The end of summer is in sight, but it seems like the end of corporate greed couldn’t be further away. Indeed, while members of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA continue the picket line battle, the AMPTP and studio executives have remained steadfast in their promise to not budge until creatives started losing their homes, if you needed an example of just how bleak the future of entertainment is starting to look.
There are champions out there who remain standing, such as A24, the independent arthouse studio who received an “interim agreement” from SAG-AFTRA to continue filming independent projects so long as they honor the guild’s terms (and if A24 can afford to do that, then the stinginess from giants like Universal or Disney are even more abhorrent), or, more recently, Michael Mann, the storied filmmaker who’s taking more than a bit of pride in releasing his new, independent film – the biopic Ferrari, which focuses on the life of Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari – from an independent studio during these times.
In a recent interview with Variety, Mann had some choice words for the current state of affairs regarding the gestating strikes, touching on the cold, hard, trite truth about writers being underpaid while shouting out Ferrari scribe Troy Kennedy Martin, who Mann credits as having provided his film’s “beating heart.”
It’s truly appropriate that it is an independent film being distributed by Neon, a very independent distributor. I think that the struggle is kind of late-stage capitalism. Writers are massively underpaid — even top feature-film writers. Troy and the screenplay, I changed it around quite a bit. But the absolute foundation and the beating heart of this movie is what Troy did.
Considering how steeped the Heat mastermind is in the crime genre, it’s no wonder he can sniff out when something isn’t quite right. At the end of the day, though, these strikes will necessarily have to end in compromise, and we can only hope that that will ultimately involve a big step forward for the treatment of creatives in Hollywood.
Ferrari releases to theaters on Christmas Day.