I'm thrilled this afternoon to be joined by Keli Goff, who is a contributor to The Daily Beast to The Hollywood Reporter, and a member of the on-strike Writers Guild of America. We'll talk a little bit more about this over the course of the afternoon. But basically, Kelly can write anything about anything from abortion politics, to donation politics, to superheroes to Sex in the City. She is a tremendously talented person, who wrote a perfect essay, a perfect column, I think for The Daily Beast. Keli, I've said that, if I was teaching a course on politics, I would build it around your essay, because it has so much of the basic ingredients of what it takes to understand at a complex level, what goes on in American politics, why things are the way they are, with some important elements and of life lessons, and I just want to read the beginning of the column to you. It begins by saying: "A few years ago, I had just begun my TV writing career when I was warned by friends in the industry, not to publish a column critical of the fact that Democrats like Hillary Clinton have for years accepted donations from Harvey Weinstein, and others like him. I did it anyway." And when I read it, I laughed out loud. And I just wonder, talking to you, what is it about you that triggers that sense of defiance? That when someone tells you not to do something, it's a guarantee that you're going to do it. Where does that come from?
I just never learned my lesson. I think some people would say, after reading this column, I just never learned. I do want to apologize at the outset of our conversation because I think there's a little bit of a WiFi issue on my end, so I'm going to I hope your listeners and viewers can hear me, Steve. But I think part of it is my upbringing. You know, there's so much talk about privilege, coastal elites versus flyover country, I'm very proudly flyover country. And now here, I am getting to have a career where I sit in air conditioning, working on a laptop, and now I get to talk to you. And so I think there is something about growing up in a system, in a family, that really is the epitome of the American dream, that my family could start where they did, and I get to end up here. But there's a sense when you grow up around people like my grandmother, who was brilliant, passed away last year, and never really got the opportunity to use her brilliance, where I think you grow up believing that you can't always play by the rules, because the rules weren't really written with everyone in mind. And so because of that, I tend to always question the rules and the people who make them. And I think that's basically what this column is.
Did she talk about what life was like growing up in Texas? She was born 100 years ago in the 1920s. Most people don't understand or really appreciate this, but most of the Confederate memorials that there's a debate over in the country were built in the 1920s. They were built in a moment of cultural backlash after the end of World War One, at a moment of black progress, and a moment commensurate with Black progress, culturally, the Harlem Renaissance and so this backlash, all of these Confederate statues are going up. They are going up right contemporaneously to your grandmother's childhood, coming down in your adulthood towards the end of her life, none of them really as memorials to the fallen on either side of the Civil War, but really a political statement a couple of generations later, to remind Black Americans about their place in our history. What did she instill in you, from that time, from that place that's formative to how you see the world?
Well, she was born a year out after women got the right to vote, which still boggles my mind. She was born a year and a half later. You know, and what you said is really important and profound, because what you just said actually plays a big role in why I work in this business as a screenwriter, because of "Birth of a Nation." The horrifically racist film that D.W. Griffith released was a phenomenon and was credited with single-handedly increasing the presence and the membership of the Klu Klux Klan. Nationally, it's considered one of the most successful films in history in terms of cultural and political zeitgeist because that film, and its depiction, a terrific depiction of every negative stereotype you can think of in terms of Blackness in particularly Black men. And and you know, the fear of the dangers towards white women. It led to a massive increase in membership of the Ku Klux Klan. And so when I was in college, Steve, I actually did my final thesis presentation on the political role of theatre and film with an emphasis on how it impacted race in America. The conversation in my presentation really started with that film. That film is proof of the cultural impact that screenwriting and filmmaking and the arts can have on these conversations. So that's the first part to answer your question. You know, the second part is, I can't even properly articulate the impact she had on me. Even though she was 100, and lived a very long life, oh my God, I'm getting emotional just talking about it. You're like Barbara Walters! She was so smart, and so talented, and she never had the opportunities I did, and I have. And so when I would hear her stories about, you know what it was like, not just picking cotton, but chopping it, as my mother always reminds me, she said, "No, picking was the easy part. It was the chopping, Keli, that was the really labor intensive, hard part." That made my mother want to better herself. So she didn't have to keep doing that into the next generation as well. But those lessons are the ones that stay with me when I have the privilege to sit and partake in the opportunities I do today. I actually said to one of the stars of one of the shows I worked on in terms of it's some racial stereotypes I was concerned about. And I said, when I sit in these rooms, and on these sets, I'm there for every woman who never got there. I'm there for women like my grandmother. And that is how I feel about what we do, so I consider what we do as screenwriters to be important.
