This year will long be remembered as the year of the Hollywood union strikes. On May 2, more than 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike, and two months later they were joined by some 160,000 actors, represented by the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). They made history, striking together for the first time in 63 years.
Both unions have been facing off against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents studios including Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery. In general terms, the unions want better compensation and working conditions, and many of their proposals revolve around the effects of streaming and artificial intelligence on the entertainment industry.
The months since both strikes began have been long: After meeting in August with no resolution, the WGA and AMPTP resumed talks last Wednesday, joined by a group of top studio CEOs. After five days of negotiations, on Sunday the WGA and the AMPTP reached a tentative agreement—in the words of the WGA negotiating committee, an “exceptional” deal, “with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership.” Though WGA picketing is now suspended, the deal does not immediately end the strike—the new three-year agreement is yet to be ratified by union members—and writers are not to return to work until specifically authorized to do so.
Negotiations between the studios and SAG-AFTRA, on the other hand, are yet to resume. As a result, awards shows (like the Emmys) and highly anticipated movie premieres (like Denis Villeneuve’s second installment of Dune) have been postponed; but most important, with a few exceptions, tens of thousands of people have been put out of work and are now facing financial hardship.
The stop in film and television production has perhaps been especially hard on industry workers watching strike developments from the sidelines. Just as much as actors and writers, set designers and builders, hair and makeup artists, costume designers, production assistants, camera operators, and technicians are indispensable in the entertainment industry, though often overlooked. Motion Picture Television Fund president and CEO Bob Beitcher referred to below-the-line crews as the “forgotten casualties” of the strikes in an open letter calling for their financial aid. He also said crew members are the “backbone” of the industry—and he’s not wrong.
Unionized crew members are not on strike. In 2021, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) negotiated for about five months with the AMPTP before reaching an agreement, avoiding the first national strike in the union’s 128-year history. (The next round of contract talks will likely occur in the spring or summer of next year, as the union’s basic agreement expires July 31.) But until the actors and studios can reach a fair deal, all that the crews can do is wait.
Every crew member interviewed for this story reiterated to me more than once that they support the strikes and were in complete solidarity with the actors and writers. But as Marissa Shoemaker, a nonbinary camera assistant from Oklahoma City, describes it, the situation has been “chaos.” “It’s just torturous,” they say. “I haven’t worked most of this year, minus two months, and it’s been really, really hard. Your life starts to feel empty because you’re not providing for yourself anymore.”
“People are losing their houses,” says Mitchell Jarrett, a New Orleans–based location scout and manager. “I don’t think we have a way to help out, and it’s frustrating.”
Clara DeWeese is a photographer as well as a set dresser for Paramount’s neo-Western drama Yellowstone. She lives in Butte, Montana, and speaks for herself and other crew members around the country when she says, “We’ve just been holding on, kind of being strung along, since May. We’re hurting really bad. Even before the strikes, the volatility of the industry does not consider the labor at all.” Her unemployment benefits ran out in April.
“Nobody was prepared for this,” Shoemaker says. “We don’t make enough money as it is to have huge savings just lying around, especially people who live in more expensive cities.” Shoemaker tells me they’ve never been in a financial situation this terrible. “I don’t know why the hell I worked my ass off for a decade to be just as broke as I was when I was in college. All my momentum that I worked hard for is gone. Same with everybody else, and it’s disheartening.” Shoemaker, Jarrett, and DeWeese are all members of IATSE. None of them have dependents, so crew members with children or other family to take care of are probably even worse off.
