One weird trick for fixing Hollywood

Plus: the asylum that raised Will Stancil

Greetings from Read Max HQ! I’m very pleased to announce that this edition of the newsletter is accompanied by an “experimental Read Max audio product,” which is to say a podcast of me reading the newsletter--with some of the classic off-the-cuff riffing you’ve come to associate with the Read Max brand identity 😎.

In addition to the link directly above this paragraph the experimental audio product can be found on Apple Podcasts and Overcast. It can also technically be found on Spotify but I recommend you do not find it there. On the podcast, as well as in this newsletter, I am discussing two items:

• The current crisis in Hollywood, the danger posed to the time-wasting industry, and the 2001 baseball romance Summer Catch.

• The secret origins of Twitter power user and political candidate Will Stancil.

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Let’s fix Hollywood by unionizing YouTube

An unexpected movie kept coming into my mind as I read Daniel Bessner’s recent Harper’s article about the changing conditions of labor and financing in Hollywood: Summer Catch, a minor-league baseball romance starring Freddie Prinze, Jr., which I saw in theaters in 2001. In theaters!! Why did I go to the movie theater and pay $14 of my hard-earned paycheck to see a movie that I must have known at the time would find no purchase in my brain--a movie that it was obvious probably even to the people who were making it would not only not going to be a good movie but not even be a memorably bad movie? I wasn’t going on a date, nor did I have any particular interest in the plot or the actors involved. I guess I like baseball, but this was not exactly Bull Durham. No, the reason I saw Summer Catch is that I had a few hours to kill and Summer Catch was playing at the movie theater.

This kind of behavior--seeing a movie almost at random, simply because you’ve got nothing better to do and it’s playing--seems incomprehensible to me now, but it was quite a normal way to fill time for many decades, even into the early years of the 21st century. It’s why I saw, e.g., the Nicolas Cage movie The Family Man or the Vin Diesel “extreme sports” action vehicle XxX on the big screen: Not because I was convinced by the elaborate marketing campaigns or the draw of the stars involved, but because, more or less, they were there, and I had nothing better to do.

What changed? There are many answers, but probably the most prominent is “smartphones.” Maybe more than any other sphere of human activity, “wasting time” has been utterly disrupted by smartphones and the app ecosystems built on top of them. Businesses that used to specialize in helping people kill time have come under existential threat¹ thanks to group chats, Candy Crush, Tower Defense, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. It’s much cheaper and more convenient to scroll listlessly on one’s phone for two hours on the couch than it is to buy a ticket and sit in a theater. You might still go out to see a movie because you’ve heard it’s good, or because you like the stars or find the subject matter intriguing.² But “because it’s there” is no longer a particularly good reason to see a movie when there are apps that are even more there.

This isn’t really what the Harper’s piece is about. Bessner’s subject is mostly the future of Hollywood writers, who won a precedent-setting contract settlement following last year’s writers’ strike, only to find themselves among the victims of what one executive calls a “deep and existential crisis”:

Currently, the machine is sputtering, running on fumes. According to research by Bloomberg, in 2013 the largest companies in film and television were more than $20 billion in the black; by 2022, that number had fallen by roughly half. […] The industry as a whole is now facing a broad contraction. Between August 2022 and the end of last year, employment fell by 26 percent—more than one job gone in every four. [… W]ithout radical intervention, whether by the government or the workers, the industry will become unrecognizable. And the writing trade—the kind where one actually earns a living—will be obliterated.

As a member of the W.G.A., I’m still optimistic about the contract we signed last year--both the present gains it secured, and the future gains that can built on top of it. But the scene is bad out there for screenwriters (especially television writers) right now. Almost no one I know has work; most people’s agents and managers have more or less told them there won’t be jobs until 2025. An executive recently told a friend that the only things getting made this year are “ultra premium limiteds,” which sounds like a kind of tampon but actually just means “six-episode miniseries that an A-List star wants to do.”

“Profit will of course find a way,” Bessner allows, and “there will always be shit to watch.” I mostly agree with that. But what shit, and made by whom? Any diagnosis of the crisis--and any sense of a path forward--needs to address the fact that the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it,³ have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on the free or barely compensated labor product of people acting as de facto writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew. Even if they’d never see it this way, YouTubers and TikTokers are effectively competing with Hollywood over the idle hours of consumers everywhere; more to the point, they’re doing what any non-union workforce does in an insufficiently organized industry: driving down labor compensation.

