Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article …
The post Struggle for Power and Control in Sudan May Lead to Civil War appeared first on Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article …
The post A Road Paved with Irritations: Macron’s Strategic Third Way appeared first on Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article …
The post How the “Woke Left” Is Destroying Education appeared first on Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article …
The post Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: To Heal the Great Divide appeared first on Global Research.
A writers’ strike would be WGA’s first since the three-month strike of 2007. (David McNew / Getty Images)
Last week, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav was asked about the possibility that the more than eleven thousand television and feature writers in the Writers Guild of America (WGA) West and WGA East may go on strike when their three-year contract expires on May 1.
Zaslav, who was paid $246.6 million in 2021, expressed hope that “we can get through this in a way that’s fair to all parties.” “For this industry to succeed, everybody needs to feel fully valued,” he added. “Our objective would be that everybody gets fairly compensated for work they do.”
Hollywood’s writers, who don’t make nearly a quarter of a billion dollars per year, do not currently feel fairly compensated for their work. The workers have just overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike if their leadership does not reach a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP) by May 1; 97.85 percent of ballots cast were in favor of authorizing a strike, with a record 79 percent of eligible members turning out to vote.
“Our membership has spoken,” the unions’ negotiating committee said in an email to members. “You have expressed your collective strength, solidarity, and the demand for meaningful change in overwhelming numbers.”
While a strike authorization vote does not necessarily mean a strike will follow — members nearly unanimously authorized a strike in 2017, too, but reached a tentative agreement in time to avoid a work stoppage — many in the industry are predicting the first writers’ strike since 2007, when WGA members walked picket lines for one hundred days.
Despite a downtick over the past two years, profitability for the AMPTP’s members — in addition to Zaslav’s company, the group includes Amazon, Apple, CBS, Disney, NBCU, Netflix, Paramount Global, and Sony — has consistently gone up in recent decades. But as the pandemic accelerated the shift to streaming, which now accounts for the majority of writing work in the industry, writers haven’t shared in the prosperity. A March WGA report finds that writer pay has declined 4 percent over the past decade (23 percent when adjusted for inflation), and 49 percent of television-series writers are compensated at the contract minimum, compared to 33 percent in 2013.
While writers won a toehold in streaming thanks to the 2007 strike, they say the streaming-first model has led to shrinking residuals (pay for the reuse of their work in, say, television reruns or DVDs) and the abuse of “mini-rooms,” smaller writers’ rooms consisting of a showrunner and a few writers developing a script, which also serve as a loophole around pay minimums. Mini-rooms in particular have transformed a once stable job into a gig-like, understaffed nightmare. Streaming’s shorter seasons and longer production times for each episode — a problem for writers paid per episode rather than by the day — mean a raw deal, one that WGA members say does not add up to a full-time living.
In a message to members, the WGA said the AMPTP has pushed for “rollbacks designed to offset any gains” in contract negotiations. “In short, the studios have shown no sign that they intend to address the problems our members are determined to fix.” (The AMPTP has denied that claim.) In another message, the union argued that “the survival of writing as a profession is at stake in this negotiation.”
Irving Thalberg, the early Hollywood “Boy Wonder” superproducer who helped build MGM Studios into a powerhouse alongside Louis B. Mayer, once said, “If it isn’t for the writing, we’ve got nothing. Writers are the most important people in Hollywood — and we must never let them know it.”
His boss, Mayer, was one of the original Tinseltown executives with an outsize personality, as adept at spinning a yarn to his studio’s contract players as to moviegoing audiences. Famously, in March 1933, Mayer used a weeklong bank holiday declared by Franklin D. Roosevelt to pull off one of his greatest gambits: getting his employees to accept a 50 percent pay cut.
After gathering the talent in the studio’s biggest screening room, Mayer warned the workers that every studio was on the brink of shutting down, and only the voluntary pay cut for those making more than $50 a week could save MGM from such a fate.
