Hiya Smarties: Fran Drescher Says the Jig is Up!
The Actors Strike, Tom Cruise, Billie Eilish, Vampires, Paul Newman and More ...
Dear Wags,
We interrupt Barbie vs. Oppenheimer blah-blah with this dispatch from the actual Human-Robot war. As Wag Suprema Fran Drescher puts it, This is a moment of history that is a moment of truth.” The last time we saw Drescher, she was hawking a sitcom called Happily Divorced. Now she’s Winston Churchill! It’s the role of a lifetime.
The Great Actors’ Strike of 2023 is the latest aftershock from huge technological change. The fight between Drescher’s union, SAG-AFTRA, and studios and streamers isn’t merely about TV residuals. It’s about the nature of human creativity. Changes in the show business model have been wrenching in an industry that relied on big talent and big audiences. A handful of actors are rich, famous, and insufferable. Most are scraping by, just like everybody else. The old rules of the game were blithely rewritten without their consent and to their detriment. Like Hollywood’s writers —on strike for more than 70 days—they are furious.
Hard-pressed corporations will cut costs. What’s depressing is that they do so in predictably lousy ways. Labor is crushed, while the C-suite goes on feathering its nest. Before A.I. was a glimmer in a technologist’s eye, the creative economy shifted to modes that devalued artists (and the army of people who support them), in favor of the MBA class. The assumption was that creativity was simply another product to be cranked out at swamping volume. Success or failure wasn’t determined by talent but by programmatic hacks. Anybody could do the grubby human stuff. All the magic was in spreadsheets and algorithms.
This is false, and the chickens have come home to roost. The shift to streaming disrupted show business without coming up with a monetization strategy to replace what was lost. That lurch cut creatives off from potential earnings with little more than a Sorry, times have changed. Fragmentation may be unavoidable, but entertainment companies should expect a fight over a shrinking pie.
Storytelling is a wonky human activity. It does not always deliver a boffo shareholder return. Efforts to jam Hollywood into Silicon Valley’s model are problematic, because there is no clean techie formula for artistic success. Anybody who has worked in a media corporation knows there is always a febrile search for shortcuts: If only we could get those annoying, irrational, quirky humans out of the way. If only there were an equation that added up to a blockbuster!
The actors are onto this. Like the writers, they see the potential of generative A.I. to kill their ancient profession. The more challenging things become, the more such diabolical efficiencies are plausible. Drescher isn’t having it. “They plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs,” she says of media conglomerates. “It is disgusting. Shame on them.”
What’s happening to the industry can’t be hung on a few executives. But if the idea of work — in show business and everywhere— is changing, workers need a seat at the table. For decades, labor has been anemic force in American life. The relentless pace of change helped it find its voice—in Hollywood of all places. “What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor,” said Drescher. “When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run, we have a problem.”
Yours Ever,
Norma R. Webster
The Pictures
Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One (Theaters…obviously!) Sir Tom Cruise runs, leaps and drives motorcycles off cliffs in this latest adrenaline shot directed by his compadre, Wag Christopher McQuarrie. The Last Movie Star looks amazing in every frame. If you prefer jazz hands to car chases, shimmy over to Frick-and-Frack Ben Platt & Molly Gordon’s rollicking mockumentary, Theater Camp.—Alanna Mitsopolis
Bloodsuckers
What We do in the Shadows (FX/Hulu). Season 5 of the funniest undead comedy ever kicks off with Guillermo (Wag Harvey Guillén), the put-upon human familiar to Nandor the Relentless (toothy Kayvan Novak) believing he may have been turned into vampire. Oh, and they all go to the mall. Looking to be legitimately spooked? Try Netflix’s Bird Box Barcelona. — Ellen Hutter
Proper Piss Up
The Afterparty (Apple TV+). The groom (Zach Woods) has been done in at his own wedding, and everybody is a suspect. In the second installment Apple’s whodunit comedy, it’s up to Hilarious Sam Richardson and The Tiffany Haddish to grill the suspects—Paul Walter Hauser, John Cho, Poppie Liu, Elizabeth Perkins, Anna Konkle, Jack Whitehall, and Ken Jeong among them. — Dora Charleston
Tangled Web
Full Circle (Max). You may need to take notes: The son of a rich New York couple (Claire Danes and Timothy Olyphant) is kidnapped. Or maybe not. The head of a Guyanese crime family (Dame CCH Pounder) is behind the plot, which has to do with an old curse. Why have the kidnappers demanded a strange ransom of $314,159? What does the boy’s grandfather (Dennis Quaid) know about this mess? Wag Supremo Steven Soderbergh and Scribe Ed Solomon give an investigator played by Zazie Beets loads to unpack. It’s a very starry conundrum! — Kenny Lockhart
Back in the 1990s, Carol Fisher dated a great guy named Bob. He was a plastic surgeon, pilot, multilingual globetrotter and seemingly, a nice Jewish boy. But then it turned out he was seeing a lot of other ladies — and they all had thorny questions. Like, what had become of his poor wife Gail? So, they banded together to get to the bottom of it — and busted open a murder case. — Jane Tennison
Wag Emerita Louisa May Alcott called the violin the most human of all instruments. In the right hands, it will break your heart. In the wrong ones, run for the hills. Hilary Hahn is one of the great violin virtuosos of our age; Belgian composer Eugène-Auguste Ysaÿe was a titan of his. Hahn’s tackles his 6 Sonatas for Violin, Op. 27, and the fusion of their talents is sublime. You could not be in better hands. — Holly Martins
I used to float, now I just fall down/I used to know, but I'm not sure now/What I was made for? The noisy, neon hype machine of the Barbie movie is exhausting. Leave it to Billie Eilish to turn down the volume with What Was I Made For? a sad, understated tune from the soundtrack. It’s about a living doll seeking her purpose, but it hits deeper notes about finding meaning amid shiny distractions. —Emmy Hesire
Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961) did a lot for pool. The film helped renew interest in the pastime, and the characters of small-time hustler Fast Eddie Felsen (Paul Newman) and pro Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) were so indelible many believed they were based on real people. In fact, they were invented by novelist Walter Tevis, who was most upset when a real-life pool player, Rudolph Walter Wanderone, capitalized on the movie’s popularity by assuming the Fats moniker. Tevis’ novel had been optioned several times (including by Frank Sinatra). It didn’t gel until Rossen and writer Sidney Carroll adapted it, focusing more on the relationship between the main characters than on the game. Shot in just six weeks in real New York City pool halls, The Hustler became an instant critical and box office smash. The movie nabbed 8 Oscar nominations, and won two, for art direction and cinematography. Still, it scored at the BAFTA’s taking home Best Picture and a Best Actor accolade for Newman (July 18, TCM). — Sarah Packard
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