And you're on strike. Yes. Which...
...is why I have time to talk to you.
And for somebody who is watching or listening to this, and thinks about Hollywood and the strike, and they think about the star. So they're thinking about Jennifer Aniston, right? They're thinking about Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Taylor Sheridan, right? He's a writer. Everyone is on strike. Can you explain what it's like to work in this industry? The thing that, for me, having been around it on the periphery is that it is fundamentally sustained by the electricians, the union contractors, right? This is a middle class, working class industry, including a lot of the working actors, a lot of the working writers. This strike really is raising an issue that every person who works is going to deal with, certainly almost every person who works in what you would call a white collar industry, where intellectually they have been insulated from the ferocity of the winds of globalization. White collar workers, as a general proposition, have not had to train their replacements. But if you're a radiologist, you're an accountant, you're all manner of lawyers, and so for whatever reason, the first group into the line talking about this issue, and its profound ramifications for how we live, how we work, and how we function as a society in the 21st century, it's the writers, and it's the actors.
I think the easiest way, perhaps to explain it to your viewers and listeners, Steve, would be to say that, just as on every presidential campaign, there is a John McCain, there are a lot of people who make that machinery work. They're the people building the signs. They're the people holding the signs. They're the people writing the speeches, they're the people doing the phones, banking. A presidential campaign can't function without all of those people. And the difference between those people and John McCain is if a John McCain loses the campaign, he'll actually be fine. But there are certain people who after the campaign is over may not know how they're going to pay their rent. And the same goes for Amazon workers, for there's a Jeff Bezos and then there are the people delivering the packages. And I think what a lot of people did not realize until now, is Hollywood functions very much the same way. There are the Tom Cruise's, there are Denzel Washington's there are Morgan Freeman's, and then there are the rest of us. And so while we may not be struggling as much as the actual Amazon delivery person, and it's not always that far off, and I actually think, Steve, but strangely enough, one of the people who best articulated the precariousness of the positions of those of us who I think a lot of other people from places like my home state probably thought, I work as a cashier, I don't want to hear these annoying writers griping about their fancy gilded cages and their six figure lives. Well, the person who actually, I think, explained how precarious our positions actually are better than anyone, was whichever producer leaked to Deadline that they were waiting until October for us to become homeless, for them to come back to the table. They basically let out the dirty little secret that I think a lot of Americans who don't live in New York and LA never realized, which is most writers, and most actors are only about two to three months away from being homeless. And finally, someone who pays us has the temerity and the audacity to actually tell that to the press. That's the truth. So that's why we're on strike. They have been getting increasingly worse in this industry. And I'm happy to explain some of the ways why, but I don't want to get ahead of wherever this conversation is going.
The question that I was going to ask -- and talking about the cashier, and not to go down a rabbit hole -- but I was at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. You go there, I was with a bunch of my fellow Gen Xers. And we have to go online to get a beer and something to eat. There are no people! You are ordering from a machine, which gives you a number. And the number rolls out. At 52, I can learn to do it this way, but this is a new experience -- about how you go get a beer at a concert, and what they have removed from the process. And by that I mean management, or as many people from the equation as possible. So if in fact you are a cashier, you're living on borrowed time, at the edge of the age of the intelligent machine. Like a lot of professions. It seems to me, the writers, and the actors are both taking an extremely important stand on a fundamental proposition about the dignity and importance of work, to the happiness of a life, you know, is it to be that there will be an incredibly small class of people that are richer than any human beings have ever been in the history of human civilization, and everyone else is essentially popularized into a vessel state, who serve them across whatever industry, whether it's writing their entertainment, or delivering via truck, their pleasures.
