Hello, I Must Be Going
I’ve been gone for a while. Did you miss me? I was on a deadline, writing a story for a magazine, a piece of historical fiction. (A CIA critic called The Devil’s Chessboard, my book about the nefarious spy agency, a splendid work of fiction, bless him.) The magazine paid me good money for my creative work. Squarespace does not. Guess who comes first? Like you, I have bills to pay.
This brings up the current Writers Guild of America strike. I don’t belong to the entertainment union, but I feel I have a dog in this fight, as a professional writer. Not just because my father, Lyle Talbot, was a founder of the Screen Actors Guild. Then, too, the studios tried to crush the union and took vengeful measures against the labor activists. I was glad to hear that actors like Maya Rudolph and Jeff Bridges suspended production of their hit series, in solidarity with the writers’ union. The Hollywood unit of the Teamsters has also sometimes honored the WGA picket lines.
Among the goals of the striking writers is better-crafted movies and TV shows. And that’s something that all of us entertainment consumers can get behind. Streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon and Apple don’t give a damn about creativity. If they could replace the writers with robots to churn out their increasingly banal and formulaic “entertainment,” they gladly would. Big Tech is taking over Hollywood, and let me tell you from the wasteland of San Francisco, it won’t be pretty if the forces of profits and “progress” defeat the humanoids, I mean the writers.
I was thinking about the plight of the Hollywood writers a lot this weekend, because two well-written TV shows I watch came to an end, Succession and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. We know a lot about the talented actors who play the leads in those shows, but we know little or nothing about the writers who dream up their lines and made the shows so compelling in their very different ways. (Btw, the Succession finale got all the ink, but I found this last season of Mrs. Maisel surprisingly funny -- and bittersweet – including the final episode.)
So, let’s hear it for the unsung heroes, the writers. Without their imagination, our lives would be dreary.
Speaking of which, didn’t you miss me?