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The director also gave details of the “existential problem” facing the book: “Nobody’s going to survive doing it.”
Judd Apatow believes that the studios and broadcasting companies already have an idea of when the writers’ strike will end.
“I think they probably already know what they’re going to lean on,” Apatow said. diverse Saturday’s feature at Rock4EB in Malibu. “I suppose they already know the date when this will end. They may have been planning this for years.”
The writer-director reversed comments heard on picket lines in Los Angeles and New York after talks broke out between the Writers Guild of America, the Motion Picture and Television Producers Alliance, and the Writers Union. The strike began on Tuesday. Apatow explained that he sees the strike as a calculated business move by Hollywood’s largest employers.
“I always think that whatever happened, they could have already figured it out. When this stuff is over, you never go, ‘I understand why it took this long.’ It’s never something innovative and cool where you think, ‘Oh, people needed “It’s always a very obvious situation,” Apatow said. “So the scary thing about it is that there is a solution but I’m not sure all the business interests are interested in getting there quickly.”
While Apatow doesn’t currently have any projects in production that are directly affected by the strike, he does share that the deadlock “affects everything because we’re developing a lot of things, so you just have to stop … Then once the strike is over, everyone says, ” Oh, now we have a backlog, we don’t need anything.”
“That aspect of it complicates everything we try to do,” Apatow continued. “We’re not in the middle of anything other than writing.”
Studios and broadcasters don’t treat writers as essential parts of their endgames, Apatow says. “We’re like the people of Twitter,” he said, “If they want to save money, they get rid of 80 percent of the workforce.” For this reason it is an existential problem. If the book ecosystem didn’t exist, no one would learn how to do it. No one would survive doing that. And then everybody’s going to say, “Okay, maybe I’ll write video games, maybe I’ll make TikToks at home and become an influencer.” Lots of creative people can do other things. So you don’t want the whole system to collapse.”
The growing part of the financial pie that the WGA is asking for is not about being greedy and trying to get rich, he said.
“We now have a system that does not reward success on many of these projects,” Apatow said. “If you make something and a billion people see it, you don’t make more money than if it’s a disaster, right? It’s not good for creativity because it takes away a lot of incentive for creators, because people work so hard to create some kind of protection for their lives. All our work ebbs and flows. Successes pay for time.” Where things don’t go well.Sometimes they go well and sometimes they don’t, but you can live from the time you wrote something that had a lot left over [fees paid out]. It has always been a shaky profession. But if you take away most of the essentials, this is a profession that the majority of people cannot survive.”
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