![]() However, his real opinion is much more ambivalent. Schrader’s view was taken to be part of his typically reactionary worldview that springs up in his repressed Calvinism. If one truly believes in those rights, not just personal advancement, they should be using that power they built to further the cause. However, he entirely misses the point of the labor movement, even the one he so proudly holds up his family as being a part of, in that the point to give power and protections to everyone because it is a right, not just to help advance the people who figured out how to navigate the system. I have considerably more power as an individual than as a member of that group, and I am forced to be a member of that union in order to work.” This is ostensibly true, in that, as a big-name writer, Sorkin has much more bargaining power than any old nobody carrying a screenplay around Hollywood. It’s easy to draw similarities to comments made by Aaron Sorkin and Todd Phillips during a writers roundtable by The Hollywood Reporter back in 2010, where Phillips called the WGA the “Whiners Guild” and Sorkin said he was a “union guy” although made the strange claim that “A union makes sense when people have more power as a group than they do as individuals. Schrader jabbed that all the writers who were “formerly unemployed” now get to be on strike. Paul Schrader drew attention for a scab-y remark saying he’s going to keep promoting his latest film Master Gardener even though that would technically cross the picket line. The real absurdity of the situation comes, too, from the game the strikers have to play. They’re cheated out of money and artistic freedoms. ![]() In this way, film workers in the States, of all different unions and disciplines, get the short end of both sticks. George Lucas, infamously, said that Soviet filmmakers had more freedom than he did in Hollywood because they weren’t beholden to a narrow commercialism (from the same Charlie Rose interview where he called Disney “white slavers”), a claim that no one is better than supporting than Andrei Konchalovsky, the Soviet filmmaker (and ex-writing partner to Tarkovsky) who defected to Hollywood in the 1980s and found his career beset with more censorship than ever- the censorship of money, in which, rather than having a film completed and thrown on a shelf not to be seen, the people in charge would never let the film get made in the first place, at least not the way the artist wants. The massive manpower required for productions of certain scales isn’t necessarily artistically limiting. And while there have always been DIYers, avant-gardists, and general renegades that’ve sought to turn filmmaking away from its factory-like home and more akin to an artist in a studio, the trend of film as a big-money game continues. The medium specificity of, say, what an original camera negative is to a print made for distribution isn’t the same as that of an original, physical painting and a reproduction of it. It required the inputs of artistry through the means of mechanization to create an industrial, reproducible product. ![]() Hollywood, and its many other national equivalents, is an industrial perversion on the art world, one not technologically possible before the turn of the century. Yet a labor theory of value doesn’t totally tell the picture.Ī Hollywood factory is more complicated than any old Rust Belt construction churning out this year’s models, or even a bespoke manufacturer like Rolls Royce. ![]() Nor has the fundamental relationship at the heart of Hollywood changed: the money and those who produce it. This much hasn’t changed, although the industry has bubbled up, collapsed, and come back time and time again. Golden Age studios used to be arranged like Ford car factories, where craftsman of different guilds would piecemeal a film together along an assembly line, leading to a prolific number of credits every year for all involved (even if these numbers were still exponentially smaller in the sound era, almost any director would make as many Hollywood films in a year as Hong Sang-soo could with a consumer camera, not to mention the innumerable films a composer could “score”). Despite the glitz and glamor, Hollywood, since its boom economy in the first half of the 20th century, has always been a hypermodern production line. There’s something very American that the country’s last bastion of union labor isn’t from one of its pioneering industries or vast, continent-spanning infrastructures but from entertainment. ![]()
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