PRESS
PRESS
“We are living in the wildest imaginations of a few billionaires.”
“The question coming out of this strike is, how do we turn this moment into a movement? This is a new generation. There is a new wave in Hollywood. If you truly believe in a better world, that better world can come. It’s not inevitable; it takes labor. We have the ability to build the world that we’ve always wanted to live in.”
The fact that Senator Ed Markey was able to shift momentum in his race, change the early conventional wisdom, and use savvy marketing to align his campaign with a new generation of activist voters is a big news story. The fact that he won the race is an even bigger story.
The video that made it all happen may be the biggest story of all…
“It's always our strategy to lean into a controversy. We believe that we can win.” O’Keefe says that Democrats don’t always play hardball, but Sunrise is willing to go there: “In the Democratic Party people try to play it safe. But we want to expose the contradictions of the political machine and assumptions about electability that are used to tell us why we can't demand more.”
How The Best Campaign Ad Of The Year Beat The Kennedys
Pod Save America Interview
Why Are TV Writers So Miserable?
By Micheal Schulman
For newer writers, there’s a sense of having shown up at the party too late. Alex O’Keefe, who is twenty-eight, grew up poor in Florida and worked as a speechwriter for the senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and as Green New Deal campaign director before getting staffed on FX’s “The Bear.” “It should be this beautiful rags-to-riches story, right?” he told me. “Unfortunately, I realized not all that glitters is gold.”
During his nine weeks working in the writers’ room for “The Bear,” over Zoom, he was living in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with no heat; sometimes his space heater would blow the power out, and he’d bring his laptop to a public library. (He was never flown to set.) He thought that he was making a lot of money, but, after reps’ fees and taxes, it didn’t add up to much. “It’s a very regular-degular, working-class existence,” he said. “And the only future I’m seeking financially is to enter that middle class, which has always been rarified for someone who comes from poverty.”
Last month, “The Bear” won the W.G.A. Award for Comedy Series. O’Keefe went to the ceremony with a negative bank account and a bow tie that he’d bought on credit. He’s now applying for jobs at movie theatres to prepare for the potential strike. “A lot of people assume that, when you’re in a TV writers’ room, you sit around a table, and you just dream together,” he said. “With ‘The Bear,’ I learned from these masters that, if you are given a shit sandwich, you can dress that up and make it a Michelin-star-level dish. And they were consistently given shit sandwich after shit sandwich.” He recalled one of the executive producers apologizing to him. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry this is your first writers’-room experience, because it’s not usually like this. It shouldn’t be like this.’ I don’t even know the alternative. I thought we would be treated more like collaborators on a product. It’s like an assembly line now.”
Writers Strike Messaging War Reshapes Fight With Studios
The PR “war” has been decisively won by the guild from the get-go. Credit a unique sense of solidarity across Hollywood’s aggrieved labor community in 2023 and writers’ tendency toward communication.
The guild’s grassroots has sought to define the narrative, both in the streets through its daily pickets of studios and streamers as well as online, where its members publicly post with unfiltered abandon to humanize their perceived plight as often as to persuade.
The guild has generally taken a hands-off approach to its rank-and-file’s messaging, for the most part neither dictating talking points nor attempting to give notes that might hem output. It’s unconventional for a large institution of any sort: allowing the tail to, at least publicly, wag the dog.
The Dan LeBatard Show
A Culture of Solidarity Has Swept Hollywood
Interview with Alex Press
A lot of people in Hollywood saw this work as a white-collar, high-status career. But we’re seeing that the CEOs and their shareholders don’t see a writer from The Bear any differently than they see Chris Smalls from the Amazon Labor Union. We are their enemy. When they said that they’re going to keep this strike going until we start to lose our homes, we realized, oh, we’re just as precarious as anyone else out here in America.
No one really knows what it means for the future of Hollywood, if we’re going to keep this kind of solidarity in our culture, but it’s made an imprint on the minds of all the culture workers of America. Everyone who has written everything from a Marvel movie to a kids’ show has had this experience of, “Wow, my power is in the collective, it’s in my union.” I think that will ultimately change the culture, even if there’s a lot of resistance from the studios...