entertainment media already, but that's largely because it's the studios who are directing traffic. They hire the writers and actors for variations on the same things over and over because one of those things once made a huge profit. They interefere with writers/directors because they're worried about overseas markets, or target audiences, or focus groups, rather than letting the writer & director's stories being fully realised. There's a huge history of studio interference in projects, making them bland, boring and derivative. That will only get worse with what the studios want to be able to do with AI.
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AI like we see at the start of the new indianan Jones movie is just way to expensive at the moment.if there ever comes a stage that they could get the cost down to make a whole movie using it, live action movies would be indistinguishable from animated ones. As we can see from the exorbitant wages the Simpsons voice actors get there will be still be top earners, "the talent".
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Yes thank you yet again for describing supply and demand, and scarcity value.
I had hoped that by mentioning the free market and the issue of supply and demand myself, more than once, that we might be able to take it as being a given, and well understood already.
So to clarify, yes supply and demand sets prices, I get it. No need to get stuck on it again.
So now that we're over that hurdle let us go to page 2 and consider how supply and demand can be manipulated.
How intrinsic value can be inflated, so that you can get way more than what something is worth in normal circumstances.
The best illustration I can think of for the situation with actors is the situation in the diamond market.
Some will know what Im referring to, but for anyone who doesnt you can consider the word 'actor' to be interchangeable with 'diamond' and the word 'hollywood' to be interchangeable with 'DeBeers'
So roughly speaking everyone likes a good diamond, and theyre costly little bastards, you might see one on sale for some ridiculous price but you can see that such rare and beautiful items are at least worth such a price tag. Theyre rare and special so theyre worth it. Supply and demand.
But the truth is that the natural price of a big shiny diamond, even the exceptional ones, is shyte, diamonds are worth fuk all by themselves.
The copper doorknob on the jewellers door in normal circumstances is very likely worth more than the diamond in the window. ...If the market hadnt been rigged that is.
But the market was rigged, by DeBeers.
Americas population is some 320 million. And its estimated that there is enough diamond supply to give each of those 320 million individuals a fresh chunk of diamond every day.
Another estimate is that there are enough diamonds in the world to give every American a cup full .... but that doesnt really work for this post ... cup full of actors doesnt work so well.
All easily verifiable, go look it up.
Anyway. Diamonds are super abundant in reality, theyre naturally, intrinsically, not that important. Their natural price is 1000 times less than what you see.
In a natural, non-manipulated market they have some intrinsic value as a hard mineral for cutting, but thats about it.
So knowing this you can see that the price of diamonds is artificial, its manipulated for the benefit of DeBeers, and diamonds arent nearly as precious as they were made out to be since the last 100 years or so.
So next time youre with somebody and you see a diamond you might say that hey that diamond is at an artificially inflated price, its not worth anywhere near that. And DeBeers are making a fool out of you.
And you might thereafter be told that youre a philistine who cant appreciate beauty and who doesnt understand color, cut and clarity.
Actors/entertainers, and Hollywood are roughly the same situation.
Entertainers were traditionally just average bums, like myself, and they were treated accordingly.
Then technology and industry manipulated the market, and the entertainers value was inflated beyond belief. However intrinsically theyre still just low-mid tier bums. Nothing wrong with that, but its about time they were brought back down.
Circumstance allowed the diamond to be made precious, and nowadays new circumstances are allowing for artificial diamonds to be manufactured. Bringing the precious diamond back to its natural point in life.
The entertainers timeline is almost identical.
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I'm not talking about supply & demand or scarcity. There are likely 100,000 actors out there who could give as good a performance as Matthew McConnaghey but who haven't had the chances or experiences he's had. As I said previously, making it in Hollywood is as much down to luck as it is talent/skill.
As for your diamond comparison, people will always pay for things what they believe them to be worth. That has always been the case. A pair of Nike runners sold for €50 would sell for €500 with Michael Jordan's name/logo on them. Kanye West was selling plain white t-shirts for about €100 because his name was on the inside label.
