June 19, 2023

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(Jiaqi Wang / For The Times)

By Matt Brennan Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Monday, June 19. I’m Matt Brennan, The Times’ deputy editor for entertainment and arts. Today marks 48 days into the first Hollywood writers’ strike of the streaming era, and by many accounts, the picture is bleak. The already dim hope of a swift resolution between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has flickered out, and SAG-AFTRA, which represents actors, has authorized its own strike. (The Directors Guild this month agreed to a new three-year contract.) The sticking points, on a granular level, are the state of residuals income, the rise of “mini-rooms” and fears of displacement by artificial intelligence, among other issues. More broadly, though, the conflict is over the very nature of the streaming revolution, which has in the last decade-plus upended film and TV as dramatically as color photography in the 1950s or the introduction of sound two decades earlier. Led by Netflix, that revolution has come to inflect — or infect, depending on who you ask — nearly every aspect of the industry. What we watch, when we watch, where we watch, even how we watch has changed significantly, fueled and shaped by technological advancements, the rise of social media platforms, the proliferation of TV programming, the COVID-19 pandemic and the fragmentation of the culture itself. So has the measurement of success, the price of attracting top talentand the rhythms of work for Hollywood’s rank-and-file. Streamers have become major players at the Emmys and the Oscars and in the world of stand-up comedy; they’ve shaken — though not yet sunk — the theatrical exhibition of movies; they’ve created the expectation of an entire universe of films and TV series at our fingertips at little to no cost. It’s no surprise that such a swift, seismic transformation should result in heartburn, or worse. The studios claim that streaming has squeezed their bottom line. Workers claim that streaming has made a middle-class existence in the business all but impossible, while pointing out that executives are doing just fine. And, as in any revolution, blowing up the old paradigm creates a state of chaos. [Sign up for Screen Gab to get everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyone’s talking about, in your inbox every Friday.] That’s not to say the clouds amassed over the industry don’t have silver linings. With an assist from boutique streamers like Criterion Collection, Mubi and Kanopy — available for free with L.A. Public Library membership — international, art house and classic cinema is more widely accessible than at any point in history, especially for those of us who grew up trawling the stacks at Blockbuster in between show times at the suburban multiplex. Streaming has also broken down one of the most intransigent barriers in American television — subtitles — turning series like “Call My Agent” and “Squid Game” into water-cooler hits and sparking the expansion of dedicated Spanish-only streaming brands targeted at bilingual families. As the power struggle set off by the streaming revolution continues to play out, it shouldn’t be forgotten that we’ve been here before. The history of Hollywood is, if nothing else, a 100 Years’ War between corporate interests and creative instincts, and that pitched battle, for all its lamentable casualties, has produced the most influential cultural economy on Earth. Understanding such ferment means acknowledging the tectonic forces that lie beneath the topical concerns of the current walkout, like algorithms and A.I. “Not half a dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote in his unfinished novel “The Last Tycoon.” If Hollywood’s first century can teach us anything as we enter its second, it’s that there’s no such thing as predicting the future — only adapting to it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something, or lying.