Scenes from Hollywood’s Hot Labor Summer

“Jump the fuck up!” Tom Morello, the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, instructed the crowd outside the gates of Paramount. Morello, who wore his signature red bandana around his neck, was strumming “This Land Is Your Land,” to rev up the morning’s picketers. Everyone raised a fist and jumped the fuck up, singing, “This land was made for you and me!” The Writers Guild of America was on day one hundred and three of its strike against the Hollywood studios, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (A.M.P.T.P.); the actors of SAG-AFTRA were on day thirty. The August sun was blazing, and the experienced strikers wore hats; others found shade under signs that read “ON STRIKE!” or “CUT OUT THE CRAP AMPTP!” It was “Bruce Springsteen Day” on the Paramount line, and several people had come in “Born in the U.S.A.” garb. A guy in a headband and tight jeans marched along Melrose Avenue. “I’m here so often I plan my outfits,” he said to a companion. “I gotta go SAG-AFTRA-strike shopping.” He passed Morello, marching in the other direction. “Tommy boy! How ya doing, brother?” he shouted, and they tapped signs.

The twin strikes that have brought Hollywood to a standstill are a long time coming. The streaming revolution has put the industry into a doom spiral; it’s not uncommon to hear words like “apocalyptic” and “existential” thrown around. Writers and actors are fighting for higher minimum fees and better residuals. The W.G.A. wants to prevent TV writers’ rooms from getting reduced to “mini rooms.” Both groups want to put guardrails on the use of artificial intelligence. On the picket lines, a defiant spirit—and a winky humor—prevails. The atmosphere is part protest, part carnival, part networking event. “This is the new ‘Let’s go grab coffee,’ ” one actress told me.

But, beneath the pep, other emotions are roiling: dread, restlessness, economic panic. Strikers are getting survival gigs as nannies, Uber drivers, dog-walkers, brand ambassadors. No one knows how long it’s going to continue. Just before I arrived in Los Angeles, to take inventory of Hollywood’s surreal “hot labor summer,” the actor Billy Porter lamented that he would have to sell his house. “Everyone I know is slowly sinking into a depression and brainstorming alternate career paths, but not aggressively enough to be taking any tangible action,” the writer-director Desiree Akhavan told me. A TV writer I know has been alleviating the monotony of the picket line by listening to Agatha Christie audiobooks. Studios are delaying movie releases; the 2023 Emmys have been bumped to 2024. The prolonged stasis has ricocheted through the L.A. ecosystem in strange ways: plastic surgeons’ offices have reportedly been overrun with stars trying to squeeze in procedures before they go back to work.

Nerves are jangled within the studio walls as well. When I asked a friend who works in marketing to describe the mood in Hollywood in one word, he thought for a moment and answered, “Exhausted.” With the shutdown potentially stretching into next year, wasn’t it a little early for everyone to be exhausted? He considered the corporate and creative denizens of the entertainment industry and said, “I’m not sure these are the hardiest people.”

On a weekday afternoon, Vincent Amaya was driving from his building, around the corner from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, to a food bank in Mid City. Amaya, an L.A. native, is a professional background actor (don’t call them extras). His first gig, during college, was in “Spider-Man” (2002), as part of a crowd fleeing the Green Goblin. He got his SAG card two years later. “I’ve played a dead body. I’ve played a coffee patron or a person at a bar,” he said, behind the wheel. “But my main role is a cop, and I’ve bounced around from cop show to cop show—especially because I understand weapons handling.”

Amaya wore a SAG-AFTRA shirt that he had tie-dyed with bleach. In normal times, he works about three jobs a week. He gets text alerts from Central Casting, the nearly century-old casting company for background actors and stand-ins. The average day is twelve hours, but he’s worked as long as eighteen and half, for a John Leguizamo movie in which he appeared as a concertgoer. There’s a lot of waiting around—he plays chess on his phone—and he’s often required to supply his own wardrobe. (He likes to wear red on weekends, since he can’t wear it on set—too eye-catching.) He also helps produce the Los Angeles Union Background Actors Awards, or “the Blurries,” with categories including Best Time Period Look and Best Multi-Cam Stand-in, plus honors for special skills (card dealing, handstands).

