--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: The actor Kimiko Glenn got a statement in the mail. Kimiko is one of the stars of Orange is the New Black.
--:-- Noel King: I always thought women's prison would be more about community and girl power and stuff. Some of these women just seem crazy.
--:-- Noel King: The show had just started airing overseas, and now Netflix was paying her residuals for dozens of episodes.
--:-- Noel King: Oh my god, I'm about to be so rich. What? $27.30.
--:-- Noel King: When we next find Kimiko Glenn, she's on strike, along with every other actor who's unionized with SAG-AFTRA.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up on Today Explained, inside the actors' strike.
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--:-- Noel King: Alyssa Wilkinson is a correspondent and a critic for Vox, and of late, her beat has been the actor's strike.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: So this double strike is historic. It's the first time in 63 years that it's happened.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: I, as an observer of the industry, agree with the people in the industry who say that this is kind of a do or die moment.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: Seeing what's going on right now and seeing kind of the stories that are coming out of the strike about how people have had to make a living, you start to understand that this is existential for the business to remain relevant, and it's also existential for the business to kind of keep existing at all.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: This is a long time coming, and the story is really a story of technology.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: In Hollywood, every big change, every labor movement, everything is always tied to advances in technology.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: If we start with streaming, that's really where the genesis of this particular strike comes from.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: When streaming technology was developed, the idea was kind of like, who's going to want to watch TV on their computer, right?
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: This is going to be a small part of our business. It's maybe, you know, where we put a show after it's run its course on broadcast TV.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: So the residuals for streaming, and that's sort of like royalties that writers or actors or directors or whoever get every time their work makes money for the studio or the distributor.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: The residuals are quite low on streaming compared to like if you watch the show on cable or you watch it on network TV.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: I actually make less money working in film than I did in the year 1990.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: This also means that there have been, I guess we can call them innovations in the industry, that have changed how much people even get paid for a show.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: Shows are shorter now, right? Our typical show is like 8 to 10 episodes instead of 26 that you might have gotten in the past.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: So there's less work. It lasts for less time. There's longer gaps between jobs.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: At a certain point, you have to just say, who's going to determine what our value is?
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: Well, look at these thousands of people. We're determining what our value is.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And then we have the other side of the coin, which is AI.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And of course, this has been a big part of the writer's strike.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: For SAG-AFTRA, this is actually a bigger deal.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And sometimes people are surprised when I say that.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: But if you're an actor, your likeness now digitally exists somewhere.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And it is somewhat easy for a studio to generate a new performance with your image, your voice.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: We've already seen this happen, right, where sometimes we resurrect an actor who's died to have a bit part in a Star Wars movie or something like that.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: So we know it's very possible.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: This is not necessarily going to be an issue for, you know, Meryl Streep or Tom Cruise, but it will be an issue for the mid-level actor or the extra who kind of makes their living by going and being an extra in different scenes.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And if you're a voice actor, which is what SAG-AFTRA also covers, maybe you read audiobooks or you do a lot of voiceover work, your voice is pretty easy to replicate with AI as well.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And I have one thing to say, if you want this voice, you got to pay for it.
--:-- Noel King: So with all of those considerations in mind, the big issue is that the AMPTP, which is an organization that represents all of the big studios and production companies in Hollywood, they have a contract with SAG-AFTRA and with the other unions.
--:-- Noel King: It was coming up for renewal, And SAG brought forth its demands and said, we need better pay because we're not able to feed our children and pay our mortgages.
--:-- Noel King: And we need to make some rules about how AI can be used and how it can't be used to take away our livelihoods.
--:-- Noel King: And the AMPTP has not budged from their position which is basically lower than what SAG would like.
--:-- Noel King: I cannot believe it quite frankly how far apart we are on so many things how they plead poverty, that they're losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs.
--:-- Noel King: And what are the studios saying to these demands? Is there any common ground?
--:-- Noel King: Well, you know, it's hard to tell because nobody's releasing exactly what they said.
