Last weekend at New York Comic Con, during a panel on the anime series Robotech, speaker Kevin McKeever played a clip from a new documentary on the making of the groundbreaking show, mostly culled from interviews with the series’ American producers and voice actors. One anecdote that stuck out at me was that the voice actors constantly used pseudonyms in the credits because they were breaking union labor rules–the hours they worked, the pay received, it was all in violation of their actors’ guild’s regulations.

Stories like that always bring a tear to my eye. There’s nothing quite as stifling to art and creativity than arbitrary rules placed on artists by disinterested third parties, and labor unions are a major offender. Thus, it’s heartwarming to see union members rebel against their leaders because of the passion they have for a project–going the extra mile to make it an outstanding product and to make it feasible by charging less than their standard pay.

—–

That documentary’s story also stuck out to me because a recent Pitchfork interview with Anthony Gonzalez, frontman for the French electronica group M83, revealed a similar story, this time involving his newly-released double album “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming”:

Pitchfork: When I spoke with you last year, you said you were worried about having enough money to make a double album.

AG: We had a good budget to make a 10-track album with good sound, so we had to find ways [to stretch that out]. It was difficult. But [producer] Justin [Meldal-Johnsen] did an amazing job putting a lot of artists together who worked for no money, just because they were in love with the project. I always wanted to play with strings and brass, and Joseph Trapanese, who did the arrangements for the album, didn’t get paid. We didn’t put the real names of the string and brass players on the album because they’re part of a union, and it’s illegal to work for shitty money. They’re credited, but with fake names. [emphasis added]

(more…)

I went to University of Detroit’s Jesuit High School in Northwest Detroit.

Out of all my educational experiences, those formative four years were the best and the most enduring. Matched up against four years of the Ivy League at Dartmouth College and a year abroad in England on a Fulbright Scholarship, the Catholic experience was the deepest, the longest lasting and, in my opinion, the greatest contributor to a long – 70 years so far – and wonderfully rewarding life.

Here is an undeniably clear revelation of the growing divide between traditional America as seen in this Catholic Preparatory School, and the Obama Nation’s radically Leftist virulence poring out of union bullies and SEIU troublemaking.

Not only will the Progressive values of an Obama Nation leave our children and grandchildren holding a massive debt, those generations of Americans, increasingly influenced by The Obama Nation Value System, will be crippled and live a life of total dependence upon government and unions and eventually the devouring greed for power in a Progressive New World Order.

The Children of Obama will find no other recourse in life but increasing dependence upon the political and governing likes of Barack Hussein Obama, the SEIU and this cabal’s inner circle of CEO’s that are, like George Soros, “too big to fail”.

No one and nothing, from Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler to the Roman Empire, the Third Reich and World Communism have ever proven to be “too big to fail”.

(more…)

Thanks to Jack Webb’s inviting me to write for “Dragnet,” I became a proud member of the WGA back in the late 60s, but the honeymoon came to an unseemly end at a strike meeting a few years later.  Because the Guild had decided to try dividing the opposition by allowing independent production companies to keep their doors open during the strike, so long as they agreed to abide retroactively by the final contract, I, who was then employed by Talent Associates, found myself in the odd position of crossing a picket line in the morning and leaving my office to carry a picket sign from 3-4 in the afternoon.

At the strike meeting, someone had suggested that because a number of us would be gainfully employed for the duration of the work stoppage, we should have to kick in an additional 3% to the strike fund.  That seemed fair to me, so I raised my hand along with just about everyone else.

Then another writer suggested that because the networks would be using re-runs in order to keep product on the air, the same 3% levy should be placed on residual payments.  That seemed an equally fair notion.  This time, however, when I raised my hand, I found I was one of very few.

That was my initial wake-up call.  The second occurred during a strike meeting in the 80s, when our negotiating committee reported that we had come to terms on DVDs.  We were agreeing to accept 1.2% of producer’s gross.  Oh, and by the way, it would pertain only to movies produced after 1971.

When I saw Julius Epstein trudging up the aisle, it dawned on me that the Guild had just screwed him out of “Casablanca,” not to mention dozens of other Warner Brothers classics of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, that he’d co-scripted with his late brother, Phil.

Why, I wondered, hadn’t the Guild settled for, say, just 1% of producers gross, but insisted that the deal cover every movie going back to “The Great Train Robbery”?

