Last month, the actor Kirk Acevedo, who has had a long career with roles in everything from “Oz” to “Band of Brothers” to “Fringe,” was a guest on the podcast “An Actor Despairs,” and he talked about the brutal financial reality he and many of his peers in Hollywood are facing. “I went from working nonstop, to now I’ve got to sell my house.” Everyone, he said, is going through this.
It’s not just actors, screenwriters and crew members who are affected. In April, Disney laid off 1,000 employees, including many who work in publicity — the very people who ensure that audiences are aware that new titles exist. Also slimmed down: Various divisions of Marvel. Sony Pictures is also laying off several hundred people this month. That’s on the heels of earlier layoffs at Starz, Lionsgate, Paramount and Warner Bros. And if Paramount Global’s plans to buy Warner Bros. go through, more cuts will likely follow.
Then there’s the threat of AI. Producers are already using AI to “summarize scripts and grade elements like plot, character arcs, pacing and dialogue on a scale of 1 to 10,” according to Variety. “It even gives a verdict: Pass, consider or recommend.” Suddenly, the job of (human) script reader has become outsourced to a computer.
In the last three years, California has lost 51,000 production jobs. Fewer movies and films are getting made, and Los Angeles, once the nexus of TV and film production, is losing out not only to other states but to Canada, Great Britain, Central Europe and Australia.
The entertainment business has never been known for its job security. But current circumstances are looking especially precarious, write the authors of the new book, “Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers.”
Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller are film and media professors (Banks is at Loyola Marymount University, Fortmueller at Georgia State University) and they talk about how we got here. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: Your book is coming out this month, when there happened to be some sizable Hollywood layoffs. That must feel strange, but not unexpected.
A: Banks: It is not surprising at all, given the financial and economic decisions that these corporations have made over the last 10 years and what their priorities are. But it’s upsetting in terms of the impact on a really important workforce to the city of Los Angeles, and to all of us audience members who feel like there’s been a massive slowdown in the amount and the quality of what’s out there right now.
Q: The rapid expansion of television production that happened when streaming took off, coupled with reduced spending of the last couple of years, means the workforce is now oversaturated.
A: Fortmueller: The number of film and television production majors that are going out into the world are much higher than they used to be. But where this also gets really sticky is that 25 years ago, we were primarily talking about jobs in Los Angeles, and New York to an extent. I live in Atlanta, which saw a huge increase in production, and therefore jobs. But now production numbers are down. We hear it from recent grads. I even hear from people in my neighborhood who used to work on film sets who don’t anymore, so I know that people are really struggling even outside of Los Angeles.
A: Banks: If you go back 20 years, most TV shows had a 22-episode season. That was unbelievably steady work for a lot of people both in front of and behind the camera for an industry that’s normally project to project. And that’s become so unstable because streaming shows are doing a fraction of that and they’re not getting multiple seasons the way a hit show on broadcast TV would.
A: Fortmueller: And those jobs at the studios are affected by consolidation and mergers, which makes things really tumultuous. So you hear about people leaving Los Angeles and getting out of film production altogether. That feels different.
A: Banks: Corporate mergers are always a time to downsize. And who benefits from a merger? The shareholders and the top executives — not audiences or workers. What’s dramatically changed in this industry is that, once upon a time, to make more money, you had to make more movies or have hit TV shows. And now there’s a much more extractive model.
Q: Or, and tell me if this is simplistic, it’s not even to make as much money as possible, but to tell a story that Wall Street likes enough so that the stock price continually goes up?
A: Banks: A hundred percent.
Q: In the book, you write about how in the 1980s, investment banks started getting involved in Hollywood and the goal changed from profits to potential. What do you mean by that?
A: Fortmueller: That’s the storytelling (to Wall Street) that you’re talking about. It’s about selling a narrative on the future profits that you can make, and continually selling people on that narrative.
Q: That they’re going to grow forever.
A: Fortmueller: Which is not possible.