Jarrett, 42, is also a member of the Teamsters union. Originally from Georgia, he’s been in the business for around eight years. More than a decade ago, he and his brother made an independent film called The Taiwan Oyster (2012), which premiered at South by Southwest. After years of dipping in and out of the industry, he finally committed to it full-time in 2015, leaving behind the restaurant business, where he was a manager and, at one point, a restaurant owner. This year, “work definitely slowed down. There has been next to nothing here [in New Orleans] all year long. Nothing.” Jarrett was lucky enough to work on a show in Texas for a month, but left that job early to return for the final season of another show he’s part of. But then the writers’ strike started. “I don’t think there’s any chance we’ll try to shoot anything before the end of the year,” he says. Jarrett recognizes that he’s fortunate: He worked a lot last year (it was “brutal”), and had planned to take some time off this year to relish Mardi Gras, which he hadn’t been able to for some time. “But I wasn’t planning on anything like this,” he says. He’s working on a commercial right now, which he’s thankful for, but commercials are “just not that much work, and it’s not enough to go around for everybody.”
Shortly after the writers’ strike started, DeWeese, 30, got a job for a couple of weeks on a movie that was permitted to shoot because its script had already been finalized. It’s the only film or TV industry job she’s had this year, and it helped her maintain some of her union benefits. “But I didn’t get paid for that job for two months because they ran out of money the last two weeks of production,” DeWeese says. She’s still upset about it. “Two months—after I haven’t worked all year! They still haven’t paid some people I know. It’s inexcusable.” Amid the strikes, DeWeese has decided to apply to graduate school; she wants to get a university professorship and teach photography. Although she’s very much enjoyed working as a set dresser (“I never had a job I liked before this. It’s the coolest job ever”), “filmmaking isn’t my ultimate passion” she acknowledges. And that’s to say nothing of its strains: “Relationships are hard to maintain, whether it’s romantic or familial. It’s a really volatile industry.”
Before the shutdowns, Shoemaker, 29, was working on a nonunion television show. The job was supposed to be two months long, but halfway through, the writers’ strike started. When, weeks later, the show got a waiver and resumed shooting, Shoemaker was not rehired. “When the show was shut down, they lost so much money that they couldn’t even bring me back,” she says. Since then, Shoemaker has done a few nonunion jobs that lasted a couple of days at a time, “but it’s just not enough to make ends meet.” They’re receiving unemployment benefits, but, they say, “just keeping your head above water and trying to maintain a good level of mental health is hard.”
After all, it wasn’t so long ago that many of these same crews had to stop work due to the pandemic. “We haven’t even really filled the coffers back from that,” Jarrett says. And besides, the entire world was going through some version of the same thing with COVID; this time around, the cease in work is specific to the film industry. It feels lonelier, and it’s definitely been going on for longer. In 2020, film and TV productions halted in mid-March and started picking back up again (albeit with new health protocols in place) in June.
DeWeese says she started hearing murmurs about potential strikes back in March, but according to Jarrett, studios were slow-walking projects “in anticipation” of the strikes as early as January. That, combined with an annual industry slowdown that begins around Thanksgiving and continues through December and into the new year, means Jarrett knows people in New Orleans who “literally have not worked a film job since November of last year.”
So even if SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP reach a tentative deal today, no big jobs are likely to start up in November or December, as Jarrett tells it. “They might prep,” he says, “but they’re not gonna start until January, February at the extreme earliest.” And if the actors’ strike is settled in January? Jarrett predicts people who work exclusively on set—camera operators, for instance—won’t get back to work until February, March, or even April. “I don’t really see the end in sight.”
To the people thinking that, in the meanwhile, crew members should just find different jobs, many are trying—but it’s not that simple. “Working on a crew, you have a very specific skill set that doesn’t really apply to 90% of the rest of the business world,” Jarrett says. What they do is also hard to communicate on paper. “Our résumés don’t even look the same. Here, you work a job for three months and that’s success,” he continues. For crew members who have worked in the business all their lives, or invested in film school, it can be hard to get their foot in the door elsewhere.
So what are the alternatives? “You go to Uber, Lyft, or go back into the restaurant industry,” Jarrett says. “There are very limited options and a lot of people are having to switch careers and find whatever they can do because they’ve got families.” (Last month, Rolling Stone published a story about crew members opting to work in retail.)
