HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Hollywood crews in ‘crisis:’ ‘Everyone’s just in panic mode’ as jobs decline.
After more than two decades in the industry, Keith Dunkerley still loves nothing more than working on a set. The 47-year-old director of photography and camera operator, who’s had consistent work since he moved to Los Angeles 23 years ago, said his is “the best job in the world.”
Since the writers’ and actors’ strikes last year and the slow restart of production, though, Dunkerley said his work opportunities look quite different than in past years: He has worked only 18 days during the first five months of 2024.
“People outside the business don’t understand this is not a factory,” Dunkerley said. “It’s not like, ‘OK, the strike’s over, go back to the factory, turn the lights on and get the machines going.’ A lot of us knew it’s going to take some time to ramp things up.”
While Dunkerley supported his family through savings and odd jobs as a handyman on TaskRabbit during the strikes, the sluggish rebound has been difficult for him. He’s recently made more than 60 calls to friends and industry contacts to look for prospects.
What Dunkerley is experiencing is a part of the massive ripple effect of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that is still affecting tens of thousands of people working in entertainment and adjacent industries. Crew members, especially, have been hit hard.
“I am currently in the worst place I’ve ever been in my entire life financially,” said Heather Fink, a boom operator and director. “The industry is in a crisis. It is not back to normal. We are in debt.”
On the plus side, a Hollywood producing fewer product is a Hollywood with a smaller carbon footprint. Which is a good thing from the industry’s point of view, right? John Nolte: ‘Experts’ Demand Even More Global Warming Alarmism in Movies.
[F]ewer than 10% of the 250 films passed [a “climate reality check” test], and climate change was mentioned in two or more scenes of fewer than 4% of the films. That’s out of touch with a moviegoing public that wants “to see their reality reflected on screen,” said Colby College English professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, lead researcher on the study.
“The top line is just that the vast majority of films, popular films produced over the last 10 years in the United States, are not portraying the world as it is,” Schneider-Mayerson said. “They are portraying a world that is now history or fantasy — a world in which climate change is not happening.”
Don’t laugh. This is the exact same tactic GLAAD used, which is why absolutely everything is gay now. Remember who we are dealing with. Hollywood doesn’t resent left-wing propagandists butting in like this. Nope. Hollywood loves it when left-wing propagandists give them an excuse to inject this garbage in their films. They want to be able to say, We have no choice. It’s the right thing to do.
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People continue to believe Hollywood will eventually have no choice but to stop with this woke garbage and go back to creating art and entertainment. That’s naive. History proves that once the extreme left grabs hold of an institution, it never lets go. Given the choice between ending the propaganda and going bankrupt, they choose bankruptcy.
This sort of doomsday worldview has repercussions for those who otherwise have near-unlimited power in the film industry: Be Careful What You Wish for, James Cameron.
Even in liberal Hollywood, James Cameron stands out as one of the most “woke” directors. His Avatar movies deplore how a pristine ecosystem is despoiled by “settlers” and applaud the “indigenous resistance” fighting them.
So it’s deliciously ironic that Cameron is now facing fierce local resistance to his support for a giant film studio and training center in the pastoral British countryside. It would cost nearly $1 billion and feature half a million square feet of soundstages.
Cameron has suggested the project form the base for his production company, Lightstorm3D. “The 22.5 percent of total global box office the U.K. delivered in 2023 will grow as a result,” he reportedly wrote in a pitch for the project. “But embracing that opportunity necessitates support and boldness in thinking.”
But local NIMBY activists aren’t into “boldness in thinking.” They claim that Cameron’s project “would forever destroy” the local “Greenbelt” and be “detrimental to the people living in the area, destroying their quality of life by being surrounded and trapped by the industrial-scale development.” Although the proposed site for the project is a former quarry, it is zoned as greenbelt land, an area of open land around a city in which building is restricted.
This month, a local parish poll was held in Buckinghamshire on the project, and, in a low turnout, 85 percent of those who voted opposed the film studio. The local council, which has delayed a decision on the project, appears unlikely to move forward anytime soon.
Propaganda has consequences. If you make movies that decry development, don’t be surprised if impressionable filmgoers aren’t thrilled with your own building plans.