A: Banks: What streaming did was they changed the meaning of success, and it doesn’t make any sense to us anymore. In an industry that has always felt like a gamble, it made that even more unclear. Paying upfront huge sums of money for an A-lister to do a show or movie at a streamer, that looks like success regardless of whether anybody showed up to actually watch it, but that doesn’t make sense in terms of how success has traditionally been understood. It gives an aura of success, whether or not audiences resonated with it. So whether any individual TV show or movie is popular doesn’t really matter. Popular only matters if it ensures that somebody is going to keep subscribing to the service.
A: Fortmueller: It’s popularity of service, and that’s the shift. If the story used to be “Our movies are great and lots of people go to see them, therefore we are successful,” now, for a company like Netflix, the story is customization and how much closer are we getting to being the perfect thing that you want? That’s how they’re capturing your subscription.
Q: The perfect thing, but catering to millions of people with varying tastes. So it’s not broadcasting in the old model, it’s endless niche-casting instead.
A: Banks: That’s why, for so many people working in Hollywood, there was a lot of excitement about streaming initially. Because you might be working on a show that only needed to capture a niche audience, but a desirable niche audience for that streamer. So a lot of shows were picked up that were a little edgier, or had a different style or outlook. Shows for Black audiences, or queer audiences, or Black queer audiences, suddenly were getting made. And they generated interest and excitement and buzz, and they didn’t necessarily have to be popular with everyone.
Q: That didn’t last, though. There’s been such a pullback.
A: Banks: The streamer got that audience to subscribe to watch that show. And once they had them, the streamer didn’t necessarily need that show to go on, right? They already got that audience.
A: Fortmueller: The biggest thing is that there’s a pulling back of spending. Nobody’s spending as much, that’s just the reality.
A: Banks: There are also diminishing returns for a lot of shows. There might be people who are dedicated viewers. But the number of people who make it all the way through Season 2 of any particular show is exceedingly small. So what the streamers really care about is people first finding that show and making it through a few episodes.
Q: Why is so much filming happening outside the U.S.?
A: Banks: Network shows usually shoot nine months of the year, and that length of time in another country may not be cheaper. But because streaming shows are short-order projects — six or eight or 10 episodes — it’ll end up being cheaper in another country. (For example, streamers often do not have to pay into union members’ healthcare funds when employing crew in countries where healthcare is nationalized.)
Q: Sitcoms taped in front of a live studio audience used to be the bread-and-butter of network television. They’re not anymore, and I wonder if that’s in part because it would be challenging to do that in a country outside the U.S.?
A: Fortmueller: The exception is the Rob Lowe game show “The Floor” (for Fox) that shoots in Ireland. That feels completely absurd that they’re doing that there.
A: Banks: But a game show is that model where you can do a bunch of episodes in a very short time frame, so you can shoot them all at once.
Q: You write about how studio bosses of old could be brutal in terms of business, but they also followed their gut. There was this idea that they understood audiences. And then tech companies came in, and they have a different sensibility, culturally.
A: Banks: A lot of those old studio bosses were particularly good about understanding who the audiences were and what audiences wanted. But with the Silicon Valley influence, data rules over everything and there’s also a real fear of failure. That’s not so much a Silicon Valley thing, but a corporate mentality where people are more afraid of losing their jobs than taking a risk. So they will delay making decisions rather than come out strong and go with something if they believe in it. There’s no attuned interest in understanding an audience.
Q: The thing that the old studio bosses understood was storytelling and mythmaking. And today’s generation of studio bosses seems to lack that talent. But maybe I’m wrong, because as we noted earlier, they do understand storytelling when it comes to the story and mythmaking they’re selling to Wall Street.
A: Fortmueller: The old studio heads were not good people, we’re not trying to romanticize them, but they were human in all their flaws. And I think the main difference is that telling a story that enchants millions of people is different from telling a story that enchants investors.
Q: Right, and you feel it! That studio bosses of today don’t care about enchanting audiences. They want to enchant investors.
A: Banks: I think that absolutely hits the mark. Who do they care to tell stories to?