Some of the assembled group expressed skepticism about the pay cut’s necessity, but actor Lionel Barrymore stepped forward and announced that he would accept the loss in wages. The others should too, he argued, “for the good of MGM, of Hollywood, and of the country.” He succeeded in swaying the group, which eventually agreed (though character actor Wallace Beery walked out of the meeting after asking “L. B.” Mayer if he would take the pay cut too, to which his boss replied, “Well, no”). Though Mayer promised to pay them back, he never did.
At least according to some tellings of the story, Samuel Marx, a young story editor who would go on to become a Hollywood legend in his own right, followed Mayer and another executive after the meeting adjourned. He overheard the studio boss turn to his colleague and ask with delight, “How did I do it?”
As it turned out, executives from all the major studios had decided to use the financial crisis to lower pay rates, and Mayer’s pleas were just the latest con in an industry built on them. The workers realized that, had they been unionized like their “below-the-line” colleagues (workers who aren’t actors, directors, or writers) in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), they wouldn’t have been suckered into such a deal.
The development added urgency to an idea that had begun forming the previous month, when more than fifty screenwriters met at the Knickerbocker Hotel to revive the then dormant Screen Writers’ Guild. On April 6, the new, reorganized guild was born.
Much has changed since the WGA’s founding, but film executives’ unwillingness to share their wealth with writers has not. The hostility for this particular subset of their workers, the ones who Thalberg saw as the industry’s foundation, has made the WGA the Hollywood union most likely to strike. Judging by the union’s authorization vote, a new writers’ strike may soon be upon us.
In addition to standard issues like higher minimum compensation and increased contributions to health care and retirement funds, writers’ priorities include standardizing residuals for feature writers regardless of whether their work is released in theaters or on streaming, curbing the use of the much-hated mini-rooms, applying contract minimums to comedy-variety shows made for new media, and addressing the issue of artificial intelligence.
“Studios have been getting away with murder and they know it. I think that the money is still there,” said Ashley Lyle, a writer on Yellowjackets, in a message to WGA members. As David Goodman, a cochair of the WGA negotiating committee, told the New York Times, “the streaming model has created an environment where there’s been enormous downward pressure on writer income across the board.”
Operating profits in 2021 at the biggest entertainment media companies in 2021 were about $28 billion, a slight decrease from pre-pandemic profit levels. But in a March report on the state of the industry, the WGA emphasized employers’ investments in streaming services, mergers, and billions of dollars in stock buybacks.
“Over the past decade, while our employers have increased their profits by tens of billions, they have embraced business practices that have slashed our compensation and residuals and undermined our working conditions,” said the WGA in an email to members ahead of the strike authorization vote. “We’ve met and talked with thousands of you about our bargaining agenda and heard loud and clear that this negotiation can’t be business as usual. The compensation increases and protections we’re demanding are designed to restore what has been taken away from writers.”
During the 2007 strike, studios leaned heavily on reality television, an “unscripted” alternative — though, in truth, even these shows have some level of scripting, and there have been efforts to organize this work as well — accelerating its growth into a now ubiquitous form of entertainment. (It is impossible not to mention that Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the strike.) That reality and other forms of unscripted television is now a massive chunk of television programming undoubtedly poses a problem for writers’ leverage.
Viewers will likely see late-night talk shows — first nightly shows, then when the scripts run out, Saturday Night Live — go dark first. Soap operas would run out of episodes in about a month, and scripted series might delay their fall premiere dates. The Hollywood Reporter has noted that networks and streamers are “offering more early renewals than usual, stockpiling unscripted series, emphasizing more animated shows (many of which are not WGA-affiliated), and looking to their own libraries to fill airtime.”
As for movies, the effects of a strike wouldn’t be felt immediately. Films that premiere this year have already been shot, so the impact would be in 2024 (and one can imagine films going into production with scripts that could’ve used a bit more work).
According to Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation during the 2007 writers’ strike, that work stoppage cost $772 million in lost wages for writers and production workers and a total of roughly $3 billion to the city’s economy (a number that, as Mary McNamara at the Los Angeles Times notes, is around $4.5 billion in today’s dollars). For an industry that just underwent a pandemic-induced slowdown, the stakes of another interruption could not be higher.