I recognize that this framework does not capture in all of its fullness the many reasons that people might consume movies, or TV, or YouTube videos; TikTok videos of Spongebob-themed raps, popular though they may be, don’t necessarily cut into the market for classic cinema. But in practice it seems hard to argue that the social-video app industry is not in competition with Hollywood. Imagine you were a union carpenter who made a decent living working on extremely expensive apartment buildings, only to learn that in the same town a bunch of people, none of whom were unionized, most of whom thought of what they were doing as a kind of hobby, had started making, on spec, super cheap, passably safe, room-sized structures that could serve as apartments in a pinch. You might think: Someone should probably do something about that!⁴

But what? At the end of Bessner’s piece, he suggests that, in order to head off the looming professional crisis, writers should “demand to own complete copyright for the stories they create.” I’m not sure I quite understand why that in particular strikes him as a solution (neither, it seems, do most of his sources), but I appreciate that he’s thinking big; in the same spirit, let me propose another course of action: organizing YouTube.

I recognize that this sounds a bit insane, but we’re taking big swings here, and the logic is pretty straightforward. If YouTube is effectively a non-union employer in the motion-picture industry,⁵ then the best way to relieve the downward pressure it places on the wages and conditions of unionized employees elsewhere in the industry is, simply, “organize it.” As a unionized screenwriter, I have self-interest here, but YouTubers’ lack of collective bargaining power isn’t just bad for me and other guild members; it’s bad for the YouTubers themselves. Ask any professional or semi-professional streamer what they think of the platform and you’ll hear a litany of complaints about its opacity and inconsistency; these complaints are what led the giant German metalworkers’ union IG Metall to lay some organizing groundwork with YouTubers as “FairTube,” though the organizing effort seems to have fizzled a bit in the past few years. A well-organized YouTuber guild or union could negotiate a fairer settlement, one that could both clarify and stabilize YouTube’s compensation structures and shore up Hollywood wages.⁶

It would not be an easy task to organize YouTubers, or any group of streamers, for reasons both practical and cultural. But the alternative is to allow an effective reduction in union density across the time-wasting industry, the start of a slow and grinding process by which labor protections are whittled away. We’ve already lost Summer Catch; let’s not lose everything else.

You wouldn’t survive in the asylum that raised Will Stancil

I enjoyed reading David Klion’s recent New York magazine profile of Will Stancil, a progressive lawyer running for a seat in the Minnesota State House of Representatives who also happens to be frequent “main character” on Twitter. Stancil’s claim to fame is his willingness to argue, at staggering length, against all comers, and without ever ceding an inch of ground, in favor of propositions like “race science is fake” and “the economy is good, actually.” As Klion explains:

[In] December 2023… Stancil dominated a swath of Twitter’s attention by fervently insisting that the U.S. economy was doing well under Joe Biden and that anyone arguing otherwise from the left was mendacious. […] Stancil was hardly the only person on Twitter making Pollyannaish arguments about Bidenomics this past year, but he distinguished himself both by his tone and by his stubborn refusal to back down against his many, many critics. By my rough count, Stancil tweeted about the economy around 150 times in December alone, or about five times a day. “Hilarious watching leftists producing these long threads of graphs to try to explain why the economy is bad, actually. They are acutely ideologically and psychologically dependent on the idea that things are terrible, must be terrible, must always be terrible,” he tweeted on December 1. “Also, again: ECONOMIC SENTIMENT IS NOT A DIRECT REFLECTION OF LIVED EXPERIENCE. Everyone assumes that people think the economy is bad because THEY’RE miserable. But it’s because they’re hearing OTHER PEOPLE are miserable! It’s a belief, contingent on information and persuasion,” he tweeted on December 5. My personal favorite, on December 13: “For the crime of pointing out the economy looks very strong, I was already getting pummeled by cosplay Twitter communists. Thanks to Nate Silver’s entry into the debate, I’m now being swarmed by the right-wing anti-vax types who love him. This must be how Poland felt in 1939.” I could go on, but these give a sense of how Stancil uses Twitter: persistently, repetitively, hyperbolically, and sometimes in all caps.

The main question people always have about Stancil is: Who is this guy, and why is he like this? But Stancil is not (necessarily) insane; in fact, as he tells Klion, has a fairly rational theory of Twitter: It’s a tool for attracting elite attention, which he can use to effect change; the more annoying he is, the more attention he attracts. I happen to agree with this theory, at least in the broad strokes, and though I do indeed find Stancil annoying I also admire his dogged commitment to the bit.