(more…)

Ed. Note: Please welcome Ashley Sewell to Big Hollywood. Someone sent a link to her site and after a quick look I immediately asked if she would join our growing community. When you read what’s below, I think you’ll see why. — J.N.

I was in Austin Wednesday for the Texas Unions Day Off as they paraded around demanding state government keep its dirty paws off their pensions because, you know, we should keep cutting Child Support Programs and the Cancer Research & Prevention Institute so they can continue planning their retirement party in Jamaica, but whatever.

These two aren't going anywhere!

After the crowds dispersed to collect on the boxed lunch they were promised, I was approached by a guy who I immediately identified as a liberal, but not a union member (he wasn’t wearing a solid-color t-shirt, but he did reek of hipster).  We exchanged niceties and politely told each other what we did: I’m a conservative blogger and he works for Moveon.org.

Yah.

Niceties continued and he asked me if I’d mind taking a few minutes to speak with him on camera.  I believe both sides can engage in civil discussions and he was being very kind, so I agreed.

“What are some of your childhood Sesame Street memories?”
Um, what? Keeping up with the polite conversation, I answered about Elmo, Big Bird, counting – you know, Sesame Street stuff.

(more…)

Michael Moore quoting Thomas Jefferson to justify his Marxism is a true highlight. Let’s just hope he’s right about unions being on the ropes. No doubt the low-to-no turnout at his astro-turfed Michigan rally earlier this month has the mega-millionaire feeling a little gloomy.

(more…)

—–

Starts around the 3:25 mark: And it’s a great opportunity that this idiot [WI Governor Scott] Walker has given us to remember our strength and to remember that we are the many and they are the few; and even though they have the wealth, we have something which is as important if not more important. And so I came just to say thank you.

“They” have all the wealth?

Brother, that’s priceless.

If you watch the whole interview you’ll hear that Susan Sarandon is “spreading her vast wealth” by donating pizzas to the cause.  Oh, and she likely paid her own airfare to get a little face time by interjecting herself in a big story in front of tens of thousands of people. What a sacrifice for an actor.  

(more…)

Did Dr. Martin Luther King really give his life to protect the inherently corrupt system of Public Union collective bargaining? The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and whoever else is part of this April 4th AFL CIO “We-R-1″ protest– oops, I mean “Day of Action,” sure seems to think so. Below the fold, you’ll see their call to arms to keep the wretched process of corrupting our democracy alive. But first we go to the videotape!

—–

You see, this is how it works — at least how it works in my home state of Wisconsin:

1. Public Sector Unions give upwards of 90% of their political donations to help get Democrats elected.

2. With the help of all this public union money, Democrats get elected to local and state offices.

3. Guess who the Public Sector Unions then collective bargain with? That’s right, the very same people who they helped get elected. And guess what the elected Democrats give away in order to keep that union money coming into their campaign coffers? Taxpayer money! You want to retire at 55 with full pension and benefits? No problem. We’ll just raise the money by increasing the tax burden on the working class. Sure, that means private sector workers will have to work till their 70 due to the tax burden necessary to cover public worker pensions, but sometimes the “social justice” omelette requires a few broken eggs. 

4. And yet somehow, with all these “rights” and a salary and benefit package worth around $100k a year for nine months work, Milwaukee Public School teachers still manage to not educate their students.

Yeah, that’s what King gave his life for.

(more…)

Michael Moore tweeted the below just this morning…

Can’t blame the union-busting, multi-millionaire Moore for being unaware of these incidents. The same MSM that created a two week narrative out of a Tea Party N-word incident that never happened, has gone out of their way to almost completely ignore union thuggery, all of which I managed to compile below in just a half hour.

Don’t miss the last one — a livid Moore declaring, “This is war.” New tone, Michael? Anyway, please watch the below videos and correct your tweets. I don’t blame you for being unaware of your side’s use of violence, racism, lack of respect for law enforcement and over all intimidation tactics. I blame the media. **NSFW language**

Capuano to unions: You have ‘get a little bloody”: MyFoxBOSTON.com

(more…)

This is what I love about New Media. As Obama’s Palace Guards in media and entertainment have circled the wagons to protect the President from exploding gas prices, as they’ve attempted to spin the Wisconsin union debate into a “rights” issue and Peter King’s hearings into the rise of Islamic radicalism into a “bigotry” issue — New Media has been doing our own thing, creating a parallel narrative going after NPR and dismantling Michael Moore’s hypocrisy and lies piece by glorious piece. 

