Trouble in TV
The Television Academy is doing pretty much the same thing as the WGA. Over the last few months, I have received emails from The Television Academy asking that I complete a “survey” about my “particulars”. This requested information should have NOTHING to do with how qualified i am at doing my job, or have anything to do with my membership in the Picture Editors Peer Group.
Each and every time I have gotten this email, I have turned down this request. You are RIGHT, Chris!! Personal information SHOULD NOT NEED to be a requirement relating to job opportunities!! I have been a member of The Television Academy since 1998, after I was nominated with my two editing partners for Outstanding Single Camera Editing for our work on the PBS Television Series “Wishbone.”
These kinds of “personal inquiries” are invasive and should not be acceptable in a free society.
I ENTHUSIASTICALLY APPLAUD Film Threat for CALLING OUT this despicable behavior!!!
“…they always say it in a manner that I can best describe as “deflection through performative self-deprecation”, or “I Know I’m an Evil Old White Guy, Please Don’t Kill Me”
Troubles in The Music Industry
I’ve worked in the live music and theatre industry in the UK for almost my entire career. I’ve been hearing this phrase, “male, pale and stale,” for at least the past 5 years – about as long as I’ve been listening to you, Gary, Drinker, and the rest – and most insufferably, I’ve been hearing this phrase said by the very people it describes… and they always say it in a manner that I can best describe as “deflection through performative self-deprecation,” or “I Know I’m an Evil Old White Guy, Please Don’t Kill Me.”
The questionnaires that are designed to collect irrelevant demographic information “purely for reporting purposes” have been doing the rounds for years now, and I feel because the music industry can react faster than the film industry (in general), I’ve been in the frontline trenches of the depressing creep of D.E.I. for a long time. Pronouns are ubiquitous in email signatures. Employee groups that achieve precious little are everywhere. The unicorn of ensuring that all festival lineups are split 50/50 between male and female artists is still being hunted.
I’ve sat in board meetings with senior executives for hours on end, listening to the highest-paid people in a company talk about things that will never happen or, due to actual employment law around *genuine* fair treatment, CAN never happen. Aside from embodying despicable ideals, my other gripe with this whole movement is that it’s made me totally disenchanted with the industry I once loved.
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Thanks Alan and Chris for delivering us the investigative journalism the trades have desperately failed in. Also thank you as well for your humor and informative/entertaining content pertaining to movies. Filmthreat has become a recurring highlight for me.
I have two questions. First, Why are white males paying to be a member of WGA if they are going to be discriminated against, it’s like they are paying for the privilege to cut their own throats. . Second, why aren’t white males filing discrimination lawsuits against the WGA, the last time I checked it’s illegal to base hiring decisions on race or sex.
What was the answer when you flipped it and asked why Blacks and Latinos stayed members during all the decades including this one in which we were discriminated against? For me, the answer is simple. Helen n Al Levitt. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were murdered, yes. But you have to keep fighting for what you think is right. As you know from a prior post, I was attacked in the WGA building, shoved and locked in a room 15 feet from the board room with the assailant blocking the door and members ignoring my calls for help.
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Gee, and you are surprised this is happening? I am a conservative writer of nonfiction and fiction. I wrote Senator Harry Reid’s biography, of which the movie Casino if a small subset. I was told by literary agents not to bother submitting it because it was too controversial and wouldn’t be picked up by the liberal publishing universe.
My magnum opus, I’ve worked on for 30 years, predicted a Covid scenario and AI wars plus a civil war over wokeness. It has no chance unless I go Indy.
How is this legal? I thought hiring by race and gender…Especially on a scale this size….Was pretty much illegal.
The Free Press ran an article in January of 2022 called “Hollywood’s New Rules: The old boys club is dead. But a new one—with its own litmus tests and landmines—is rapidly replacing it. ‘This is all going to end in a giant class-action…”. I personally believe that massive class-action lawsuits are indeed are coming, which is going help rid Hollywood of this cancerous DEI.
If an 18 year old white heterosexual male from the mid-west with no connections to anyone in the entertainment industry whatsoever decided that he wanted pursue a career as filmmaker, I would advise him against it. Not because of lack of effort, talent or persistence, but because he would be denied any chance at making a career for himself in this new age of Hollywood. His work would go unread, un-watched and rejected before it would ever be judged on the merits or quality of the work itself. This also applies to the independent film world just as much, as financiers and distributors have also become just as guilty in participating with DEI.
The safest check box you can lie about is non-binary. If they accuse you of lying, just say to them “prove that I’m not non-binary.” No one can prove that they ARE non-binary. You could also lie about your race. It’s not like they’ll ask you to take an ancestry test.
This doesn’t seem isolated to the WGA. It feels like a form of communism has spread industry-wide. Using their counter-productive exemption, SAG allows producers to pay the actors less money if a percentage of cast falls under DEI. The only incentive in that seems to be to wipe out Caucasians from the zeitgeist of American stories, cinema, and culture. And this corporate idea of redesigning famous IP characters to form a new world looks awfully familiar to all those historical statues and monuments being removed and wiped out of existence. All of the above are communist constructs. I think Nerdrotic hit a target when he points out members are afraid of their own unions. And to think this is not affecting streaming and distribution yet is shortsighted.
I was dragged into a side room where the WGA board met, held captive, and harassed by a top WGA male exec. There was one female staffer present. Finally, he let me go and I ran from the building. The WGA Board of Directors blacklisted me because the guy was more important to negotiations than I was. He had me banned from WGA meetings to prevent me from talking to anyone. Because we were in the middle of negotiations, the board’s silence re the attack was more important than me. He recently retired rich.
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Male and pale is stale. And, on average, 30% of your audience.
I keep coming back to this too.
Making money can smooth over a lot of problems and they were able to coast for a while during the height of Marvel.
I just feel the bills are finally coming due and eventually they will have to make DRASTIC changes or risk completely sinking the ship
These letters are revealing of the cognitive dissonance of these writers. Almost to a one these writers proclaim being pro-diversity, progressive, and liberal–yet they somehow can’t connect the dots between that ideology and their own displacement in the industry. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in the culture war trenches understands the lunacy of the progressive cause and that it could (and does) only result in the disenfranchisement of the majority. “What did you think decolonization meant?” goes the refrain on twitter. “It’s like we’re supposed to just shut up and go away.” says one writer, and yes, that is precisely what the ascendant diverse coterie desires. They wish you starved, silenced, and consigned to the redacted annals of TV history. Had these writers, for a moment, considered themselves as having a collective interests in preventing the toxic DEI ideology from gaining traction the damage wrought might not have been so catastrophic. Make no mistake, the diversity commissars simply want ‘non-diverse” people to be utterly purged. The liberal, progressive, writers have handed them the keys to accomplish this.
Funny how, the powerful and power hungry in the entertainment industry, have so much in common with the Nazi Party. It must be a natural flow of those with no, to low self esteem, emotionally damaged egos, craving, needing/wanting attention from the world, desire power (especially power over others) above all else, have zero spiritual development, no relationship with their Creator, and are suffering from various mental illnesses, especially those related to gender dysphoria, to find themselves in goosestep with fascist ideals. Liberalism/Progressivism is a gateway drug to Communist/Fascist addiction, and those drugs have killed billions.
Female, gay, and Brown brings sales down
[…] an email sent to Film Threat, the anonymous WGA member shared five points that confirm nearly all theories about why the Marvel […]