Film Workers Should Fight for Good Movies, Not Just Jobs
Hollywood’s unions fight for tax credits and jobs but not for the movies themselves. That has to change. Unions can take up policies that could save American cinema not only as a way to make a living but as a vital art form.
Hollywood’s unions have spent years chasing tax credits to bring production home. Jobs matter, but a labor movement that never asks whether the films are any good has given up on the art its members make. (Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
It’s hard getting normal people to care about the politics of the film industry. Our demands always have to be hitched to some other kind of politics. California Senator Adam Schiff recently tried national security: “We have a lot of our influence around the world as a result of American film and TV,” as he put it. “We don’t want to lose that soft power.” Presumably he’s not talking about the enduring influence of John Huston and Robert Altman films, but rather Top Gun and Transformers movies made in collaboration with the Pentagon. What matters to someone like Schiff is the economic health of the industry — not whether American films are any good.
The unions aren’t exactly interested in the question either. Last year, I went to the quadrennial convention of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents over 168,000 behind-the-scenes entertainment workers who are finding a way to make a living in the increasingly grueling industry, from stagehands to the “below-the-line” crews on film sets. Many speakers expressed pride in their work, but nobody talked about working on a good movie. I went with an insurgent reform caucus, the Caucus of Rank-and-file Entertainment Workers (CREW), and while we had fruitful discussions about a broad range of democratic reforms and political perspectives, we never talked about film as an art form either. Occasionally someone would mention a production we were proud to have worked on, but usually as the setup for an embarrassing anecdote or a story about workplace conflict.
When we talk about what ails the film industry, it’s easy to focus on catastrophic economic shifts: the offshoring of production since the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes; theaters still struggling to recover from COVID-19; the networks and studios that chased Netflix like a pack of lemmings off the peak-streaming cliff. That’s a good way of working out who to blame and which powers to break up. But it doesn’t tell us what we’re fighting for, or how to care for the crowning achievement of American culture: our cinema.
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