The Directors Guild of America (DGA) is set to begin negotiations with the AMPTP on May 10; their contract expires on June 30, as does the contract of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which has not yet set an initial bargaining date. The industry has long considered the DGA the easiest above-the-line union with which to negotiate, and sore feelings persist among writers over the directors taking an agreement during their 2007 strike; that the DGA did not begin negotiating before the WGA contract expires suggests that Hollywood’s unions might at last be presenting a more united front.
Hollywood star Jamie Foxx is reportedly experiencing a steady recovery following a “medical complication” reported by his daughter Corinne Foxx earlier last week. The 55-year-old actor, who has been in the entertainment business for over two decades, is currently in a Georgia medical facility undergoing additional testing as doctors try to determine what caused his medical scare last week, as reported by CNN.
The incident occurred on Tuesday, April 13, and Corinne first announced the news on Wednesday. In a statement to fans on behalf of the Foxx family, she wrote: “We wanted to share that my father, Jamie Foxx, experienced a medical complication yesterday. Luckily, due to quick action and great care, he is already on his way to recovery. We know how beloved he is and appreciate your prayers. The family asks for privacy during this time.”
Jamie Foxx is a well-known actor, musician, and comedian who has starred in numerous films, including Ray, Django Unchained, and Baby Driver. He has also released several albums, including his debut album Peep This, in 1994. Foxx was recently seen filming his latest movie, Netflix’s Back in Action, on April 10.
The cause of Foxx’s medical complication is still unknown, but according to People.com, the actor is responding well to treatment and is expected to fully recover. Supporters have been sending their well-wishes and prayers for a speedy recovery, and it is expected that Foxx will soon be able to return to filming.
Nicholas Hoult and Nicolas Cage star in Renfield. (Universal Pictures)
Renfield, a comedic spin-off of sorts of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, focuses not on the count himself but his frazzled, long-suffering servant played by Nicholas Hoult (The Great, The Favourite). Here, Hoult’s lowly Renfield has finally had enough of his toxic work under his boss Dracula (Nicolas Cage) and has even started attending group therapy sessions to deal with his codependency issues. Applying wimpy therapy jargon to the satanic blood-feasting dominance of the world’s most ruthless vampire generates a number of very funny scenes, and both lead actors bring their all to their roles.
It’s no surprise that Cage, reveling in the bleeding edge of performance style that goes way back to his early roles in films like Birdy (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Moonstruck (1987), and Vampire’s Kiss (1989), makes an enthusiastically campy meal of playing the Dark One. Decked out in his cape, top hat, cane, and ornate jewelry, he swanks into rooms full of dull, scared, dressed-down contemporary Americans and stuns them all with his aristocratic grandiosity and mesmerizing way of chewing on full sentences as he speaks them. That’s before his eyes turn red and he bares his fangs and goes “full Cage” on the gonzo line, “L-l-l-let’s eat!”
Cage has also made it clear he’s got a big thirst to play the role again, so this movie counts as something of an audition for future work.
As for Hoult in Renfield’s title role, he’s been a gem of an actor since childhood, holding his own opposite Hugh Grant, Rachel Weisz, and Toni Collette in About a Boy (2002), a romantic comedy. He really ought to be a bigger star by now. He’s handsome and effortlessly charming with wicked comic timing, and he can play drama beautifully as well. He’s got it all, including a major role in Robert Eggers’s upcoming remake of Nosferatu, in which he plays Thomas Hutter. (That’s the Jonathan Harker character in the Bram Stoker novel Dracula. It was changed to Thomas Hutter in F. W. Murnau’s legendary unauthorized 1922 adaptation, Nosferatu, in order to avoid copyright infringement.) Hutter’s the hapless solicitor who goes to Dracula’s castle to close the deal on a nice piece of property in London, which will unfortunately place Dracula’s new home quite near to Hutter’s own, where his wife lives, a romantic-looking young woman whose “lovely neck” Dracula admires.