However, when's the last time someone said "I want to go see that new Interstellar film, David Lowry is the Supervising Animator on it!" Never, because the film is partially sold on the fact that Matthew McConnaghey is in the lead role. So people who enjoyed his previous stuff think "I might go see that, I think he's a great actor". People see interviews with him and it brings it to their attention that the film is out soon. He gets nominated for awards so people think it must be a good film, maybe I'll give it a watch.
That's why he gets paid so much. He inherently brings eyes and attention to the film through his filmography, talent/ability, suitability for the role, and publicity/marketing, and it's perceived that paying him 1x will increase the box office by 2x, and is therefore worth the salary. People are less inclined to go see a film where the writer, director and actors are people they've never heard of, at least until such time as word of mouth starts to spread about how great it is in which case people might take a chance on it. But then guess what happens; the writer, director and actors popularity grows, and they can command a higher wage for their next project because all of a sudden they're more of a known factor with fans of their work and people may be more inclined to see their next project.
Regardless of how manufactured, inflated and artificial the price of a diamond is, if you know you can buy one for 1x and sell it for at least 2x, it's worth the money you paid for it because it's a positive return on investment. Same with actors.
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Yeah well that model is coming to an end.
And how could anyone with even a tiny sense of justice not be happy about that.
Britney Spears has the right face and measurements, she can hit certain notes, and dress up as a w4nk fantasy. Show some tit, and sing lalala.
And for this she gets the pay and respect of the entire staff of a university hospital × 20.
An essential tradesman, vital to society, meanwhile would have to work his ass off for 100 years for the price of her holiday home.
We all know that such a situation is complete bullsht. But hey, thats the free market, a powerful unpredictable beast.
Ah, but whats this, the old model is dying, 1000 generic AI Britneys will suck up all that revenue now. Shaking your booty wont cut it now, shockingly. And the grind of the everyday person might even get a bit more respect.
Well excuse me for rejoicing, at the impending fall of these chancers. It was/is an anomolous, fcked up situation. You know it was.
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Firstly, you're continuing to ignore the people who are going to be hit the most are those who actually don't make a lot of money. Everyone from vfx artists, writers and even the likes of extras. Superstar musicians and actors are unlikely to disappear any time soon. Secondly, it's slightly bleak that you're looking forward to the potential of all kinds of artists being replaced by bots effectively. Would you prefer AI Van Gogh or David Bowie? For the record, I don't think it's happening any time soon but it's most definitely not something I'd welcome.
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No one knows the future, but i just doubt AI will ever be as popular as humans. There is definitely no suggestion that it will happen soon or that things will go back to this natural order, as you refer to it, of top musicians or actors being paid pittance. You can see from the various annual singing competitions out there that there are plenty of young women that look and sound as good as or near better than Britney Spears but they just don't have the x-factor that make them as interesting as her so cant reach her success.
Given that the music ,movie and TV production industry looks nowhere near collapsing as regards revenue and there is limits to what AI can currently do, apart from mimicking background actors I dont see the world of celebrities disappearing anytime soon.
I dont think anyone here is against you rejoicing the impending replacement of humans with AI its just no one here subscribes to that theory that it is happening anytime soon.
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It sounds like something from the novel Brave New World. Culture become totally disposable, and without any heart.
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Reading today Disney's making a taskforce to research AI.
AI might not surpass the best humanity can offer but it doesn't have to it just needs to be good enough, and the studio's are 100% never going to agree to tie their hands on something that could vastly alter their business. They don't know what it is or isn't capable of but they sure as hell aren't going to cut themselves off from the benefits or tie it to having a human intermediary like the writers union have suggested.
WGA strike also hitting 100 days, no movement there. Both unions seem to have some rosy idea of their position believing a bit too much in the #unionstrong stuff, they're probably going to hype themselves into this lasting longer than it needs too.
3 large tech companies being among the studios is definitely changing their position, them being far more secretive than the average normal studio preventing the transparency demands and far more likely to chase potential innovation preventing any movement on AI.
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