I unfortunately think the short answer is yes. I think that the people who are in charge across a lot of these industries have no problem with a future you just described, Steve. The reason we're on strike is because we do have a problem with that. You know, I find it again, I'm grateful to whichever exec made it very clear that he expects a lot of us to start struggling to pay our rents and our mortgages in less than three months of a strike. He's absolutely right. Because I'm someone who is already looking ahead to what I'm going to do financially just a couple of months from now. I have plenty of friends in the same position. And again, coming from, I just want to give some context here, coming from the background I come from, someone who could not have attended college without financial aid, and who grew up in a family who had struggled just to get where they were, and my parents were the first in their family to go to college. So for me, the idea of ever earning six figures sounded like, you know, you're rich, right? That was kind of the idea when I was growing up, but who aren't six figure people? I went to school with their dads who were managers of grocery stores and construction workers who didn't make six figures. And then I worked as a journalist, and we all know that doesn't pay well, particularly well, either. So Hollywood really was the land of dreams, and then you get there. And, you know, as I think some of people have been reading in the articles, our increases in pay have not kept up with inflation, which was up at 9%, or increases in pay, we're like 1.5%, over a couple of years, you make low six figures. And then we happen to live in states that define themselves as progressive, which means they progressively have very high tax rates. So let's say you earn $120,000, which is more money than my mother ever earned. So for me, that sounds like that might as well have been a million dollars. And then you have city taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, managers, lawyers, agents. Imagine playing for a sports team, where you're only paid per game, and your coach says you can't even take meetings with people on other teams about what you're going to do next year. That's what it's like being in our business, Steve, it's scrambling from year to year, hoping that you can just break even a lot of times, and you're lucky if you get to put something away. That's what the business has become increasingly. The last thing I want to mention, because I think it's important, and it's one of the things that's not being talked about publicly because it's a bit like what talking about Harvey Weinstein was 10 years ago, is that a lot of the studios and the production companies already engaged in behavior that I think could be considered abusive, but that very few people speak about publicly. I'm getting to speak about it right now. I'll give you an example. I can't say what the show was, I can't say who the entity was producing it, but I will talk in broad terms so my lawyer won't have a heart attack. I worked on a project where we had a contract that was guaranteed for a certain amount of time, a certain amount of money. I actually relocated for the project. Something happens, and then the studio decides they don't want to pay out what they owe the writers. They tell our lawyers, each of our individual lawyers. They say, "We'll be nice, and we're willing to pay 15% of what you all think we owe you know on your contract, Steve. Our lawyers follow up, and this is what they were informed: "We know what the contract says. We know you interpret it that way, but our position is we don't, and they're welcome to arbitrate, they're welcome to sue." But, you know, it's tough to have a cordial relationship for future opportunities with people who have arbitrated or sued. I call two of my mentors in the business who had been in the business over 20 years and walk them through what's happening and said, "What do you do?" Each of them said, "Oh, this has happened to me a couple times." Doesn't this sound like shades of Harvey Weinstein. It's "you'll never work again." So people roll over. This is what it's like in the business, and I think other people think that we're just all eating gold lollipops, and you know, have people carrying us around and fanning us, and living this gilded life. The Taylor Sheridan's, the Shonda Rhimes, God bless them, but that is not what the life is for most writers.
So you've described a couple of things, and I want to balance on two conversations just observationally. One is about the economic conditions that I think shaped politics in the country. They are at a top level -- you have 40% of the country which doesn't have $400 cash available for an emergency -- and no doubt, some of those people are making six figures a year. If you live in a state like California, that is a high real estate high tax state. If you have kids in private school, you have a child that has any type of special needs added on you, you have a parent whose health you're involved in, or any family member that you're financially supportive of squeezed to death and have an inability really economically to climb the ladder and get ahead, particularly when you when you look at real estate prices in the Los Angeles area. So, so...
