The Hollywood strikes reveal Los Angeles’s deepest anxieties
ON THE 100TH day of the Hollywood writers’ strike, August 9th, the picket line outside Warner Brothers’ studios was more like a party than a protest. A marching band strutted alongside Los Angeles’s screenwriters and actors as they belted out the lyrics to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”. One striker shrieked periodically near the studio entrance. “This is the executive gate, so we try to make as much noise as possible,” says Jon Long, a member of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union. Rather than marching, he offered his comrades free massages. Soon afterwards, a black SUV ferried a Warner Brothers VIP through the sea of jeering strikers.
Two stories emerge from talking to writers and actors on the picket lines at studios around Los Angeles. The first is of an industry in chaos as workers fret about the effects of technological change on their pay-cheques, and studios balk at Wall Street demanding profits, not just subscriber growth, from their streaming platforms. The second story is about a city that is shrinking because it is too expensive for its workers. Nithya Raman, a city-council member whose district borders on Disney, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios (and whose husband is a TV writer), wonders if LA is at risk of losing the industry that gave it fame and makes it, arguably, the entertainment capital of the world. Unless something changes, she says, “I don’t know that these are professions that will allow people to come to Los Angeles.”
American cities shrink in two ways. One is like Detroit in the 1980s and 1990s, when population decline makes housing cheaper but the city still cannot attract more people. The other way is like New York or San Francisco, when lots of rich Americans live, or have bases in, the city but high housing costs push regular folk out. That is what is happening in LA. Median incomes are higher and have grown faster in the Golden State than the US…
2023-08-17 08:33:27
Source from www.economist.com
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