Cartoonishly Evil Hollywood Execs Never Miss an Opportunity for Bad PR

Via The Daily Beast:

Another thing SAG has going for it is the fact that the studio executives on the other side of their contract negotiations have not missed an opportunity to fumble the bag.

At best, the AMPTP seems to vastly miscalculate the tenacity of organized labor in entertainment. At worst, they seem cartoonishly evil, the kind of villains who would need to be rewritten in a script, on account of the fact that they’re too unlikable. One would think that people paid millions to run media companies would be better at media strategy.

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Many Hollywood observers saw the writers’ strike coming, but fewer predicted that actors would join them. Most blindsided of all seem to be the movie executives, who apparently have no PR strategy at all beyond waiting until all of the union members starve to death so that they can emerge from their Brentwood bunkers into the writer and actor boneyard, finally free to produce their own attempt at The Next Yellowstone (Yosemite? Arches? Great Smoky Mountains?) starring an AI-generated Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh and written by a chatbot that has been fed a bunch of Dallas scripts and Carrie Underwood lyrics.

I’m only slightly exaggerating. Earlier this week, for some reason, members of the AMPTP told a Deadline reporter that the movie executives’ plan in negotiations was to “let it bleed out” until “union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” Mass evictions were, in the words of an “insider,” “a cruel but necessary evil.” “The studios and streamers’ next think financially strapped writers would go to WGA leadership and demand they restart talks before what could be a very cold Christmas,” the article continues.

Their PR strategy is to… threaten to ruin Christmas? Who thought this was a good idea?

The Deadline article did not read like a hit piece. Deadline’s parent company is Penske Media Group, a powerful multimedia conglomerate, which would make the publication an easily accessible mouthpiece for industry bigwigs. Additionally, these awful anonymous studio executives weren’t participating in conversations overheard on the Acela; they were giving on the record (albeit anonymous) quotes to a journalist writing a piece on contentious labor negotiations. Some observers read the studios’ public declaration that their plan was to “be super evil” as a bargaining tactic. But in what world is threatening to make people homeless because they want to see more of the profits generated by material that they wrote something that will win anybody over? Who was this for?

If it was an attempt to scare the writers, it didn’t work. If it was an attempt to get SAG members to reconsider their 98 percent strike authorization vote, it didn’t work. Within 24 hours of the piece being published, Deadline added a quote from an AMPTP spokesperson clarifying that those evil executives did not speak for the organization and that actually the movie executives wanted to get the industry up and running again. The author of that quote was also granted anonymity by the Deadline writer.

What the AMPTP’s public relations missteps have done is highlight just how exploitative the current structure of the entertainment industry is to the people who create entertainment. It doesn’t take an insider to understand this. Did you know that Disney’s Bob Iger has a $27 million compensation package and writers on massive hit shows sometimes have to do things like drive Uber to make ends meet? I didn’t, until the AMPTP Streisand Effected their own personal wealth into headlines. Would Boston University students have known to boo the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO when he spoke at their commencement had he not been so unwilling to negotiate with the workers who generate his $39.3 million salary? Do AMPTP members honestly believe that if they wait long enough, writers and actors who can’t afford to buy a house in Los Angeles will stop being mad that the corny Wharton dipshit profiting off their labor has their own jet?

Thanks to the article’s writer Erin Gloria Ryan. Lots of good observations and a great laugh with the whole The Next Yellowstone riff.

One question arises from these PR screw-ups: With these studios CEOs making one misstep in public after another, like David Zaslav and Bob Iger, and the much maligned Deadline article featuring villainous anonymous execs …

Are these guys really this dumb?

And if so, why the hell are they running giant entertainment companies? Particularly if they seem hell bent on running them into the ground.

But I guess that’s why they pay them the big bucks.

For the rest of The Daily Beast article, go here.

For the latest updates on the strike and news resources, go here.

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Cartoonishly Evil Hollywood Execs Never Miss an Opportunity for Bad PR was originally published in Go Into The Story on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.