The Hollywood Writer’s Strike: Society and Sillivization Need to Mature - Fast!

by NDK Creative Artist

This is part four of the Hollywood Writer’s Strike series. You can start from the beginning by clicking here. - Joel Falconer, Editor-in-Chief

Some of mankind’s greatest thinkers—and writing and creating in any field is very much a thinking, intellectual pursuit—came from men and women who were not supported nor even recognized for their accomplishments until much, much later. We need to change this way of thinking, for it is what puts this civilization in peril.

In a book I’m currently reading, The Philosophy of Elbert Hubbard (a leading light in the art & craft movement in America at the turn of the last century and famous for his essay A Message to Garcia) which he calls Positivism, Elbert covers a few such examples:

Jean Francois Millet, starved out in art-loving Paris, his pictures refused at the Salon, living next door to abject want in Barbizon, dubbed ‘the wild man of the woods, ‘ dead and turned to dust, his pictures commanding such sums as Paris never before paid; Walt Whitman, issuing his book at his own expense, publishers having refused it, this book excluded from the mails, as Wanamaker immortalized himself by by serving a like sentence on Tolstoy; Walt Whitman, riding on top of a Broadway bus all day, happy in the great solitude of bustling city streets, sending his barbaric yawp down the ages, singing paeans to those who fail, chants to Death—strong deliverer—and giving courage to a fear-stricken world; Thoreau, declining to pay the fee of five dollars for his Harvard diploma “because it wasn’t worth the price,” later refusing to pay poll-tax and sent to jail, thus missing, possibly, the chance of finding that specimen of Victoria regia on Concord River–Thoreau, most virile of all the thinkers of this day, inspiring Emerson, the one man America could illest spare; Spinoza the intellectual hermit, asking nothing, and giving everything–all these worked their philosophy up into life and are the type of men who jostle the world out of its ruts–creators all, one with Deity, sons of God, saviors of the race.

“Only when the talent is dead do their works fetch the price they should in life. Whose economic model is that? How does that fit in the oh so fair and democratic free enterprise system other than the artist must always give it away and be grateful for the exposure and the opportunity? How does the rest of the world justify this theft and their willingness to let it persist?”

“Dead and turned to dust…his pictures commanding such sums…” It’s an all too familiar story; somebody was making money, from the artist and their work, but not with the artist. Oh, how short-sighted and miserly our society and civilization can be when faced with such talent. Only when the talent is dead do their works fetch the price they should in life. Whose economic model is that? How does that fit in the much-vaunted free enterprise system other than the artist must always give it away and be grateful for the exposure and the opportunity? How does the rest of the world justify this theft and their willingness to let it persist? How do the rest of the world’s families and others justify the perpetuation of this outrage that they tacitly support by doing nothing to change the circumstance? I submit to you: the public is complicit in this rip-off, for they do nothing to change it.

Advance Civilization: End Creative Artistic Oppression

It is time for this sort of creative artistic oppression to end. It does not belong in a free and truly advanced civilization. But it is still happening today and we think of ourselves as an advanced civilization, even though the very symbols and trappings of that advance are and the lifestyle they afford us is actually and factually destroying the very possibility for us to live! This is part of what’s wrong with our civilization and society and it is what keeps us primitive, barely out of the caves, despite the advances in knowledge.

We’ll cover this in additional depth a bit later as there are methods that are springing up here and there around the world that do not disenfranchise visual artists from the sort of income those in other creative disciplines enjoy. But across the swath of creative disciplines, there are very few artists paid what they are worth. Rather, talent is used, and abused.

The Value of Things Un-tethered – The Value of Entertainment

Patrick Goldstein, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer in his article BIG PICTURE: Just what is entertainment worth? states:

On the surface, the impasse revolves around how to divvy up future Internet media revenues. But the real problem is that nobody knows the value of anything anymore. Whether we’re reading horror stories about the mortgage meltdown, watching the dollar plummet or gagging on the prices at our neighborhood gas station, we’re all stumbling around with a nagging feeling that the value of things has become unmoored.