...just to interject, because that's important, Steve, that's important for your listeners to hear, because a lot of times, people say, "just move. New York, California, they are expensive, move." I'm sick of hearing people say tha.t. If this is where your career is, where you move into. Sorry, I just wanted to...
...so and then the other issue is, is the executive compensation within the studios, and how the studios have spent money on their businesses. So for example, if the CEO of Netflix makes $50 million a year, and in his infinite wisdom, it was his decision to sign a $100 million contract for whatever with Harry and Megan, because of, I'm not sure what. Then, he's pleading poverty. Or you look at the $200 million salary from one studio executive, the $50 million from another. The thing that I always think about and remember, is the hotel I would stay at in New York all the time, during my years of consulting. I would go down for breakfast every morning, and I'd have the same thing. I would have scrambled eggs, hash browns, orange juice, coffee, ice water. I get the bill -- $112 -- that was the bill for the meal. I would get that bill -- someone's paying it for me --whatever client would sign it without a thought. But what I would think about is why 112? Obviously, if I would pay $112, for the three scrambled eggs and the hash browns. I'd pay 135, right? And so where does the compensation come from? Right, if you're the studio exec making $50 million a year running a public company -- and by the way, this didn't exist when we were kids that you made that much money, right? Baseball players, football players, they didn't make that type of money. People like Ted Turner were billionaires, but if you were the public company CEO, you made a lot of money, comparatively, but you weren't living like a Middle Eastern Crown Prince.
So you hit the nail on the head, because I'll give you a perfect example of that. Ryan Murphy was paid $300 million by Netflix. That's the guy who did "Glee." Well, it was a successful show. It was not the most successful show in history. None of his shows have been the most successful shows in history. Netflix paid him $300 million. Guess who just announced that he's about to sign with now? Disney. So explain to me how both of them are having money problems, Steve. But they can afford to pay the writers and actors. I'm assuming he's not going to Disney for significantly less than what Netflix just paid him, or he would stay there. So we have Bob Iger. We have the guys at Netflix pleading poverty to those of us that they say they can't afford to pay $200,000 a year to, but yeah, the $300 million, the $200 million. Patriss Cullors from Black Lives Matter had a multimillion dollar deal. Did it produce any content? Was she an established Black writer? No, but that was someone throwing money right at a problem to look like they were doing the right thing by progressives instead of actually doing something that would be perceived as legitimately progressive, which is paying people a fair wage, who actually have the experience to do the job. So this is where we're at. And you know, one of my friends is a producer, she put it beautifully. She said, "Look, listen to them cry poverty after they've literally thrown over $100 million at at least 20 people across the industry, and then turning around and saying, "We don't have the money to pay the rest of you." It's the equivalent of a little kid going to their parents who just said, "You only get your allowance on Saturdays." And Wednesday they show up and they say, "Well, mommy, daddy, I need more money. And then they say, "But you only get your allowance on Saturday." "But I bought one big toy, I want to go buy other toys." Now, that's not the fault of the other toys at the store that you spent your allowance on one big shiny toy that either broke down or you don't actually enjoy playing with that much. That's what they're out asking us to do, Steve. And it's not only that I think it's morally wrong and unconscionable and un-American, but also we can't afford it. I legitimately can't afford to work for peanuts, because you wanted to pay one person $200 million. It's just insane. It's insane. I will lastly say this to your fundamental point: you know, at least Taylor Sheridan and Shonda Rhimes, and Ryan Murphy are actual writers. The idea that, as one of my closest friends who worked on Wall Street for a long time said, "Keli, let me get this straight. You have a bunch of guys who can't write, can't direct, can't act, can't turn on a camera, can't sing, can't dance, earning millions and millions of dollars to tell those of you who can actually do it, what to do. How does that how does that make sense?" He says, "It doesn't sound right to me. It sounds right to you?" And I thought, "Wait a minute, he's onto something." And here we are a few months later at a strike.