This isn’t the first time that Cameron’s “Progressives Against Progress” worldview has impacted Hollywood’s bottom line. In 2010, he decried the sale of DVDs due to their being very, very bad for the environment:
In 2010 that James Cameron told the Washington Post that DVDs were bad for the Gaia and other living things, and needed to be eliminated (while simultaneously having multiple versions of Avatar coming out that same year on DVD):
“It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability. …”
It turns out that a lack of DVD sales was very bad for those in the 90210 zip code. In 2013, veteran producer Lynda Obst wrote in Salon, “For consumers, the decline of the DVD market has meant switching over to both Blu-ray and, more recently, streaming options for their viewing pleasure. The end of the DVD format’s dominance meant something much more, and far worse, for Hollywood.”
“The DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” [20th Century Fox executive Peter Chernin] went on. “Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”
For those of you like me who are not good at math, let me make Peter’s statement even simpler. If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10 percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.
This was, literally, a Great Contraction. Something drastic had happened to our industry, and this was it. Surely there were other factors: Young males were disappearing into video games; there were hundreds of home entertainment choices available for nesting families; the Net. But slicing a huge chunk of reliable profits right out of the bottom line forever?
This was mind-boggling to me, and I’ve been in the business for thirty years. Peter continued as I absorbed the depths and roots of what I was starting to think of as the Great Contraction. “Which means if nothing else changed, they would all be losing money. That’s how serious the DVD downturn is. At best, it could cut their profit in half for new movies.”
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“When did the collapse begin?”
“The bad news started in 2008,” he said. “Bad 2009. Bad 2010. Bad 2011.”
It was as if he were scolding those years. They were bad, very bad. I wouldn’t want to be those years.
“The international market will still grow,” he said, “but the DVD sell-through business is not coming back again. Consumers will buy their movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon et al. before they will purchase a DVD.” What had been our profit margin has gone the way of the old media.
A decade later, Matt Damon concurred:
In one of the most recent episodes Matt Damon took on the challenge and was asked to give his insight into what changed within the industry to result in the kind of movies we grew up watching not being made anymore. His answer makes total sense.
He basically said that DVDs used to be a huge part of the business, and that technology (streaming in particular) has unfortunately made them obsolete.
He said that when a movie that wasn’t guaranteed to be a box office hit was released, the studio would get a second chance to make its money back with DVD sales. As fewer people bought them however, it became more important for a film to do well at the box office because there was a greater risk of losing money.
Ironically a lot of the films Matt Damon built his career on are the kind that are now considered “too risky” which is why we’re not getting so many films like Good Will Hunting, Dogma and The Talented Mr. Ripley anymore.
In one of the most recent episodes Matt Damon took on the challenge and was asked to give his insight into what changed within the industry to result in the kind of movies we grew up watching not being made anymore. His answer makes total sense.
He basically said that DVDs used to be a huge part of the business, and that technology (streaming in particular) has unfortunately made them obsolete.
He said that when a movie that wasn’t guaranteed to be a box office hit was released, the studio would get a second chance to make its money back with DVD sales. As fewer people bought them however, it became more important for a film to do well at the box office because there was a greater risk of losing money.
Ironically a lot of the films Matt Damon built his career on are the kind that are now considered “too risky” which is why we’re not getting so many films like Good Will Hunting, Dogma and The Talented Mr. Ripley anymore.
Home video has always been hugely important to the movie industry and has given a lot of films that either flopped, or that just weren’t very well received at the box office a new lease of life on video and DVD.
Films like The Thing (1982), Blade Runner (1982), The Big Lebowski (1998), Donnie Darko (2001), Fight Club (1999) and even The Shawshank Redemption (1994) weren’t box office smashes, and in some cases were panned by critics. It was largely thanks to home video that these films became the fan (and cult) favourites they’ve since become.
In a lot of ways I guess we’re to blame.
I’ve always loved collecting films. First it was VHS tapes, then DVDs, and for a shorter period, Blu-Rays. I used to buy loads, but even I don’t really buy them anymore – just the odd movie that I like so much that I feel the need to own a physical copy.
With streaming becoming more and more popular, and with an increasing amount of original films being released directly to those streaming sites I worry about the future of cinemas. We’ve already lost video shops like Blockbuster, as well as countless independent rental shops.
Could cinemas soon become obsolete with the ever increasing popularity of streaming? I really hope not. Streaming has already become partly responsible for the decline of decent films. Let’s hope that’s where the damage ends.
Which is brings us back to the global warming message that Nolte spotted. Although ironically part of Hollywood’s unintentional degrowth strategy is that they followed the advice the media proffered to coal miners during the Obama era: they actually learned to code.