The Businessmen Broke Hollywood
And now they don’t want to pay their employees.
The Hollywood machine—from script writing, to shooting and production, to late-night talk-show PR—has officially ground to a halt.
On Thursday, the actors went on strike. The 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, led by Fran Drescher, the fearless sitcom nanny, stopped working after talks with the studios collapsed. They join the ranks of the Writers Guild of America, whose members (myself included) have been on strike since May.
Our two unions have not been on strike together since 1960. The writers’ pickets at shooting locations had already shut down an estimated 80 percent of productions.