--:-- Noel King: But according to Bob Iger, who's the CEO of Disney, he went on TV the morning that the contract was supposed to expire and basically said, There's a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic.
--:-- Noel King: And they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.
--:-- Noel King: So they're not being realistic? No, they're not.
--:-- Noel King: This came on the heels of a deadline article that some people have speculated was planted to scare SAG-AFTRA that said something like, we plan to make sure that the writers are losing their houses and their apartments before we will go back to the bargaining table with them.
--:-- Noel King: Now, people like freaked out about this and said, why would you even say this? You know, this is an inhumane.
--:-- Noel King: Someone called it a necessary evil.
--:-- Noel King: So those two things came kind of in a one-two punch.
--:-- Noel King: And that's the message I think a lot of people heard from the studios.
--:-- Noel King: The moment that SAG-AFTRA went to a press conference on Thursday and announced that they had ordered the strike, the AMPTP released a statement saying, we offered historic and groundbreaking concessions.
--:-- Noel King: You know, we offered this much raise. We offered this percentage change in residuals. individuals, and we offered, and I believe they just said groundbreaking AI proposals.
--:-- Noel King: And from everything I've heard from SAG-AFTRA, those groundbreaking AI proposals were basically that all performances of extras, and in fact, historical performances, could be used to feed an AI machine.
--:-- Noel King: And then those likenesses would be able to be used without actors' consent in perpetuity throughout the universe.
--:-- Noel King: So they're not thrilled about that for obvious reasons, but they also clearly don't think that the amount of money that's being offered to them is equivalent with what it costs to live a middle class lifestyle.
--:-- Noel King: We work really hard for our money. We're not these elitist people who are running around in yachts and stuff.
--:-- Noel King: We're literally looking for the next job to pay for our rent, to pay for our dinners.
--:-- Noel King: You know, the heads of studios make a lot of money.
--:-- Noel King: There is a lot here that has been successful. Why don't the heads of studios take a pay cut, for example?
--:-- Noel King: They'd still make a ton of money and everyone gets a little bit more.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: Yeah, well, that's a great question that I think we could ask in many industries, right?
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: That, you know, one answer is just they don't want to, which I on some level understand is kind of a human thing.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: But I think the bigger answer here that requires sort of rethinking how we think about Hollywood.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: So sort of because of Netflix, movie studios and TV production companies have been moving towards acting more like tech companies.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: Some of them literally are tech companies, right? Amazon, Apple, Netflix.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: These are tech companies that also make some content and put it on their platforms.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And the more traditional studios like Disney, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, which is now Warner Brothers Discovery, they have to pivot to being tech companies in order to keep up.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: That just is a kind of company that works under a totally different business model.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And they also are large companies that are more beholden to their investors than anything else.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And investors tend to want to see a rate of return that keeps growing.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: So you end up in a position where you need to make more and more profit all the time.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And there is kind of a ceiling on how much content the world can consume, right?
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And people are buying fewer movie tickets now than they used to.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And people don't want to subscribe to a dozen streaming platforms.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: They just want to subscribe to a couple and get everything they want, quite reasonably, of course, right?
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: So the only clear way to make more revenue is either to charge more, which doesn't seem like it's going to work in this economic climate, or to cut out costs.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And a really good way to cut costs is to pay people less, shorten seasons, and also remove people from the equation as much as possible.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And if you can eliminate, say, 40 background actors or extras from your production, well, suddenly you don't have to pay any of those people.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And you don't have to worry about working around the kind of working conditions that unions actually have won for people, which is like you can only work a certain number of hours a day and you have to get lunch.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And if you have a scene where it's needed, we have an intimacy coordinator and, you know, all of those kinds of things.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: Computers don't need those.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: So by cutting down how much the cost of making something is, you raise the profit.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And on the balance sheet, that looks better.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And that's what you want.
--:-- Noel King: So there's just sort of a confluence of factors here.