What do you think about this strike? We were talking about your grandmother earlier in the world that she was born into? Within an overwhelming likelihood if you were a black American, in the 1920s in the 1930s, and you identified with a political party, that political party was the Republican Party. It was the party of Abraham Lincoln, and that held until 1964. And in 1964, the Civil Rights Voting Act is passed, and the parties undergo really a geographic switch-aroo on a 50 year basis. The Republican Party becomes the home of the neo-confederacy ideology, of the revanchist, anti-civil rights momentum, and the point on this is that these these political coalitions are fungible. They move. There has always been a no- nothing element, a nativist element in American life. Slavery was not a disputed moral issue at the time of the revolution. You had people, mostly from the north, who looked at their slaveholding fellow founding fathers with moral repugnance. were appalled by it, but it was expedient in the moment in time. So we go forward with the shifting political coalitions. The issues largely stay the same. We grow up in an era, where as a general proposition, the Democratic Party is the party of labor. The Democratic Party is the party of the working person. And what we've seen over recent years, really at a cultural level, and you can see it manifested in something like the Bud Light fiasco, where Red America, working class America, is deeply alienated from Democrats, culturally, but also economically. And the point of your column is to look at politics, to look at these labels, to look at these structures, where this is all projected into politics by the national media that looks at this very black and white, very linear, on a scale from left to right. And that's really not how it functions. Because at the core, like in all fights, there's a choice. Right? And it's like mommy and daddy are fighting, there's a divorce and everyone has to pick what side they're going to choose. And the fight is between Wall Street and your partners, because at the end of the day, Bob Iger, Ted Sarandos, they can't make anything without the actors, without the writers, without the directors, without the electricians, who bring all of this to life for the consumer and yet, they would rather starve their partners than alienate Wall Street. Whereas I say to you..
...it says that. As I said in the column, they're not nearly as progressive as they pretend to be. I think that that's, what's that saying about Hollywood that "Hollywood doesn't care about black or white? It just cares about green." And I think that that's the reality of what we're seeing. I mean, it was interesting when you were talking, Steve, and I actually was like, "Oh, I just want to sit back and listen to the show, instead of participating on the show, because you were on a roll." A couple of things that you nailed so perfectly. For example, isn't it that the Democrats are allegedly the party of labor, allegedly being the party of civil rights. And, you know, we started this conversation with you asking where my defiance comes from, and how I was very clear about the fact that as much as I spent so much of my youth wanting to run away from Texas, I'm so glad that's where I was born and bred. Because I think there is a real sense of challenging the status quo and the boxes that people try to put you in. I mean, for instance, I've long said that I thought I grew up a Democrat in Tom Delay's district in Texas until I moved to the East Village of New York and found out that there, they felt that I was basically a Republican, because they were like, "What are you talking about charter schools?" So, I think that we're here, where both parties have some work to do -- a lot of work to do. Because I've always been very clear that I would love to live for the day where a voter like me is considered the soccer mom vote of the year, you know, we're swing voters. I think that what Tim Scott represents, and particularly his willingness to really challenge DeSantis, on what's happening with the Florida curriculum, in terms of Black history speaks to the fact that there's opportunities in that party. And, you know, I think that this situation with the strike, still really speaks to Democrats either putting up or shutting up in terms of where their values are. The irony is here, you have this party that's been so chastised as being the party of Hollywood elites, and that's where they are. And it's like, well, it turns out, they actually are the party of the Hollywood elites. I just think a lot of us didn't realize how elite the party was -- that it really was only the elites who run the studios and networks. Not just the people that the Obamas attend parties with, who were Hollywood celebrities, that the people that it seems to me that democratic power brokers are so far not willing to call to the carpet, or the people who signed the checks for them as donors as people who produce their projects. There's not a single major studio head that Kamala Harris doesn't know, Steve, because that's how she built her political career. It started as California AG. There's not a single person in charge that she can't pick up the phone and talk to, but my read of it is, you know, is one of my friends who read my column and called and said, "You're so right. Where are the Democrats? What, you know, what, why aren't they saying anything?" I said, "Because I don't think they figured out how to chastise Bob Iger in the same phone call where they're gonna ask him for a big check. They haven't figured how to do it, they don't want to do it. And if that's how they're going to treat the people in Hollywood, who actually are more likely to donate to them, I understand why a voter in Michigan wouldn't trust them." I mean, who would trust them? So I am not particularly, I'm a fairly optimistic person. I'm not particularly hopeful for this election cycle because so far, it seems like both parties aren't exactly bringing their A game to the table, at least not in terms of the average voter. And that's a bummer. You know, as someone who cares about this country and very much cares about the process and cares about the fact that people who looked like me died to get the chance to vote, and this is the best our country can do. I mean, that's not a great statement on us right now.