But where did Stancil develop this theory of being annoying as a means of political change? Where did he acquire the strong constitution and discursive stamina necessary to argue endlessly online? The profile omitted what has always been to me the true origin story of Stancil’s remarkable doggedness, the birthplace of his unique constitution, his distinct ability to drive people insane, his perseverance in the face of embarrassment, pile-ons, and incandescent online rage: SomethingAwful.

As the above screenshot reveals, Stancil was once a poster on the infamous message board SomethingAwful (specifically, on its politics subforum LF). For many of us, this admission was a sort of the-end-of-Fight-Club realization; a moment when everything just clicked. No wonder Stancil is like that.

SomethingAwful, as I’ve written before, was notorious for its combative culture, in which overconfident I.T. professionals would argue for weeks with lean-addicted community-college dropouts about the gold standard or the Khmer Rouge or home-renovation projects, both sides incredibly annoying, unyielding, and utterly indefatigable, some arguments spilling out across multiple threads for multiple years. If you are looking for the reason a guy thinks he can post his way through any fight (and into power and influence), the explanation for a particular kind of blank obstinacy, “he was raised on SomethingAwful” is more than sufficient. And while I don’t always agree with him, there is something distinctly beautiful about anime-avatar guys and other notoriously annoying Twitter types picking fights with Stancil thinking he’s just some progressive-lawyer dipshit and not an unstoppable disputatious freak, trained in some of the stupidest, toughest forum territory yet developed.

The most influential man on the internet

1. Did you know that people used to buy stacks of magazines before long flights? Did you know that, as recently as the 2000s, if were early to meet someone at a bar in any large city in the U.S., you could pick up a free copy of the local alt-weekly, right there in the bar? Did you know that people actually used to buy books?

2. A clear factor in studios pushing “cinematic universes” on audiences through the 2010s was the desire to create “appointment movies.” In a loose sense these cinematic universes were the Hollywood equivalent of newsmedia publishers turning to subscriptions as a means of capturing their audiences as recurring revenue sources.

3. I want to be clear here that the smartphone, in its capacity as a new distribution technology, is not to blame for the crisis in Hollywood. After all, you can watch movies and TV on your phone, and the industry has survived and thrived through multiple major developments in distribution, from the invention of television to the invention of the VCR. (All of those developments, as the media historian Miranda Banks tells Bessner, accompanied by militant labor action by Hollywood unions to ensure they were fairly compensated the new source of profits.) The internet, the smartphone, video-compression algorithms, and so on are not in and of themselves the reason that “the top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically,” as one producer puts it. It’s a bad intellectual habit to naturalize economic or technological change as “inevitable,” and Bessner identifies the roots of the present crisis in policy, monetary, and business decisions made by human beings inside and outside Hollywood--deregulation, conglomeration, ZIRP, and some notably bad strategic calls by industry leadership--rather than the supposedly inescapable march of technological progress.

4. Both this column and Bessner’s article are operating from the assumption that fairly compensating writers to create wildly profitable entertainment is “a good thing,” but to a certain kind of person, the crisis facing Hollywood not a “problem” anyway so much as a solution--the market at work on multiple levels, directly assaulting inefficiencies like intellectual ambition and production values, which are standing in the way of giving people what they really want, which is, I guess, MrBeast, nonstop. I’m not sure I’d commit myself strongly to the position that Summer Catch is culturally or aesthetically preferable to any given MrBeast video, personally, but I am skeptical about the concept of “revealed preference,” and I have my own romantic ideas about the value of professional cinema and the importance of moviemaking as an institutional practice (in addition to my obvious self interest).

5. YouTube has dedicated a great deal of time and energy establishing itself in the collective understanding as a “platform” that just happens to connect creators with advertisers, “users,” but Julia Carrie Wong has argued compellingly that the company is best thought of as “Uber for broadcasting,” which is to say an employer extremely invested in a set of legal fictions denying its identity as such. (Relatedly, as Wong herself has pointed out, YouTube’s “Uber for broadcasting” model enables not just labor but regulatory arbitrage, allowing YouTubers to shirk Hollywood’s strong if imperfect child-labor protections.)

6. And, look, I don’t want to make this a strong part of the argument, but I suspect that such a settlement would have positive knock-on cultural and aesthetic effects as well; an organized YouTube where creators have a semblance of income stability and platform transparency (and where the YouTubers themselves control the flow of creator labor into the platform) is likely one with less lowest-common-denominator algorithm-chasing trash.