--:-- Noel King: And it seems like the thing they're not willing to do is say, well, you know, I'll take a pay cut and then we'll sort of fix this.
--:-- Noel King: But, you know, we don't see a lot of examples of that happening in the real world.
--:-- Noel King: So I'm not so surprised about that.
--:-- Noel King: I love that there's the real world and there's Hollywood.
--:-- Noel King: Alyssa, as long as the strike goes on, what do we expect for actors and for writers and for people who like movies and TV?
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: So there's a couple of things that are different right now than when we had our last major strike, which was in 2007.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: The writers went on strike.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And back then, there was less stuff sitting around on people's streaming platforms.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: And even though a lot of companies have been pulling stuff off their streaming platforms for tax write-off reasons, there's still a lot out there.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: If the strike continues into late fall, it really is going to cause a pretty big ripple.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: There will be, like, major franchise movies that are delayed because they can't shoot them.
--:-- Alyssa Wilkinson: We already in a position where most productions in the U have been shut down for a while because crews won't cross the writer picket lines in solidarity.
--:-- Noel King: Your favorite show has already been delayed but you're going to really start to notice it if this leaks into awards season and not only the Emmys get pushed, but the Oscars, the Golden Globes, that kind of stuff.
--:-- Noel King: And we may see release schedules getting moved around like they did in the early days of the pandemic, too.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up, life as a non-A-list actor. Orange is the new broke.
--:-- Noel King: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
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--:-- Noel King: Mrs. Sheffield, I can't go in there. My mother had three rules.
--:-- Noel King: Never make contact with a public toilet. Never, ever, ever cross a picket line.
--:-- Noel King: What was the third one?
--:-- Noel King: Oh, yeah. Never wear musk oil to the zoo.
--:-- Noel King: Today Explained, we're back with Michael Shulman.
--:-- Michael Shulman: He's a staff writer at The New Yorker.
--:-- Michael Shulman: He recently wrote about the cast of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black.
--:-- Michael Shulman: It first aired a decade ago in 2013.
--:-- Michael Shulman: It was very, very, very popular.
--:-- Noel King: And I asked Michael, why is he writing about this show in the context of the actor's strike?
--:-- Michael Shulman: Well, actually, one of the cast members came to me.
--:-- Michael Shulman: This was Kimiko Glenn, who played Brooke Soso, one of the inmates.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And she had been talking with her castmates in the years since the show.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And while the show was on about how some of them felt they had never been properly compensated for being on this show in a way that was commensurate to the gigantic success that it was for Netflix.
--:-- Noel King: You know, So-So came in on season two.
--:-- Noel King: She was a sort of idealistic, wouldn't stop chit-chatting about environmental causes.
--:-- Noel King: My parents named me Brooke after Brooke Shields, the actress.
--:-- Noel King: Except without the E because I thought it would be a bit more original.
--:-- Noel King: But sometime around my 10th birthday, they started saying I was named after a Brooke instead.
--:-- Noel King: Like the babbling kind.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Like many characters in the show, she was not one of the series regulars, the kind of core cast, but she was on tons of episodes.
--:-- Michael Shulman: You seem so calm. Are you a murderer?
--:-- Michael Shulman: You know, a lot of the people in that category started out getting paid SAG scale, which is the minimum you can pay someone.
--:-- Michael Shulman: So some of the actors told me at the very beginning, it was less than $900 a day, which is, it sounds like, you know, a lot for a day, but it's really not that much when you factor in the commissions and taxes and dues and all the stuff that they have to pay.
--:-- Michael Shulman: They actually go home with very little and they're not working every single day.
--:-- Michael Shulman: It's very spread out.
--:-- Michael Shulman: So a lot of these recurring guest stars had to keep other gigs while they were on the show.
--:-- Michael Shulman: They were waitressing. They were tending bar.
--:-- Michael Shulman: One of them was working in a soap store.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And their customers would recognize them from the show.