I want to come back to that in a second. But I wanted to ask you about the fight, the strike itself. So at the beginning of any fight, there's a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of bravado. You know, if we were talking about guys, I'd be saying that the testosterone is flowing, that the energy is there. Everyone is out there six weeks later. Two months later, three months later, different story, right? This is hard every day to be on the picket lines to hold up, to not give in. And there are only two ways right to win a fight. You either bring your opponent to submission or they bring you to exhaustion. So perfect historical analogies, Japan and Germany are what submission looks like. Exhaustion is what the United States looks like after Vietnam, after Afghanistan. The cost of the fight is too much. So when you talk about "we'll starve them out," they're going to siege the WGA and the working actors until they break them financially. You break morale, you break. Well, now, what would typically happen, people don't understand psychologically. And this goes to the defiant streak is that when you bombed cities, for example, in World War 2, like London, instead of breaking morale, what it did is it hardened it. So what I wanted to ask you, is what is the morale on the picket line? In the fight? It's clear to me, as an observer of it that it's not ending any anytime soon, right?. It's going to the long haul. It also may be the case that UPS and the Teamsters are still on strike as you are. And my personal view is that the American labor movement is going to be fundamentally rehabilitated through this strike, because these issues around artificial intelligence are profound issues. What is the morale?
It's so interesting, what you said. So the first part of your description, I would say is/was accurate. It was what was starting to happen where I think, you know, the first couple of weeks, it was fun. I mean, running into people you haven't seen in a long time on the picket line, and lots of hugs. By the way, I don't know a single person in Hollywood, Steve, who hasn't been demeaned in some horrific way. It's just so entrenched and ingrained in the culture and in the business, that I think it really is just about us being taken advantage of financially. But every single one of us has a story. I mean, in my case, I remember being on a conference call with my lawyer and someone who was trying to cheat us in a deal that they signed. And the person said to my lawyer with me on the call, "What Keli Goff has to understand is that, in this town, she's a nobody." I hear his exact words, "she's a nobody in this town. And I know what you're both saying, and I still won't do it." And that's how people speak to you. And this doesn't matter how long you've been working, how many awards you've won. That is the mindset. So that's to say that the strike is about more than that, in the same way that Me Too was about more than Harvey Weinstein. It's women saying, "I'm mad as hell. I'm not going to take it anymore." And that's what's happening on the picket lines. What, you know, you're right. After a few weeks, a lot of that, like, kind of turned into, hey, you know, we're back here, again, picketing until the gift that keeps on giving -- that awful article where they said, "We can't wait for them to become homeless because then they'll come crawling back to the table." Oh, my god, the way people returned to that picket line in force, and to say, you know, words, I can't say on your podcast, but like that, to say that we're really going to stick it to the man says, they want to see children homeless, it reinvigorated us. Then having the actors join us on the picket line to where it's pushing people to a breaking point until they say the status quo will not hold. And I think what they weren't ready for, Steve, is, when you were talking about exhaustion, I think they didn't realize how many of us were exhausted already. You know, how many of us who had been demeaned so much by so many people in so many ways in this business, that staying on a picket line and having someone not return your calls? That's the easy part. What some of us have been put through by studios and networks and powerful people. That's the harder part. So I think they underestimated the will there. And one thing I know for certain is they are going to have a concern I'm already starting to hear, that they're worried they're going to not get some of these viewers back, particularly to late night shows. Those viewers have already started finding other ways to fill their time. "Barbenheimer, that phenomenon, proves that people want good old school content that they can watch on a movie screen. So they're gonna have to come up back to us at some point. Now, the reality is, despite the rosy picture I kind of painted is, not everyone's going to still be in the business by the time they come back to us. And that's unfortunate, but I do believe that at the end of the day, we, as in the creatives, will prevail. Because, as I like to say, Steve, everyone compares Hollywood to high school, you know, you got the jocks, you got the prom, queens, you got the nerds, the writers are the nerds. I compare it more to a car dealership, where you can't have more car salesmen on the floor, then you have cars. And you certainly can't have the people selling the cars earning significantly more than it costs to build the Ferrari. And you certainly can't have them coming in on a helicopter every day, not even knowing how a car works, and trying to sell a car. In Hollywood, the writers and the actors were the cars. So we're the ones who are actually necessary for the industry to run. It's the other guys who have just forgotten that. And the strike is reminding them of that.