To further complicate the tangle of adaptations, in Renfield there’s a great black-and-white sequence showing us how R. M. Renfield was first recruited by Dracula back in the nineteenth century. It’s essentially footage from the old Bela Lugosi Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning, but with the faces of Cage and Hoult digitally transferred onto those of Dracula/Bela Lugosi and Renfield/Dwight Frye. In the 1931 film, it’s Renfield who goes to Dracula’s castle to close the deal, rather than Harker. Renfield escapes as a weak partial vampire and a raving lunatic, soon committed to an asylum where he lives on the blood of insects, raves about the coming of Dracula, and awaits further orders from his boss.
These early scenes are the best in the movie, though Renfield returns to form again at the very end as soon as Renfield returns to group therapy. It’s the broad middle that sags with too-damn-much plot and tiresome business, and perhaps that’s one reason why the film is doing badly with the same ticket-buying public that’s racing out to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie instead.
There’s a lot of guff about a zealous cop named Rebecca (Awkwafina) who’s trying to bring down the Lobo crime family in corrupt New Orleans, a crime family led by the bumbling son Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) of a formidable old-world mother Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Rebecca’s incorruptible policeman father was murdered by the Lobos, and this traumatic event has estranged Rebecca from her sister Kate (Camille Chen) while . . .
You see what I mean? Blah blah blah, who cares? There had to be some better way to get Awkwafina and Nicholas Hoult together as an odd couple fighting Dracula shoulder-to-shoulder, but sadly screenwriter Ryan Ridley and director Chris McKay (Robot Chicken, The Lego Batman Movie) couldn’t think of it.
Given this sinking under narrative weight, the action scenes are a welcome relief. They’re cartoonishly gory, and generally played for comedy. This Renfield isn’t a gibbering weakling as in the 1931 Dracula. He gets supernatural strength from eating bugs and thinks nothing of beheading somebody with a bar tray or ripping off their arms and using them as weapons to beat others to death. An elderly couple walked out of the screening I was attending early on, mid–fight-scene — so be warned! Geysers of blood!
The comedy gold is all in the Renfield-in-group-therapy premise, which makes fabulous sense, really. After all, Count Dracula already represents the vampiric relationship of the aristocratic elite to the working classes, regularly draining peasants out in Romanian hills and then moving on to the London upper middle class. At any rate, it’s an easy leap to make Dracula a kind of ultimate abusive boss, with unbeatable power over a lowly personal assistant, even one who’s been in enough therapy sessions that he thinks he’s ready to “take his power back.” There’s nice commentary on the terribly weakened condition of American labor when everyone in group therapy assumes Renfield is talking about just another ordinary capitalist boss, not a supernatural monster.
“You feel like he could destroy you with just a snap of his fingers, don’t you?” commiserates one working stiff.
“He wouldn’t even need to snap his fingers,” says Renfield, and everyone in the group nods understandingly.
If only the plot had spun out from that ingenious scenario, there would’ve been no need for the strenuous addition of cops and crime families. Why couldn’t Awkwafina have been in group therapy too, another of the downtrodden turning to psychiatry and twelve-step programs and the self-care industry for help?
Before it veers off, Renfield is right on the cusp of a nicely rollicking satire of the huge distance between the monstrous material conditions we need addressed, and the sad emotional maladjustments therapy is prepared to address. So many of us who’ve been in therapy know perfectly well that it can’t possibly deal with our main problems, which are all about economic injustice — working too hard and long for too little pay. As a direct result, we’re perpetually exhausted, sick, and depressed. Fix all the immense glaring social problems and the therapy numbers would be guaranteed to drop like a rock.
But we’re so overburdened, we’ve got to go somewhere, talk to someone. These days, we’re all eady to process our trauma, challenge our own negative self-talk, and learn to care for our inner child.
That’s all fine, no doubt. But what we really need is to quit our horrible jobs and leave this insane nation designed for the pleasure and prosperity of a not-altogether-dissimilar class of bloodsucking vampires. When Renfield hits those notes — and it does quite often — it’s a pleasure that, sadly, resonates with far too many of us.