Actors/Writers Strike
“Nothing happens until something is sold” is an adage I learned as a young man. I’m fairly certain that some will disagree but it has a pretty firm foundation……at least for the purposes of this post.
There are people who create stuff but don’t know what to do with it. Oh, you can sell it to your friends if they’re good friends who have a spare dollar or two. Or you can sell to your family members if you’re not currently feuding with them. But that’s hardly a sustainable plan for a successful future.
“Sales” is currently one of the highest paid professions. It’s a specialty that requires an outgoing personality, skill, determination, and self discipline. Most people don’t have all of those qualities and hardly any creators do. Creators want to spend their time……well….creating. Entertainers need to practice/rehearse. Finding gigs is hard and requires time they consider better spent.
Sales people need stuff to sell. They don’t invent, manufacture, or create in any substantive manner. But if you give them the right product or service they can work wonders. As a musician/recording artist I get bombarded daily with offers to help me become a star……for a fee of course.
The entertainment that you and I enjoy comes to us via collaboration between writers/composers, performers, various technical folks (these people are amazing wizards), and sales. For every concert you attend or movie you watch there is a bunch of people behind the scenes making it possible. The problem is when some people get greedy and things get out of balance.
The music business has been rife with this since the beginning. Record companies and promoters have taken advantage of artists often to their own detriment. Some of these people would butcher the goose that lays the golden egg just to have a nice Sunday dinner.
It would appear that this is what’s going on in Hollywood currently. Actors, other than the biggest stars in hit productions, are just working stiffs. They don’t get paid big bucks and they don’t get paid often. For them it’s a “gig” lifestyle. The same for writers. And yet, without them there would be no production. So when a show is a hit and the majority of actors on that hit still have to keep a day job while the studio (sales team) lives in the lap of luxury……..well the goose isn’t dead yet, but it definitely has a fever.
And none of these people would have any kind of a job if someone didn’t write the stories. The usually fertile imaginations of these folks generally keep us entertained for many hours every day. If your affluence depended on their creativity why would you underpay them? I would pamper them in hopes that they will continue to crank out wonderful stuff.
I hope, for the sake of my friends in the movie/tv industry that things get properly settled in Hollywood. I would love to see them back to work and earning a proper living.
Perhaps I’m just being naive and that’s why I’m just stumbling along hoping to make the next mortgage payment. I don’t understand these things as well as I should and I’m not very good at selling. By the way, have you visited www.rogerhumphrey.com/store yet? (Can’t blame a guy for trying)