Is there a recognition amongst the writers and actors, that you're on the backside of a golden age of television and creation, and streaming, where an extraordinary volume of what I think will be regarded as masterpieces of the genre, of film, that were rendered for the small screen, that this era just economically is coming to an end because it's not sustainable? Is there a broad recognition of that? Or do people on the picket line believe that things will kind of stay the same post-strike as the industry rolls forward and goes on?
It can't stay the same. I think there's a clear understanding that the industry as is is not working. I think the issue for debate is the analogy I just used, I think that the execs will tell you that there are too many cars, right? And not enough of them, that they're going to be the perception of Wall Street that that the person who used to be in a TNT, and who got into TV and film in the same way that billionaires by sports teams, they know nothing about that. They're not the problem, right? The players that they need to trade are always the problem. It's never them who's the problem once they fulfill their childhood dream of buying a sports team? It's the same mentality. I would actually say, though, Steve, if I'm being candid, that the question that we're probably not all in agreement on, even on a picket line, and I have friends who might view this differently, but I'm just gonna say from my perspective, I think the real question mark is when the Golden Age was. Some of the people who have mentored me in the business would say the Golden Age was Hill Street Blues, The Cosby Show, St. Elsewhere, where you had fabulous TV, but it was still a small enough business where you didn't have a lot of suits...
So we're talking those shows are 1980s, 84, 85, right?
And a lot of the shows that are still considered the gold standard, where you had Golden Girls, you've had all of these shows that were critically acclaimed. Cagney and Lacey. They won awards, that they could do storylines on things like abortion, and people's heads didn't explode. Television that was about something meaningful and special, but still entertaining, not polarizing. And there wasn't a lot of it. You'd have 22 episodes, 26 episodes on networks. And your audience wasn't divided between 400 different streamers and 400 different cable channels.
So there's a recognition that that's never coming back?
Right, exactly. So exactly. That's what I mean by splitting the difference because the kids younger than me, they would probably agree with you that the streaming era has been the golden age. But I'm not sure. I'm not sure -- maybe there needs to be a little bit of a reset in some capacity. And I'm not sure what that looks like, because I don't think I'm smart enough to formulate that as a business standpoint. But I would say that the version now where you have hundreds of pieces of content, some that are barely being sustained, budget wise and others where one person has been given $300 million. That model is sustainable.
I was in a town in Vietnam, Hoi An, a 15th century Dutch trading port. On the perfume river, a lot of bars, a lot of nightlife and we come up to this bar. There's an international crowd, watching a soccer game and there are Vietnamese women in their early 20s, and they're singing songs by "Four Non Blondes. You know, one of the things that makes America such a powerful country is America's culture, which is a wellspring of American freedom. It's admired all over the world. So are our creators, our artists, our singers, our writers, and our directors. They put America's face forward in a much better way, for example, than do America's politicians, as just a general proposition. When looking at this, when you think about the the issues in this strike, which are really the studios and Wall Street wanting to live in a world of the quarterly return, where 90 days is as far as the horizon will ever stay. And they want to take what's really, at its core, something that's connected to every person in the country at some level, as a consumer, and turn it into a widget business, and turn the writers and the actors and the artists into their version of a fast food worker who can be exploited to the maximum advantage. I think, for example, the Starbucks strike is a great harbinger of this, right? The proposition was, you're a Starbucks fast food worker, and the CEO calls you his partner, though you never get to ride on the private plane, or to ride or to enjoy in any of those perks, but you're the partner. You're making 15 bucks an hour, $13 an hour, wherever it may be. And you're a cog, dispensable, replaceable by a machine. And so the dignity of the society, whether it's the writers here, and the UPS drivers here, and the Starbucks people here, everybody, including teachers, and accountants and radiologists is increasingly in the same boat, as you can cut costs with intelligent machines to increase the return or profit to pay a CEO more by meeting a metric set by Wall Street that has no regard whatsoever for any human capital. That's not capitalism.
