160,000 actors, members of SAG-AFTRA, are shutting down all industry filming and voice-over production at midnight tonight. They are joining the 11,000 writers, members of the Writers Guild, who have been on strike since May 2.
While writers like me struggle to make ends meet, Hollywood studios get rich off the content we create.
The conformity of 1950s film and television was the result of the successful McCarthyist purge of leftists — and their genres — from the entertainment industry. The life of socialist screenwriter Very Caspary shows how it was done and what was lost.
While the methods of production and distribution have transformed several times over, every industry-wide strike since 1950 has been about residuals. Residuals have historically been the most hard-fought battles. Now there is streaming, and AI.
It’s been 15 years since the last WGA strike, and the stakes are far greater.
Angela Lansbury, who died this week at 96, was a proud socialist who achieved enormous success in film, theater, and TV. Yet her astonishing range was botched by the Hollywood studio system — preventing her movie career from flourishing even more.
As sensational shows like ‘60 Days In‘ return this fall, so does one of television’s favorite tropes: the scary, evil-doing prisoner. howcasing the most unstable of the incarcerated population spreads the false narrative that everyone in prison is a lost cause.
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Before copaganda became widely televised in shows like “Law & Order,” police were more accurately portrayed as abusers of power.
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