“For the 2020 contract, we had to cave,” he said. “That was when the lockdown was happening. We got about a 2.5-per-cent increase, but rent is going up three per cent.” He was worried about A.I. “I do not want to be scanned,” he went on. “They can use my image and then always have me crossing in a cop station without paying me. That’s my livelihood.” Some of his friends had already been scanned: “They weren’t even told what it was for.” But he doubts that A.I. could eliminate the profession entirely. “Some of the simple things cannot be replaced,” he said. “Like, I started a scene by handing somebody an iPad.”

He turned into the World Harvest Food Bank, on Venice Boulevard. Since the actors’ strike began, he’s been waiting tables, but the food bank, stocked with donations from supermarkets and caterers, has helped him with essentials. He showed his SAG-AFTRA card, then was given a shopping cart and a cardboard box, which he loaded up with fruits and vegetables: parsley, celery, green onions, limes, lettuce, cherry tomatoes, bananas. A volunteer named Albert, who works as a deckhand in Marina del Rey, gave him baked beans, cookie dough, yogurt, and collard greens. Amaya topped off his cart with Bloody Mary mix, hand-sanitizer wipes, eggroll wraps, and more cookie dough. (He’s been learning how to cook from YouTube.)

He loaded the groceries in his car. “I’m able to weather the storm out as long as it takes,” he said. “I do want to go back to work, but I don’t want to go back to work with a 2.5 per cent.” On the drive home, he passed a picket line and honked in support. “This is the most walking L.A. people have done in decades,” he noted.

Barry Michels is one of L.A.’s most in-demand psychotherapists. His patients—prominent screenwriters, actors, and other industry folk—have included Adam McKay and Drew Barrymore. Michels uses Jungian-derived techniques developed by his mentor, Phil Stutz, to help them unlock creative potential, conquer writer’s block, or generally cope with the vicissitudes of the business. “His waiting room was like the red carpet,” one former patient told Dana Goodyear, when she profiled him for this magazine, in 2011.

I visited Michels at his sunlit home office, in Santa Monica. Michels (white goatee, soothing voice) sat near a colorful Marc Chagall print; I sank into a puffy blue sofa, which was like my portal into the subconscious of V.I.P. Hollywood. Were screenwriters talking about the strike in therapy? “It’s not what you would expect,” he said. “It’s not targeted to specific issues. It’s more that there’s a pervasive feeling that writers don’t matter, and that’s a terrible feeling. They feel that they’re being treated as if they’re completely expendable.” He clarified, “If they’re coming to me, they’re well off. For them, it’s much more an issue of respect.”

Michels picked up a piece of paper next to a box of tissues. He had printed out an infamous line from a Deadline article published in July, in which an anonymous executive was quoted saying, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” “This has come up a lot in therapy,” Michels said. “When that came out, it was, like, one session after another: ‘Did you hear what this guy said? Asshole.’ Just intense, intense hatred. Because, if you read that statement, it really is a negation of human value.”

What did he advise his patients? Michels has a tactic called Cosmic Rage: “You visualize the force of pure evil—just a dark, dark force out there—and the person who said the awful thing is just the front man for that force. That’s step one. Step two is you remove the person—you don’t want to make this personal—and you face this dark force. And what you do is you rage at it with out-of-control rage.” (You don’t do this to the person’s face, he cautioned, but it seems like it might be handy on the picket line.) Another exercise is called Dust, which Michels has suggested for pitch meetings or movie premières: you imagine the people watching and judging you blanketed in dust. During the strike, Michels has recommended it to patients in order to “stop them from thinking about the producers and their position.”