In the meantime, we won in Wisconsin, Obama finally had to address gas prices in his news conference today, NPR is taking on more water than the Titanic, King had his hearings, and Michael Moore’s now in day two of a fact-based blistering.

Today that blistering comes courtesy of Mary Katharine Ham over at the Daily Caller who destroys Moore’s lies, anti-logic and fuzzy math:

This week, Michael Moore offered a simple and elegant solution to our debt problem.

Calling the assets of wealthy Americans a “national resource,” he suggested our problems would all be solved if we could just have access to all that money.

“What’s happened is that we’ve allowed the vast majority of that cash to be concentrated in the hands of just a few people, and they’re not circulating that cash. They’re sitting on the money,” Moore said. “That’s not theirs, that’s a national resource, that’s ours. We all have this… we all benefit from this or we all suffer as a result of not having it.”

(more…)

Well, it looks as though Michael Moore’s had another not so good, very bad day.

After losing his collective (pun intended) mind last night on Rachel Maddow’s show over the all kinds of awesome drubbing Big Public Labor is taking across America, we here at Big Hollywood resurrected a 14 month-old ABC News story reporting on Michael Moore’s willingness to hire cheaper, non-union workers for his most recent film and deny them health care. From there, Governor Palin tweeted our story ’round the world, Michael Moore responded about as defensively as anyone could hope for (tee hee), and then later this evening the Governor and Sean Hannity reminded the world once again of Moore’s hypocrisy again on the Fox News Channel.

Michael Moore, last night you said “This is war!” and today you got your ass kicked because for once we agree on something.

(more…)

This morning at around 9:30am PST, I posted a flashback story written by ABC News in October of 2009 that revealed a more mercenary side of director Michael Moore the public never sees. My decision to post this was in reaction to the populist director’s appearance on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow last night, where he made something of a fool of himself whipping out a pair of handcuffs. “This is war!” he thundered, and then went on to predict that those in Wisconsin and Michigan currently using the legislative process to put an end to budget-busting collective bargaining, would eventually find themselves in handcuffs. 

Well, according to ABC News, Moore was found to have made the choice to hire non-union crew while filming his flop “Capitalism: A Love Story.” Worse still, those non-union personnel didn’t receive health care benefits … from, you know, the multi-millionaire director of “Sicko” — an incredibly dishonest (albeit entertaining) propaganda film calling for Cuba-style socialized medicine here in America.

A little after 10AM, Governor Sarah Palin tweeted out the story and asked a very good question:

—–

And now we get to the fun part. Would anyone like to argue that what you’ll see below — Michael Moore’s series of desperate tweets over the last couple of hours, doesn’t represent a form of damage control in reaction to the former-Governor Tweeting our timely resurrection of the ABC News story? (And I have yet to mention this story about Moore pressuring his writers not to join the WGA.)

(more…)

With the spotlight on Wisconsin’s union thugs rampaging across the state, one wonders why it took propaganda filmmaker Michael Moore so long to put himself in front of the news cameras to take some of their publicity for himself. But this weekend, Moore finally glommed onto the cameras making himself out to be a great supporter of the union’s efforts in the Badger State. Once again, though, Moore proves to be a hypocrite. It was Moore, after all, that excluded using union workers in one of his recent films. Some supporter of unions!

Filmmaker Moore attend a recent Wisconsin pro-union rally and regaled the crowd with an address saying, “Madison is only the beginning.”

“We’re going to do this together. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up,” Moore told the protesters, who have swarmed the Capitol every day for close to three weeks.

Oh, he’s a great supporter, right? But let us drift back only a few years to 2009 when he was filming his last bomb, Capitalism: A Love Story. During that production we found that Moore didn’t hire union stagehands (the IATSE) for his film.

According to his agent, Ari Emanuel, Moore claimed that he used non-union labor because the stagehands union doesn’t “respect documentary filmmakers” or some such thing.

It made the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) mad enough that they refused all the free tickets Moore tried to offer them when the movie debuted. Yet here are these teachers in Wisconsin now falling all over themselves because Moore came publicity seeking in front of them. For shame that their institutional memory is so shallow, eh?

(more…)

I think he’s wrong about some of these things, I just can’t tell you why. – David Letterman

This is two days in a row where a glib, lefty comedian has taken off his clown nose, engaged in a serious debate with someone from our side they disagree with politically and found themselves caught off guard by a prepared presentation of facts and logic.  Wednesday it was Jon Stewart being schooled by Donald Rumsfeld on the Iraq War and last night a calm, cool, and educated Senator Rand Paul gave David Letterman a terrific lesson on the basics of economics…

—–

Like Jon Stewart, you have to give Letterman credit for his willingness to seriously engage on this issue. You just have to wonder how long that will last if our side keeps presenting our ideas so well. Will the clown nose and cheap shots return soon?