--:-- Michael Shulman: So there was this kind of cognitive dissonance where they had this overnight fame, a lot of them, where they would be chased down the street by fans wanting pictures.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And then they'd also have to do other jobs to pay their rent.
--:-- Noel King: Let's go back to the streaming ecosystem at the time that that show began airing.
--:-- Michael Shulman: What did it look like back then?
--:-- Michael Shulman: Well, so you really have to rewind your mind 10 years when streaming TV really wasn't a thing at all.
--:-- Michael Shulman: It wasn't a way people watched TV.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And Netflix was primarily known as the company that would send you DVDs and little red envelopes.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Netflix, all the movies you want, 20 bucks a month and no late fees.
--:-- Michael Shulman: But around 2012, 2013, Netflix started changing into a place that would offer exclusive, pardon the word, content.
--:-- Michael Shulman: The first two huge pieces of the content were these two TV shows that premiered in 2013, First House of Cards, and then a few months later, Orange is the New Black.
--:-- Michael Shulman: So at the time, some of the cast members told me when they were cast on the show, people were like, oh, Netflix, like the place with the envelopes.
--:-- Michael Shulman: You know, people really didn't know what this was going to be.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And of course, since then, streaming TV just is TV.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Orange is the New Black helped make the Netflix brand in a major way.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And that Netflix model of how TV is consumed, including binge watching, where they drop a whole season at once and you stay up all day and all night and watch it all.
--:-- Michael Shulman: That was a huge building block in the streaming economy that we're now in.
--:-- Michael Shulman: How did it become such a big building block?
--:-- Michael Shulman: What did that look like?
--:-- Michael Shulman: Well, so House of Cards, people remember, was the show with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, and it had a lot of star power.
--:-- Michael Shulman: The fact that movie stars were in a Netflix show and that it was this serious political drama thrust Netflix into the prestige TV realm.
--:-- Michael Shulman: But Orange is the New Black was a kind of ground hit.
--:-- Michael Shulman: For one thing, it was revolutionary in this gigantic ensemble that was overwhelmingly female, that was very diverse racially and in terms of body types and had a lot of LGBTQ characters.
--:-- Michael Shulman: You know, it was a phenomenon.
--:-- Michael Shulman: It was a phenomenon that was not built on stardom.
--:-- Michael Shulman: It was built on this very big and expanding ensemble of sort of character actors from New York City.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And for some of them, the show was a real launchpad.
--:-- Michael Shulman: I mean, when you think of Laverne Cox being on the cover of Time magazine, she was the face of this transgender people in popular culture.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And that was such a moment.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Daniel Brooks, Uzo Aduba. It kind of brought us back Natasha Lyonne after, you know, years of drug problems and a kind of career slump.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Now she's like the queen of TV.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Thank you.
--:-- Michael Shulman: It's my bad attitude that keeps me young.
--:-- Noel King: When you're on a hit show that is this big, typically you have money to live off of from that work.
--:-- Michael Shulman: One of the stories that they told me was that Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, gave a party before one of the SAG Awards ceremonies that they were going to and invited the cast.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And he gave a toast where they said he bragged about how more people watched Orange is the New Black than Game of Thrones.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And according to the actors who remember this, it was kind of this boast, but it just landed in this totally different way where they were aghast and thought, wait a second.
--:-- Michael Shulman: If more people are watching our show than Game of Thrones, why aren't we getting paid like the actors on Game of Thrones?
--:-- Michael Shulman: We all just looked at each other.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And of course, give me the money.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Where's the money?
--:-- Michael Shulman: I'm still living in my Bushwick apartment.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And part of that has to do with, you know, Netflix's secrecy.
--:-- Michael Shulman: They don't share their viewing numbers.
--:-- Michael Shulman: We've traditionally known about box office numbers, Nielsen ratings.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Those are the metrics that the entertainment industry has worked off of.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Whether it's advertising rates, you know, actors and other creative people being able to negotiate off of the popularity of what they're doing.