Do his patients on the executive side talk about the strike? “Weirdly enough, I do treat some executives, but they’re not talking about it,” Michels said. “They may just not be involved in the negotiation at all. I suspect the other reason is that what the writers suspect is real: producers don’t think much about writers.” They weren’t venting about the actors’ strike, either: “In my experience, they care about movie stars only when the movie star is being a real pain in the ass.” Then there are agents and entertainment lawyers. “They’re just frustrated because they can’t do any deals,” Michels said. “In the instance of one, the advice was ‘Finally, it’s time for you to spend some time with your kid.’ ”

Along with the agents and lawyers, entire professions—caterers, gaffers, editors, publicists, set decorators, and intimacy coördinators—are idled, many supportive of the guilds but with little to gain. One afternoon, Camille Friend, a hair-and-wig designer, sat in her dining room, in Studio City, greeting students on Zoom. Friend has been the head hair stylist for movies such as “Django Unchained,” “Tenet,” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” for which she received an Oscar nomination. Recently, she designed Halle Bailey’s hair for “The Little Mermaid.” A few years ago, she started a training program called Hair Scholars. Without movie work, it’s become one of her only sources of income, along with corporate tutorials and talks.

“How’s everybody?” Friend, in a mint-green blouse and hoop earrings, asked the twenty-odd students in her “Blueprint for Beginners” class. She had invited a friend to lead guided breathing exercises. “Because you know what? Sometimes life is stressful! Sometimes you’re having a strike,” Friend said. Then she turned to the day’s subject: continuity. “Who has ever watched a movie, and you caught bad continuity, and it takes you out of the movie?” she asked. “Exactly.” As homework, the students had filled out mock continuity sheets, with photos of Friend’s head from various angles. She urged the students to notate everything, down to eyebrow tint, because you never know when you’ll need to re-create a look in reshoots. “Don’t post continuity pictures on the Internet,” she warned.

The next class would cover time cards and call sheets. “Do some breath work this week,” Friend urged. “We’ll see what happens with the writers—you know, they’re supposed to be going back to the table.” She advised using the downtime for self-care. “I’m working out, getting a little facial, doing a little body scrub, cleaning out the garage,” she said brightly. “I took a long bath last night—come on, now! All those things that we don’t get to do, this is a great time to do those things.”

After the students logged off, Friend was less cheerful. “If I get into my logical brain, I understand what this strike is about. The system is broken. But the hard reality is, I have friends, I have family, I’m personally responsible for my mother,” she said. “Most of my days are really good. But I have days where I’m sad. We don’t know when we’re going to go back to work, and we don’t have any control.” Friend is in IATSE Local 706, which represents hair stylists and makeup artists. Some of her colleagues have gone back to salon work. In June, she was in Atlanta, designing Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s wig for the Marvel film “Thunderbolts.” After that, she had a big Disney movie lined up in Hawaii. Both are on indefinite hold. “I thought I was going to have a really great year,” she sighed.

On weekdays, picketers have a range of studio locations to choose from. One Thursday morning, it was “Back to the Future Day” at NBC Universal, “90s/2000s Hip Hop + R&B Picket” at Warner Bros., and “Netflix Is a Joke Picket” at Netflix, where, at nine-thirty, the strike captains at neighboring W.G.A. and SAG-AFTRA tents prepared for the day. They had supplies (sunscreen, water bottles, hand sanitizer, potato chips, earplugs) and, at the W.G.A. tent, a bulletin board where you could pin jokes about the A.M.P.T.P. (Entries included “Ted Sarandos is the Ted Cruz of the entertainment world” and “MORE LIKE AMPOOPOOPEEPEE.”) Jess Brownell, the showrunner of “Bridgerton,” had sent an ice-cream truck.

Each location has its own vibe. Netflix, a W.G.A. strike captain named Alicia Carroll explained, is considered “the most egregious among the A.M.P.T.P., so people definitely get fired up here.” Disney is “more sleepy,” since it’s in the suburbs, but there’s a nice park. “Fox and Amazon are really fun, too,” Carroll said, then reconsidered. “ ‘Fun’ is not the right word for it—energizing.”