DeWeese tells me that she knows of crew members getting other jobs, and that she probably should too, but the minimum wage in the town she lives in is so low she’d rather cut into her savings and be frugal. There’s also the fact that “the second my job comes back, I’m going to my job—and most [employers] want people to stick around.” So while she waits, DeWeese has been dog-sitting, picking up the odd photo jobs, and working on a photography book to try to pay the bills. “But it’s getting dire. It’s just really stressful, more than anything, not having structure after nearly a year,” she says.
There’s also the option of doing nonunion film/TV work, but those jobs play by different rules. “Seventeen- to 20-hour days, five to seven days a week, and you don’t get health benefits,” DeWeese says. “I’ll take pretty much any union job, but when it comes to nonunion gigs, I’m pretty careful. I don’t want to be taken advantage of.”
Once the strikes are over, the actors’ and writers’ unions will presumably see some benefit from their renegotiated contracts—as they should. But, as Jarrett puts it, “it is sort of painful when we’re kind of losing out the most, and we don’t have any control, and we gain nothing.”
“I do feel like the people who [the strikes] affected the most don’t have a voice,” Shoemaker adds.
Many crew members are at risk of losing their health-care coverage, if they haven’t lost it already, as they fail to meet the necessary work hours to qualify for benefits in their union-based health-care system. Additionally, when crew members “aren’t working for a long period of time like this, a lot of people are not going to have enough money in their benefits account to pay for their health insurance,” Jarrett says. “In many cases, that’s going to mean their family’s health insurance.”
In mid-September, the Union Solidarity Coalition (TUSC), a nonprofit founded by writers and directors, started a charity auction in collaboration with celebrities to offer direct financial support to crew members who have lost their health insurance due to the strikes. In a written statement made in July, Matthew D. Loeb, international president of IATSE, referenced the issue of health insurance head-on: “Make no mistake—if the studios truly cared about the economic fallout of their preemptive work slowdown against below-the-line crew members, they could continue to pay crew members and fully fund their health care at any moment, as they did in 2020 during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Days after our interview, Jarrett emailed me with additional thoughts on the state of the entertainment industry—and modern labor more generally. “I feel like there’s always been a silent notion that capitalism has an inherent sense of morality to somehow, miraculously, keep it in check. Unfortunately, we are more and more frequently forced to face the reality that there is no such check,” he wrote. “Unions are the working class’s last defense against the unbridled power of runaway capitalism—they would not exist if people were inherently treated fairly. Every one of these companies has plenty of money to treat their workers more fairly but they don’t have to, so they don’t. That is the direct result of a ‘successful company’ being based purely on how much money it makes for those at the top, with no regard for the ones at the bottom doing the heavy lifting. The film unions are just another example.”
Another union member of IATSE, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me they have a hard time understanding the leverage SAG-AFTRA (and the WGA, before they reached an agreement) feels it has over the AMPTP. “Obviously, they strike, and there’s less product available, but it’s such a delayed leverage—it’s not like the typical Starbucks workers striking and Starbucks can’t make money. [Studios] have years’ worth of stuff in the catalogs that they can slowly roll out.” (This, of course, excludes live shows like Saturday Night Live and other late-night programs.) It’s this lack of leverage, at least in part, that has allowed the strikes to go on for so long.
But they did have a suggestion: “If there were to be some organized effort, worldwide, to cancel a [streaming service] subscription, let’s say Netflix as an example, for just one month to prove a point.” With a strong promotion campaign, plus the media attention it would gather, the action would send a clear message and be “such an easy way for the whole world, anybody that cares, to get involved with the protest.” As things are, the strikes haven’t lacked for public support.“It’s just that nobody knows how to help because the studios have that much more money that they can literally wait it out.” Of the strikes, this crew person adds: “Any company that has almost $5 billion in profits, I think, should be able to pay anybody that’s working there a little bit more money.” (Last year, Netflix reportedly had a total net income of nearly $4.5 billion.)
