Bob Iger, Ted Sarandos, and David Zaslav’s Bad-PR Summer

With Hollywood’s writers and actors on strike, studio bosses were obvious candidates to be cast as the villains. Some believe they played the role too well.

From Vanity Fair:

In the largest screening room on the MGM lot in 1933, Louis B. Mayer completed his transformation into a Marvel-worthy villain. As the Great Depression raged, he solemnly shared with top executives and stars that the studio was at risk of going belly up. Americans weren’t going to the movies, and MGM’s rivals were in a panic about a complete production shutdown. To save MGM — and really all of Hollywood — employees would need to take a 50% pay cut. “I, Louis B. Mayer, will work to see that you get back every penny when this terrible emergency is over,” the Scott Eyman biography Lion of Hollywood quotes him as saying.

Spoiler alert: They never got their money back. Mayer — on his way to becoming the highest-paid executive in America — received a bonus that year after MGM posted profits, and as Eyman writes, the actors and writers unions were born out of workers’ discontent over the industry-wide cuts.

Ninety years later, amid the first double strike in over 60 years, the titans of Hollywood are fighting a narrative that relatively little has changed, particularly as they have collected paychecks of eight figures or more. Though the struggle to establish new contracts with both the writers and actors is ongoing, the major studios may have already lost the optics war. “It’s been amazing to me how lopsided the PR battle has been,” says Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. “The actors and writers are sending in the Spartan hordes while Rome is crumbling, and you’ve got Bob Iger doing one of the biggest foot-in-mouth cases of any executive ever.”

It’s not just that during the strike, Bob Iger (Disney), David Zaslav (Warner Bros.), and Ted Sarandos (Netflix) have made tone deaf comments to the press, bad PR and all that. What’s really galling is their observations reflect how out of touch they are with the people who create stories … which is the product these C-suite moguls use to justify in their $25–50M annual CEO paydays.

Where is the empathy for workers? Where is the appreciation for creativity? Where is the sense of fairness?

After all, actors and writers simply want that: A fair deal.

That these business leaders appear to be incapable of wrapping their heads around the concept of “what is fair” demonstrates how far removed they are from reality and, as the Vanity Fair article suggests, could lead to “long-term damage” in the film and television business.

For the rest of the Vanity Fair article, go here.

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