Calum Worthy, a former Disney Channel star, came with a friend he had met planting trees. “I’ve worked with Netflix on a number of projects, so I wanted to make my voice heard with some people I’ve worked with,” Worthy said. A young picketer who recognized him approached. “I grew up watching ‘Austin & Ally,’ ” she said. (Worthy starred as the character Dez.) They took a photo. Nearby, an older woman who was resting on a bench handed me a pocket-size edition of the Zohar, from the Kabbalah Centre. “It’s about human dignity,” she said, of Kabbalah. “Right now, the A.M.P.T.P. is not having human dignity. They’re filling their pockets with the work of all of us.”

The picketers traipsed beneath “For Your Consideration” billboards for “The Witcher” and “Beef.” “Remember to stay hydrated,” a captain reminded them through a megaphone. Cars on Sunset Boulevard honked in support. Aly Monroe, a writer for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” had been a strike captain at Netflix since May. When the actors joined, in July, the crowd got bigger and more invigorated. “Everyone in the W.G.A. was really dug in, but I think we were starting to flag in energy a little bit,” she said, adding that Annette Bening, Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin have all been spotted on the picket line. “We also have a d.j. now, since SAG joined,” she remarked.

Hours earlier, the W.G.A. negotiators had announced that the A.M.P.T.P. was inviting them back to the table. “We keep getting accused of acting emotionally, but I feel like they’re really acting emotionally,” Monroe said. “Our proposals are pretty reasonable. I feel like it’s going to last a really long time because of that, but I hope I’m wrong.”

Around the corner, an actor named Stephen Hopkins was picketing with his wife, who works at a studio and preferred not to give her name. Their nine-week-old daughter, Mara, slept in a stroller. The strike had made them a one-income household, a stressful situation with a newborn. “I love the idea of one day telling her, ‘You were part of this action,’ ” the mother said. “Right!” Stephen added. “When the labor movement was kicking up into full force, her parents were all about it.” A loud honk of support woke up Mara.

That afternoon, I visited SAG-AFTRA headquarters, situated in a boxy white building a block away from the La Brea Tar Pits. On the eighth floor, I met Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director and chief negotiator. His office was staid, save for a Darth Vader blanket folded over a couch. “I’m a big ‘Star Wars’ fan,” he said. “I should probably put it away during the strike.”

With negotiations on hold, Crabtree-Ireland was spending his days working behind the scenes and rallying strikers. He told me that he had just walked the Disney picket with Troy Kotsur, the Oscar winner for “CODA.” Crabtree-Ireland began working for SAG in 2000, as a staff attorney. Before that, he was a criminal prosecutor in the L.A. district attorney’s office. “I did a lot of attempted murders, a lot of gang violence, domestic violence, drug cases,” he recalled. Crabtree-Ireland shares leadership with the guild’s president, Fran Drescher, whom he calls President Drescher. “We talk pretty much every day, or text,” he said. In July, he and Drescher announced the strike at an emotional press conference, where Drescher accused the A.M.P.T.P. of giving them “a leck and a schmeck”—Yiddish for “a lick and a sniff.” “She’s taught me some new vocabulary,” Crabtree-Ireland said.

The day before we met, Disney’s C.E.O., Bob Iger, had said on an earnings call that he was “personally committed” to finding a solution to the labor impasse, the kind of bland corporate statement that Crabtree-Ireland insists he takes at face value. “We’re ready to negotiate,” he said. “We have been since July 12th. I say that privately to people related to the companies and through back channels. I do know that there are people who are helping us in subtle ways to put pressure on the C.E.O.s of the companies to get back to the negotiating table. And I am under the definite impression that C.E.O.s are talking to each other about what changes they might make in their position, so as to help further the negotiations and get us to a deal.” He was confident that morale was high enough to keep up a united front for months, but he acknowledged that the toll on striking actors was “rough.”