Strikes In Hollywood

It seems Hollywood is in deep trouble as it faces yet another strike. This time it is actors who are on strike, following suit of the Hollywood screenwriters’ strike. Hollywood is the ultimate dream of an actor or a screenwriter, both of whom play a crucial role in the silver screen with the former acting upon the creations of the latter. Now with their joint strike, Hollywood is nearing a halt.  

It isn’t too far-fetched to say that Hollywood sells dreams. Thousands of wannabe actors and writers throng the City of Angels (LA) in California, USA to achieve the American dream. Starry-eyed and young aspiring actors hope for their big break in the movies and TV shows and so do screenwriters. They are tied together by miscellaneous and diverse team of workers. Ultimately, all of their dreams hinge upon the reviews of the viewers or audiences. As such, Hollywood is known for its mega-movies and TV shows that people love to watch. For a few hours, people forget their woes, sorrow and problems as they immerse themselves in Hollywood extravaganza. 

It was in the early 20th century that Hollywood began its long-standing journey. Filmmakers swarmed to the pleasant weather, natural light and idyllic landscape of Los Angeles, California to compete with the East Coast film industry. Over the decades, LA has grown to accommodate Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, and so on. What started with silent, black and white pictures has evolved into motion pictures in Technicolour. And audiences have been thrilled. They continue to purchase movie tickets and as of 2019, Hollywood was worth $42.2 billion. 

Viewers are thus the ones who decide the box-office fate of the movies. It could explain why millions of dollars are poured in advertising and marketing. And Hollywood movies are rolled out each Friday as the industry expects audiences to splurge dollars in the weekends. With cleverly and expertly crafted jaw-dropping trailers, movies set up a high expectation among the eager audiences. But audiences have a whim of their own. Often, high-octane movies perform well at the box-office as expected while other times they flounder. Careers are thus made and broken at the box-office or lately at the streaming services. 

When it comes to actors, a substantial part of their income is from film and television salaries in addition to royalties, endorsements and brand deals, public appearances, speaking engagements, merchandising, production and back-end deals and even licensing of their image. Actors are mostly paid better than writers especially when it comes to A-list performers. But even actors have discrepancies when it comes to wages as aspiring actors have to make do with lower salaries as compared to the high-profile ones. 

And lately, the emergence of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) and streaming services are incurring a financial inequity to both the writers and the actors, which is one of the prominent reasons behind their strikes. As such, Hollywood writers of the WGA (Writers Guild of America) have been on strike since May and joining their hands now are the actors of SAG-AFTRA (The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists). It remains to be seen how the high-profile movie studios of Hollywood will deal with the strike that is likely to cause trouble for the money generating megaton.