Yep, this is an interesting article from Harper’s Magazine, which is kind enough to allow us access without forcing us to cough up the cash.
What do we have here? Let’s see.
This is the story of 32-year-old writer Alena Smith, who (in 2012) went West to Hollywood, like many before her.
She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film.
Smith was looking for a job in television. She had an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and had lived and worked as a playwright in New York City for years—two of her productions garnered positive reviews in the Times. But playwriting had begun to feel like a vanity project: to pay rent, she’d worked as a nanny, a transcriptionist, an administrative assistant, and more. There seemed to be no viable financial future in theater, nor in academia, the other world where she supposed she could make inroads.
Her friends were landing positions on cool shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Girls. It was “the second decade of prestige television … [when] TV had become a place for sharp wit, singular voices, people with vision—and they were getting paid.”
Eventually, after landing jobs as a staff writer and story editor on various shows, she ended up working on a unique concept.
In 2013, she’d begun to develop the idea for what would become Dickinson, a gothic, at times surreal comedy based on the life of the poet, Emily. “I realized you could do one of those visceral, sexy, dangerous half hours but make it a period piece,” she said. “I was never trying to write some middle-of-the-road thing.” She sold the pilot and a plan for at least three seasons to Apple in 2017; she would be the showrunner, and the series had the potential to become one of the flagship offerings of the company’s streaming service, which had not yet launched.
Now, why would a big deal company like Apple make a show about poetry and a poet, not to mention a lesbian? It was looking to make a splash, that’s why.
It’s not competition for money. It’s competition for eyeballs.
“I mean, they made a show out of I Love Dick,” Smith said, referring to the small-press cult classic by Chris Kraus, adapted into a 2016 series for Amazon Prime Video. “That doesn’t happen because people are using profit as their bottom line.”
Ahem! *cough* *cough* This should start to sound familiar, eh, indie authors?
The streaming model was based on bringing in subscribers—grabbing as much of the market as possible—rather than on earning revenue from individual shows. And big swings brought in new viewers. “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” Smith said. “But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.” [Emphasis mine.]
Apparently, Apple dragged its feet on committing to a premiere date for the show. Then, they told Smith she had rewrite the whole thing.
“It was communicated to me,” Smith said, “that my only choice to keep the show alive was to begin all over again and write a whole new season without a green-light guarantee. So I was expected to take on that risk, when the entities that stood to profit the most from the success of my creative labor, the platform and studio, would not risk a dime.” “It was also on me,” she went on, “to kind of fluff everybody involved in the entire making of the show, from the stars to the line producer to the costume designer, etcetera, to make them believe that we’d be coming back again and prevent them, sometimes unsuccessfully, from taking other jobs.”
The show eventually did premiere. In 2019. And despite winning a Peabody Award and a Rotten Tomatoes Fan Favorite prize, Smith was “losing steam.”
“I was only allowed to make the show to the extent that I was willing to take on unbelievable amounts of risk and labor on my own body perpetually, without ceasing, for years,” she said. “And I knew that if I ever stopped, the show would die.” It had seemed to her that Apple didn’t value the series, and she felt at a loss. Smith now knows that Dickinson was the company’s most-watched show in its second and third seasons. But at the time, she had no access to concrete information about its performance. As was the habit among streamers, Apple didn’t share viewership data with its writers. And without that data, Smith had no leverage. In 2020, after three seasons, she told Apple that she was done. “I said, I can’t do it anymore. And Apple said, Okay.”
“Passion can only get you so far,” she told me. But she’d stayed in Hollywood. “I’m an artist,” she said, “and I’m never going to stop creating.” The industry was still the only place one could make a real living as a writer. “When people say, Why stay in TV?” she said, “The answer is, There is nothing else. What do you mean?”
And, yeah, I would pick now to be a screenwriter.
Smith’s story is kind of emblematic of various other creators. Some with unions. Some without.
The truth was that the forces that had opened doors for Smith were the same ones that had made her individual work seem not to matter. They were the same forces that had been degrading writers’ working lives for some time, and they were cannibalizing the business of Hollywood itself.
Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.
“The industry is in a deep and existential crisis,” the head of a midsize studio told me in early August. We were in the lounge of the Soho House in West Hollywood. “It is probably the deepest and most existential crisis it’s ever been in. The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. 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.”
I urge you to read this article. Wait’ll you get to the part where the studios form a cartel! That was in the 1920s, long before anyone even imagined the internet.
Shall we end things with a motivational quote?
“When there’s high-profile IP involved,” Brancato told me, “writers tend to be treated as disposable.” “Everybody’s feeling fucked over,” he said. “The general sense is that you’re an absolutely fungible widget, and they don’t any longer take you seriously. It’s so broken. I mean, really, it is fucking broken.”
Mmm. Does time really heal all wounds?
Is anyone else feeling a sense of deja vu?
This, too, shall pass.
Rock on, indies!
PS: Having trouble selling books? Write some garbage books for Amazon. Here’s how they get made!
PPS: This just gets worse and worse more and more fucked up.
Source: Getting Real ’24. Things are getting real.
Uh … you’re telling me!
BTW, have I ever shown you this video?! 🙂
A penny-farthing for your thoughts! 🙂
PPPS: The Literary Life and How To Live It by Sean Murphy.
This Sean Murphy?
PPPPS: Oh, my God! Do follow this one! 🙂 Have I mentioned that I love Doctor Who? And a few other things British? Blimey!