Our recent discussion about the slow death of the legacy gatekeepers drew a lot of comment. One reader who’s in the know wrote in to relate his personal experience.
I know I’m a little late to this but just wanted to give my own inside info on Hollywood’s status to confirm what your friend told you, in case any of it is new info you can use.
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Former actor here, got a few friends in the industry and they’ve been told explicitly that things are terrible. “Hollywood is in shambles” is a direct quote from my friend’s manager (big clients, very connected). My friend had a co-star role on a major network television show that was cancelled over a year ago and he’s yet to book another gig, his wife (a lot of big television credits) has been faring much better so they’ve been fine, but overall it’s not good.
Part of the problem is he’s now competing on small parts with bigger name actors who normally would NEVER audition for these roles, as they’d be considered a step down (can regress your career). So now he’s constantly losing out to actors with bigger resumes (now even more important to draw in viewers). Case in point – Michael Emerson had a small part in Fallout (I’m told, I read your book and took your advice) when it’s a role that really should be going to a much lesser known actor and is below Emerson’s level, who’s a bonafide television star at this stage in his career.
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Then you’ve got agencies not paying their clients, leading to things like this:
EXCLUSIVE: The KMR talent agency, which has been grappling with “talent payment breakdown,” has suspended its franchise with SAG-AFTRA. KMR owner and President Mark Measures today sent a letter to the guild, informing them of the decision.
“After careful consideration and much deliberation, I have concluded that it is in the best interest of KMR and its clients to temporarily inactivate our franchise with the union,” he wrote. “This decision is not taken lightly, but it presents us with the opportunity to address and rectify the issues that have been causing significant distractions in recent times.”
KMR is not one of the big guns, but it’s a well-known mid level agency that’s been around for almost 70 years with well over a thousand clients.And when this happened my friend began to panic and asked his manager if he should switch agencies (he’s at a big one) and she once again reaffirmed the crisis by shooting that down immediately, telling him the last thing any actor should be doing right now is firing their agent.
Then you’ve got dwindling pilots for years now:While the number of overall scripted originals continues to soar, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and The CW had started rethinking their individual approaches to pilots before the pandemic. Now, two years into making television with costly COVID-19 protocols, the five networks have shifted to more of a year-round development model as the days of producing nearly 100 combined pilots have come and gone.
This season, the five broadcasters have (so far) ordered only 35 pilots combined — that’s the lowest tally in at least a decade — and down significantly from the pre-pandemic days when 60 was considered a record low. While sources say a handful of additional orders may still be to come, this year’s 35 comedies and dramas are still down from last year’s sum, which included 20 pilots that were carried over from 2020, when the global production shutdown wiped out pilot season.
And he told me this year the number of pilots is somewhere around EIGHT total.
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Just thought you might like to know! Love your work, and just started reading Combat Frame XSeed and loving it so far as well!
We love our readers, and we always love it when they write in.
Especially when they have unique insights to share on current events.
So thank you, Ex-ActorAnon. And thanks to everyone who reads.
The evidence is mounting that Hollywood is dead; the record labels are dead; deadpub is dead.
They’re just not broke.
Yet.
Stay tuned.
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I feel bad for the people just trying to make a living. Other than that, it would not break my heart to see the end of Hollywood.
It is tough hearing that the small and mid-level players are taking the hit first. But the big guys will fall harder.
I admit, my reaction was “Couldn’t happen to a nicer den of inquity.” 🙂
Everything ends.
Those of us who experienced the 20th century do not seem to be aware of that as others were.
The hard fall may be with the third union that provides services, electrical, lighting, etc. Iger has been mouthing off that the negotiations are unrealistic after at least one previous contract deal where that union’s leadership put the rank and file under the bus. If these people can’t find work, they have blue collar skills to move elsewhere, which would make filmmaking in Hollyweird harder.
Everybody forgets that having to deal with unions was why Gordon Gekko didn’t want to buy airlines. And, indirectly, what led to his downfall.
Have you noticed that theaters are increasing their re-releases of older movies now? There have always been a few re-releases, but the sheer amount and scale of them this year seems unprecedented from what I can remember.
This year, there are wide-scale theatrical re-releases of (among others) the extended cuts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, all of the Spider-Man movies (Raimi, Webb, and Watts), “The Mummy” (1999), “The Phantom Menace”, “My Fair Lady”, “Amelie”, “Interstellar”, “The NeverEnding Story”, “North by Northwest”, “Rear Window”, “The Crow” (1994), “South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut”, “Blazing Saddles”, “Princess Mononoke”, “Howl’s Moving Castle”, “White Christmas”, “Steel Magnolias”, “My Neighbor Totoro”, and even “Uncut Gems”.
I wonder if going forward, theaters might start increasingly depending on re-releases rather than new releases.