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What was it W. B. Yeats wrote, that line Joan Didion lifted and twisted in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” about West Coast chaos in 1967? Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
That’s how it felt on Thursday, a few minutes before lunch with some seasoned film executive-friends at the Academy Museum (Salad Niçoise again). Ping, a news alert said the actors’ strike was on. Just up the street, SAG-AFTRA was already under media siege. July 13, 2023: It was a hot one in Hollywood, and about to get hotter. As Didion said of the Sixties cultural crisis, “The center was not holding.”
Actors weren’t acting. Writers weren’t writing. Top film reviewers weren’t deigning to review The Sound Of Freedom, a right wing-connected child-trafficking thriller that slipped past Insidious: The Red Door to lead the box-office for a couple of days, until Tom Cruise took over with Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One. But the Cruise film, though strong, was not strong enough to drag this worrisome summer out of its slough.
(The Sound of Freedom, as Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro noted, was meanwhile set to pass the total domestic box-office take for Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All At Once.)
Over lunch, the immediate question was how long do you think the strikes will last?
“Well, people are talking about November,” said Seasoned Executive Number One. “But nobody knows,” added Seasoned Executive Number Two.
Of course, that’s what’s scary about the present disorder. In the Yeatsian phrase, from his poem “The Second Coming,” anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Dual Hollywood strikes are compounded with the collapse of sure bets like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, then complicated by the clear audience appetite for what those who would shun it have branded a ‘QAnon-adjacent’ child rescue film.
Disney, the mightiest of studios, can’t make its vastly expensive movies work; and Bob Iger, the retired chief executive, is called back for a year, then somewhat desperately roped in for two more. The Emmys are floating free, without a date certain—how do you give and get prizes with no actors or writers? With screen talent sitting out, San Diego’s Comic-Con is receding toward what it once was, a comic-book convention.
The end of days? Not yet. Some big, intriguing films are still slated for release—this week alone will bring Oppenheimer and Barbie. And anyone who has made a rudimentary study of Hollywood knows about its hysterical morbidity. The film business has been perennially declared dead or dying since it began.
But even sober professionals seem shaken by the current breakdown. They don’t see a clear path toward settlement of the labor disputes—issues around AI, in particular, seem too nebulous to resolve, yet too frighteningly imminent to ignore. It’s as if the ‘rough beast’ in Yeats’ poem has come slouching towards Hollywood, in exactly the form predicted by dozens of films from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on.
By now, most screen pros have had considerable experience with the streamers who drive company positions at the bargaining table. More than occasionally, screen people find the tech-based streaming executives chilly, system-oriented, and without the antique show business sentiment and values—the show must go on!—that contributed to strike settlements in 1988 and 2008.
So this downward spiral could last for a while. The elements of a Hollywood rebirth, renaissance, renascence, reformation, Risorgimento, reboot—or, as they call it at the Academy Museum, “Regeneration” (an exhibit of that name closes today)—are not yet in sight.