Yeah. Well, so first of all, you know, if we were in charge, you would have gotten an "amen," like as in the southern churches. I'm sure you visited a few on campaigns. Alright. So what I would say is, yes, and the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. I believe that, weirdly, one of the things that could help lead to a conclusion of this strike is the Barbie and Oppenheimer phenomenon. I finally saw Barbie with a screenwriter friend yesterday. And the fact that those are two films -- films that never could have been made by ChatGPT -- have become the phenomenon that they did, have become bigger phenomenons and some of the superhero films, more than the Mission Impossible film. It speaks to the fact that we're not as replaceable as widgets, as the executives thought before. I think that is actually the story that those films are getting so much coverage. Barbie is about to break a billion dollars worldwide. Greta Gerwig, who I'm a huge fan of, is really for all intents and purposes, she's like an old school screenwriter. And I mean that in the best sense of the term, you know, an Oscar-nominated traditionalist film, screenwriter, and now the most successful female film director in history. That doesn't get made by machines. And the success of those two films sends the message that we're not as replaceable as execs thought we were.
Have you seen Oppenheimer? Not yet.
Not yet. Next. I couldn't do all five hours combined.
It is a deep movie. Pretty, pretty amazing stuff. I have one other question that I wanted to ask you today. When I read about you, that I was totally fascinated by is your devotion to the Blackberry. How long did you go on with the Blackberry? You're not still using it, are you?
It is still on.
Can it receive messages?
No, but I have so many notes to myself in it. I was one of the last holdouts even when it was announced in the New York Times that they had shut down the service. I received condolence notes from people all over the world who know me, and mine still functioned for a couple of months. And Steve to tell you what a hold out I was, the way I found out it was no longer working, because they finally just gave up on trying to contact me because I wouldn't respond is that they just shut it off. And I found out from friends who started emailing and saying, I've been texting you. Where are you? That was how I found out that they shut it off.
Again, I think that the column that you wrote so perfectly encapsulates politics, and its realities, and the choices and in fact that it's not two teams. It's two powerful institutions that exist for the purposes of political power, that have to make accommodations and choices within their coalitions that tell us a lot over time about who those parties are, and what they stand for and what they believe. I thought it was a really sophisticated piece, and something that everybody should read. And we'll put it up on my Substack The Warning newsletter because this moment of politics is right at the edge of a massive disruption. Because the country, it comes back to this position of defiance. The country is saying to its political parties, and its political leaders, "we do not want the round peg you are delivering to us. We want the square one." And the powers that be say, "You're getting a round one. You're getting the Biden-Trump rematch in the country doesn't want it." What really unites people in this country, the national character, is defiance. And so any time you try to impose top down, particularly from a top down politics perspective, what's going to be, the country typically has a bad reaction to it. So it's going to be a very volatile, very uncertain, really crazy, and I think unpredictable year where a lot of things are going to happen that are different than the experts are telling us. I think one of the things that's happening right now, that is of huge importance to the type of American economy we're going to have, how people are going to live, how they're gonna work, how they're gonna get paid is this writer's strike that you're on. It's important. I know it's tough. Good luck out there. Just know that I think there are millions of people out there across the country, that are very much going to be affected by this. So hang tough today and in the days ahead. It's going to go on for a long while. Good to be with you. Thank you, Keli.