DeWeese expressed deep frustration with studio executives, especially when it came to their comments about the strikes. In an interview in July, Disney CEO Bob Iger said actors and writers weren’t being “realistic” with their demands. (Disney recently extended Iger’s contract through 2026, and raised his annual target bonus to “$5 million, making his target annual compensation $31 million, dependent on performance and share price,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.) That same month, a Deadline report claimed that the AMPTP wanted the WGA to “bleed out,” and that, according to a studio executive, the “endgame” was “to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
“They’re on a different planet,” DeWeese says. “They want nothing to do with, and don’t want any dialogue with, any of the peasants. They don’t ever have to engage with anybody who is not a billionaire, and they’re not willing to sacrifice 1% of their income to put food on our tables. It’s remarkable and confusing and tragic.”
Shoemaker tells me that the reports in July made them and their peers “feel devalued. Like all the work, time, and energy was for nothing. The general public needs to know how slimy these people are. They do not care if we live or die, and we make their money for them—I think that’s disgusting.”
Shoemaker goes on to say that “the strike is not about inflation, it is not about streaming, it is about greed. These people do nothing. They make phone calls and they sit at their desks all day and they take all of the money that we spend hours and hours on, and that we sacrifice parts of our lives for. They do interviews from their own private yachts saying that we’re asking for too much—and it’s complete bullshit.”
Shoemaker, Jarrett, and DeWeese all brighten up during their interviews when I ask what they like the most about their jobs, what they miss. Shoemaker went to film school in Arkansas. They originally wanted to be a writer (“I have realized the irony of that”) and showrunner. “I wanted to tell stories,” they tell me. “Then I realized how much I actually enjoyed the big picture—and I don’t have anything interesting to say.” So Shoemaker thought, let me help tell all these great stories that do have something interesting to say.
As a second camera technician, Shoemaker gets the camera ready and makes sure that everything is working properly. They also mark actors’ positions so they know where to stand, and at times work as a liaison between departments. “I can’t imagine myself doing anything else,” Shoemaker says. “It is so technical and there’s so much information, and I love picking apart the pieces and finding out solutions to problems.”
Jarrett likes “all the different parts of the brain” that his job works. “Location scouting is sort of the artsy side, where you’re kind of creative and you’re finding cool places to shoot the right scenes, but then it kind of shifts into logistics and it’s more like producing.”
What makes Jarrett’s job even more interesting is working with a close-knit crew made up of great people. “It’s really fun. It’s a good team effort, and it feels important,” he says. “The last few projects I’ve done have been with really solid teams. Thank God, because it just makes it a lot easier to endure the hours that we work.”
DeWeese believes working in set decoration is the best job in the business: “The best people work in the field. It’s a lot of creatives. Depending on the decorator you work for, you get some agency to make the set look nice, and it’s really rewarding.” She describes it as interior decorating, essentially, with occasional exterior work. I ask DeWeese what she misses the most about working on Yellowstone. Like Jarrett, she mentions the camaraderie. “There are people who I’ve been running into in different departments since 2018, so it really feels like a family,” she says. “There’s something different about television because you end up reuniting, often every year. It’s kind of like camp. You get to build relationships with people from all over the country and learn what they’re doing. They’re brilliant.”
It’s certainly a vocation worth fighting for, and DeWeese hopes the strikes have “a grander effect on other industries where people are being exploited. This is the most publicized industry in the country, if not the world.”
Writers have been on strike for 147 days, and actors for 74. Shoemaker says that one of the reasons writers and actors have been striking is to improve the system for the next generation—and Shoemaker hopes to make that happen right along with them. “When I was trained, I was treated like absolute garbage. Now I try to do everything I can to treat people well who are coming up, because I want it to change. All of the good ones are doing that.
“We’re going to win this,” Shoemaker continues. “There’s more of us than them, and they need us way more than we need them. It’s going to be really gruesome and horrible, and it’s going to take a long time. Maybe we’re not even going to live to see it. But I do think that we’re going to win. Whether in this lifetime or the next, we’ll win.”