What is great, though, is that thanks to Secretary Rumsfeld and Senator Paul’s willingness to enter the hostile territory of popular culture, a whole new audience has been exposed to a range of ideas unheard of on these shows before. Instead of our worldview simply being ridiculed or marginalized as punchlines, it’s being presented in reasonable and even attractive ways.

If Letterman and Stewart want to expand their audience; having more of our political stars on, engaging them on the issues, but doing so with this kind of respect would be an excellent way to go about it. 

(more…)

—–

That’s not very pretty. Any word from the ASPCA?

Maybe next week, Jon Stewart can melt a penguin in the Sahara for big chuckles.

Weekly Standard:

Who knew that an animal indigenous to the Middle East couldn’t walk on snow and ice in the Midwest? Local firefighters eventually rescued the camel. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that the Daily Show didn’t use any footage of the camel in its Tuesday night broadcast.

Update: If I’m not mistaken, it appears that Daily Show correspondent John Oliver walks in front of the camera at one point and urges the man shooting the video to turn it off. Censorship!

(more…)

This week, the Screen Actors Guild emailed all of its members, asking them to support the union protests in Wisconsin threatening to shut down large segments of the state’s public services.  SAG explained to its constituents, “Please know that your Guild is taking action to support our fellow union members in Wisconsin.  We are reaching out to our members in and around Wisconsin and our legislative committee members to travel to Madison this week so that working families there know that we stand with them.” 

It is beyond ridiculous for SAG to pretend to be a working class union.  It is not.  It is a small cadre of people who work for incredibly high pay, and who shut everyone else out of the business.  SAG doesn’t even release its employment figures or its healthcare figures.  It’s great to be a member of SAG, if you can get work.  But it’s difficult to become a member of SAG, and it’s more difficult to stay a member of SAG, since you aren’t allowed to work as a performer for any producer who doesn’t have a blanket agreement with SAG.  This is one reason why productions are moving overseas, to countries where SAG doesn’t dominate the negotiations.

This isn’t unusual in Hollywood.  The Writers Guild works the same way.  As of 2007, just 52 percent of West Coast Writers Guild of America members are employed.  The average working WGA member takes home about $200,000 per year.  The rest of the writers in Hollywood wait tables or take non-union jobs to make ends meet. 

This isn’t to argue that unions or guilds aren’t necessary in Hollywood.  In some cases, they are (for example, I supported the WGA strike over pay for online content).  But for them to pose as representatives of the people is simply absurd, especially when they use their members’ cash for causes like this. 

Then there’s the problem of private vs. public unions.  You would imagine that SAG and the WGA would support Scott Walker’s attempt to break the public unions – after all, they’re taxpayers in their own right, and when they collectively bargain, they do so with private employers, not with the government.  Where public unions attempt to bilk taxpayers of their cash by striking without regard to the fact that they create zero profits, private unions supposedly strike in order to centralize a larger chunk of the profits they create.  Private unions and public unions are as different as night and day.

(more…)

Below is an email generated by the Screen Actors Guild to “SAG Members” that was leaked to Big Hollywood. We’ve gone ahead and emphasized what we found the most interesting. Is collective bargaining enshrined in law?  How many astro-turfed actors will show up in Madison to protest Governor Scott Walker? Will Sean Penn bring his shotgun? Will Oliver Stone bring his Uncle Hugo? Will Danny Glover bring the batshit crazy? Will Richard Dreyfus bring the new tone? Will Whoopi bring her Oscar? Will Jon Stewart demand everyone shut up and protest according to his speech rules?  Help is on the way, Wisconsin!

Dear Screen Actors Guild Member,

You may have seen or heard news reports about the large rallies in support of union workers taking place in Madison, Wisconsin over the last week. You may have asked yourself why tens of thousands of working people are protesting, or why you should care.

Here’s why what is happening in Wisconsin could have far-reaching consequences for you and union workers across the country. The crowds are protesting because Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has introduced a proposal that will strip most collective bargaining rights from public workers in Wisconsin. And it is believed that if this action succeeds in Wisconsin, these kinds of anti-union efforts may spread across the country and ultimately could affect labor organizations like Screen Actors Guild.