Yes, “the value of things is unmoored.” Ultimately, this is the fate of societies that are focused on materialism and consumption in a false economic system that enriches a few at the expense of everything and everybody else. And it is the intellectual property playground of intangible assets that you will see this occur first. These are the symptoms of a civilization rotting.

The more I discovered about the industry, the more I began to despair. I knew that it would not matter if you had a contract, contracts don’t mean anything to the art & entertainment industry’s current management. They’re tools, that have little or no meaning and the truth of this is in the many broken and violated contracts they have. You know this, you’ve heard of the strikes and the way in which the business that dominates our society’s communication channels works. Patrick Goldstein, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer reports:

“No one in Hollywood can agree on the value of entertainment.”

But this is not at all peculiar to Hollywood. It is peculiar to and describes how so-called civilized society has thought of and treated the arts for as long as I can remember and, from what I’ve read, been going on even longer than that. There are a few exceptions, here and there that make continuing to create worthwhile.

In the same article, Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, says:

“It’s in the zeitgeist now—we’re at a moment in time where people don’t how to value things. Art and media are a reflection of society. And if you no longer have an internal sense of what the dollar or a tank of gas is worth, it’s no surprise that you don’t know what content on the Internet is worth either. It goes to the heart of why we’re at an impasse with the Writers Guild. If no one has a clear understanding of what entertainment is worth, then no one really knows what they’re negotiating about.”

No, it is not suddenly “in the zeitgeist now.” This attitude of not-knowing-the-value-of-things, is in fact a pretense, a lie, a falsehood, that has been around in the arts & entertainment industry for a long time already; creeping through the underbelly of society and civilization which pretends to ignore the very reality and attitude it generally has towards those who create that which inspires and generates vast wealth, around which nations ultimately build economies which drive tourism, and the recreation industries as I’ve demonstrated and brought to your attention elsewhere in this article.

What this chairman of a major art & entertainment industry company has said is doublespeak, the estimates and projections that these big corporations like SONY utilize know precisely what to expect and what the value is likely to be, and vast sums are spent on analyzing the markets to predict (which still results in a marketing failure rate that is unbelievable). So this is simply more double-speak that makes no sense coming from those who are part of the cult of greed.

Now our advanced civilization has the means to complete the final rip-off of the artists that it has always sought, and it is now seeking to do that on a far greater level of unfairness and injustice than it has ever sought before.

But it is also a positive thing, because what is happening is the technology has liberated the artists and provided them with the means to be economically independent, and part of making that liberation happen, requires the sundering of the connection to the economic Elite, so that the arts can truly work to fire the imaginations of men and women and liberate their creativity and ability to help imagine and create a more sustainable civilization, that is advanced not just in terms of technology, but in terms of the humanities. This is what we’re talking about when we’re discussing the idea of mankind maturing.

It is not the zeitgeist that is at fault here, it’s the corrupt nature of mankind and the industry that is finally coming to the fore in a society that operates on a flawed economic system that does away with morality, and along with morality all sense of equity. The Cult of Greed has destroyed and is grinding our society down (just as any cog will), only nobody wants to admit it because all are complicit.

Where do we go now?

If you can't wait for more, explore the archives sorted by month via the links in the right-hand sidebar, or use the Category links in the same place.

If you'd rather we did all the hard work, you're in luck. Here's a list of articles that are related to this one:

• Foundation Principles — The Declaration of Creative Independence and the Code of a Creative Artist
• The Hollywood Writer’s Strike: Why do I want it to go on longer?
• Another great idea: Eliminate Corporate Criminal Liability — Robert Reich’s Package Deal
• The Give Away Myth: What They Don’t Want You To Know
• The Points of the Creative Artists’ Code: Two - Communicate only that which you truly know about in your art.