--:-- Michael Shulman: But in this model, it doesn't really translate, and you can be on a major hit show and not reap the rewards.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Why were they not paid like they had leapt into the public imagination in the way that they did?
--:-- Michael Shulman: What was actually happening behind the scenes?
--:-- Michael Shulman: Well, so there's kind of two parts of this, and it's the two ways that actors are paid.
--:-- Michael Shulman: One is your upfront fee, you know, what you get paid to show up to work.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And that was, from what I have been told by all these actors I've talked to, very low at the beginning and kind of remained low.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Like, you know, they were not making millions of dollars.
--:-- Michael Shulman: I'm sure some of the people who were established names, like Jason Biggs was on the show.
--:-- Michael Shulman: I mean, who knew you could rock Orange?
--:-- Michael Shulman: Tasha Leone, Laura Prepon.
--:-- Michael Shulman: You know, people who were established probably made a bit more money.
--:-- Michael Shulman: But the vast ensemble that was kind of the fiber of the show, they were being paid the SAG minimum rate.
--:-- Michael Shulman: The other way that actors get paid is through residuals, which is like the money that you make through syndication, reruns, you know, packaging for other forms of consumption, like DVDs, stuff like that.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And traditionally, actors who are on big hit shows on, you know, networks, cable, what we can now call linear TV, they make a lot of money through that.
--:-- Michael Shulman: It's a real important part of how working actors sustain themselves.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And because Netflix wasn't the traditional TV model, it was working off of a different arrangement.
--:-- Michael Shulman: SAG had negotiated a new media agreement that calculated the residuals in a different way.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And what these actors found over time was that it was basically bupkis.
--:-- Michael Shulman: You know, one of the actors I talked to, Emma Miles, who played one of the meth heads on the show, Leanne, she told me about how, you know, she makes residuals from a handful of guest spots on Law & Order SVU going back to 2004.
--:-- Michael Shulman: She still makes hundreds of dollars from that.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Because every time they show SVU or, you know, it's just playing constantly on TV, whatever, she gets money.
--:-- Michael Shulman: For her many seasons on lots of episodes of Orange is the New Black, she's getting $20 a year.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Why do you think it took the industry so long to address this?
--:-- Michael Shulman: Why did it take a decade to have a strike?
--:-- Michael Shulman: Well, I think, again, to put your mind back 10 years, it was all really experimental.
--:-- Michael Shulman: That's a word that a lot of people use, experiment.
--:-- Michael Shulman: One of the producers and writers called it outlaw country.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And like there were upsides to that.
--:-- Michael Shulman: They didn't have to censor the show to appeal to advertisers, sponsors.
--:-- Michael Shulman: They had a real level of creative freedom.
--:-- Michael Shulman: I mean, it's hard to imagine Orange is the New Black happening on primetime NBC.
--:-- Michael Shulman: But at the same time, people were unhappy at the time with what they were getting paid, for sure.
--:-- Michael Shulman: I think it's difficult for actors to speak out about the money they're making.
--:-- Michael Shulman: Actors are in a very vulnerable profession where they have to be chosen.
--:-- Michael Shulman: They have to audition for things.
--:-- Michael Shulman: They have to get offers.
--:-- Michael Shulman: There were a lot of actors in the show who were very, very nervous about speaking up.
--:-- Michael Shulman: I really asked a lot of people.
--:-- Michael Shulman: I talked to 10 people in the end, but I could sense the fear.
--:-- Michael Shulman: And I think the only reason that a lot of them were willing to speak up now is because of the solidarity of the strike and the fact that everyone in the profession is taking this moment to talk about this systemic problem.
--:-- Noel King: Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn.
--:-- Noel King: Amina El-Sadi is our editor.
--:-- Noel King: Patrick Boyd, our engineer.
--:-- Noel King: Laura Bullard is our senior fact checker.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: out with the days new and everyone is waiting waiting on you