The right of working people to join together and collectively bargain is enshrined in law. It is fundamental to unionism and allows working people to choose to have a common voice on wages and working conditions in their industries. Screen Actors Guild was formed in 1933 for exactly that reason: to negotiate with the powerful Hollywood studios to ensure fair treatment for actors. We believed in collective bargaining then, and we believe in it today.

(more…)

Okay, that ices it.  I was going to keep quiet about this.  But they’ve gone and done it now.  For roughly thirty years I’ve been a member of the Screen Actors Guild.  I remember back when it was rumored that you couldn’t get an agent unless you were in SAG.  And if you didn’t have a SAG-franchised agent you couldn’t work.  Only problem was – you had to get an acting job to get into SAG.  But you couldn’t get and acting gig unless you were already in SAG.  Thank God I’d seen the movie ‘CATCH 22’…or the whole thing might not have made any sense to me.

Fortunately, they had a provision around all that, the Taft-Hartley act.  If you could talk some producer into hiring you, even though you weren’t yet SAG, you could work.  The producer paid some sort of stipend fine (something like $100) and you sign a thing saying you’re joining SAG and you got your card – and everyone was happy.   Back then the one-time payment to join was $365 – for me at the time, a small fortune.  (I understand the entry fee is in the thousands now.) 

I remember when I got my SAG card in the mail, after I’d gone through the above-mentioned calisthenics.  I was ecstatic.  This, then, was corroborating proof that I was indeed a professional Actor, capital-A.  I had arrived and the world was about to be turned on its ear.  Look out, here’s Gary Graham coming to Hollywood to rip it up!

Well, I’ll leave it to the historians to determine the degree to which I’ve ‘ripped it up’, but that began my long association with the venerable Screen Actors Guild.  And initially – I loved it.  I voted in the elections.  I read the high-quality full-color-glossy monthly newsletter.  I followed union politics, strike votes, no-strike votes… and of the attendant in-fighting.   I was an actor’s union wonk.

So…why, 20 years later, would I quit SAG? (more…)

According to our friends at NewsBusters, on June 25th, a pro-life group called Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust were peacefully protesting outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood when a crew from the Jimmy Kimmel Show arrived to do some filming. The pro-life youth activists weren’t in the film crew’s way — whatever they were shooting was across the street — but then for no reason other than to be ideologically sadistic, the crew turned a hot spotlight on Ryan Bueler, one of the young protesters. Bueler refused to be intimidated and for 15 minutes stood under a light hot enough to partially melt a bracelet he was wearing. This video is unbelievable:

—–

Well, welcome to Hollywood, where celebrity and those who surround them trump justice, because it wasn’t the goons who tortured the kid the police arrested, it was Survivors’ founder Jeff White. He was eventually released but as of now no charges have been pressed against the real thugs in this case.

Looking for an apology, the pro-life group’s now trained their protests on Jimmy Kimmel. Fair enough. He’s the boss. But my guess is that this crew is part of a union and as we’ve seen since our President urged his followers to “get in their face,” there’s a thuggish union mentality out there that seems more emboldened by the day.

Word to the wise: If the Survivors plan to demand an apology from the union, they might want to hire an army to protect them.   (more…)

My girlfriend and I drove the hour down to Beverly Hills to catch the education documentary, The Lottery. It ran for just seven days in the Los Angeles area, which boasts one of the least performing school districts in the country, with a fifty percent dropout rate in some parts of the district.

It was a bit ironic that the theatre would be in Beverly Hills, where the choices for parents seem to be what Lexus or BMW to buy their children for their first car. Beverly Hills High is among the best public schools in the country because it is effectively private, thanks to stratospheric the real estate prices. You can imagine their thinking: Lotteries are for poor people, thank you very much. 

—–

Beverly Hills High was the scene of a recent school reform battle, where Beverly Hills decided that those living adjacent to the town can’t attend the school system anymore.  A friend, former Sen. Feinstein intern, and editor of the far-left magazine on my campus found a way around it – her parents rented an apartment in Beverly Hills so that her younger brother could attend illegally. To her credit, she changed her position so that she could square being a Democrat and in favor of school choice.

I don’t blame her, but does indicate the kind of contorting that progressives do to escape the school system that their union allies run. It’s a contortion that some black Democrat politicians – notably Mayor Cory Booker of Newark – are making with increased regularity. In a shocker of shockers, Booker says that more money won’t solve the problem of failing schools. Good for him. (more…)