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      in Movies

      Film and TV Writers on Strike Picket Outside Hollywood Studios

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      Those in picket lines at the headquarters of companies like Netflix were critical of working conditions that have become routine in the streaming era.Ellen Stutzman, a senior Writers Guild of America official, stood on a battered patch of grass outside Netflix headquarters in Los Angeles. She was calm — remarkably so, given the wild scene unfolding around her, and the role she had played in its creation.“Hey, Netflix! You’re no good! Pay your writers like you should!” hundreds of striking movie and television writers shouted in unison as they marched outside the Netflix complex. The spectacle had snarled traffic on Sunset Boulevard on Tuesday afternoon, and numerous drivers blared horns in support of a strike. Undulating picket signs, a few of which were covered with expletives, added to the sense of chaos, as did a hovering news helicopter and a barking dog. “Wow,” a Netflix employee said as he inched his car out of the company’s driveway, which was blocked by writers.In February, unions representing 11,500 screenwriters selected Ms. Stutzman, 40, to be their chief negotiator in talks with studios and streaming services for a new contract. Negotiations broke off on Monday night, shortly before the contract expired. Ms. Stutzman and other union officials voted unanimously to call a strike, shattering 15 years of labor peace in Hollywood, and bringing the entertainment industry’s creative assembly lines to a grinding halt.“We told them there was a ton of pent-up anger,” Ms. Stutzman said, referring to the companies at the bargaining table, which included Amazon and Apple. “They didn’t seem to believe us.”The throng started a new chant, as if on cue. “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! This corporate greed has got to go!”Similar scenes of solidarity unfolded across the entertainment capital. At Paramount Pictures, more than 400 writers — and a few supportive actors, including Rob Lowe — assembled to wave pickets with slogans like “Despicable You” and “Honk if you like words.” Screenwriting titans like Damon Lindelof (“Watchmen,” “Lost”) and Jenny Lumet (“Rachel Getting Married,” “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”) marched outside Amazon Studios. Acrimony hung in the air outside Walt Disney Studios, where one writer played drums on empty buckets next to a sign that read, “What we are asking for is a drop in the bucket.”Another sign goaded Mickey Mouse directly: “I smell a rat.”But the strike, at least in its opening hours, seemed to burn hottest at Netflix, with some writers describing the company as “the scene of the crime.” That is because Netflix popularized and, in some cases, pioneered streaming-era practices that writers say have made their profession an unsustainable one — a job that had always been unstable, dependent on audience tastes and the whims of revolving sets of network executives, has become much more so.The streaming giant, for instance, has become known for “mini-rooms,” which is slang for hiring small groups of writers to map out a season before any official greenlight has been given. Because it isn’t a formal writers room, the pay is less. Writers in mini-rooms will sometimes work for as little as 10 weeks, and then have to scramble to find another job. (If the show is greenlit and goes into production, fewer writers are kept on board.)“If you only get a 10-week job, which a lot of people now do, you really have to start looking for a new job on day one,” said Alex Levy, who has written for Netflix shows like “Grace and Frankie.” “In my case, I haven’t been able to get a writing job for months. I’ve had to borrow money from my family to pay my rent.”Lawrence Dai, whose credits include “The Late Late Show with James Corden” and “American Born Chinese,” a Disney+ series, echoed Ms. Levy’s frustration. “It feels like an existential moment because it’s becoming impossible to build a career,” he said. “The dream is dead.” More

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      Hollywoods Newest Stars? Nike, BlackBerry and Cheetos.

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      A new spate of films stars not people but consumer products.Your standard-issue Hollywood biopics foreground people caught in the wheels of history. We meet titans of industry, genius mathematicians, brave astronauts and dogged journalists. We hear stories of fearless, unyielding figures whose visions changed the world. Some, like presidents and generals, already know their own importance; others still think they’re ordinary. But the stories generally revolve around people and events, showing us how laws were changed, wars won, villains defeated.Lately Hollywood has landed on an effective variant: Hey, remember this old thing?This type of film is not new, precisely, but this spring is staggeringly replete with examples. “AIR,” directed by Ben Affleck, tells the story of Nike’s game-changing sponsorship deal with a rookie Michael Jordan and the world-conquering shoes that emerged from it. “Tetris” does the same for the titular video game, which farsighted 1980s capitalists managed to license from the Soviet state. “BlackBerry” offers a raucous, satirical history of the Canadian tech company whose cellphone went extinct. And then there’s “Flamin’ Hot,” a drama about the former Frito-Lay employee who claims — highly dubiously, according to Los Angeles Times reporting — to be the creator of the addictively spicy red-dusted Cheetos.These movies are not about people or events that changed our scientific or political reality; they are interested in men (and yes, I do mean just men) who changed our consumer reality. The protagonists here are white-collar functionaries who carry leather briefcases to work. They are corporate middle managers and marketers and brand gurus. They scream into phones, scrutinize contracts and sift through webs of licenses and sublicenses. Their world isn’t always depicted as glamorous; “AIR” has Matt Damon don a fat suit to play a schlubby, basketball-obsessed divorcé. But these are stories in which businessmen are the heroes. They are the people who got the job done, if the job was selling millions upon millions of units to grow a major corporation’s market share.Yet it’s not even right to say these brand-o-pics focus on the men. They are, above all, centered on the objects. Movies have told the stories of market-movers before, but Hollywood’s most recent biopics of Steve Jobs were not called “iPhone 1” and “iPhone 2.” Ray Kroc’s franchising of McDonald’s is dramatized in a movie called “The Founder,” not “Big Mac.” It’s in these new movies that the consumer product itself truly becomes the star around which human stories revolve. Their cumulative mood is resolutely frothy: poppy 1980s bops, eight-bit graphics, white-collar sharks gnawing on the geeks. For any child of the era, this is yet another casual stroll down memory lane — one in which, yet again, memory lane is flanked by endless billboards of retro brands. The objects in these films, after all, are not just products; they signify a specific slice of a time, perhaps a specific type of childhood. Like all brands these days, they are signposts we use to navigate the world, orienting ourselves socially, signaling our identities. They are interested in people who make the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more.This experience of consumption is precisely what the films promise audiences. In both “BlackBerry” and “AIR,” the executives are consciously trying to tap into questions of consumer desire and identity. “AIR” could even be seen as an origin story for the very concept of brand-as-identity, an innovation it seems to admire. “BlackBerry,” shot in vérité style, is more sour on the idea. Glenn Howerton plays Jim Balsillie, depicted here as the raging id of the company, barking orders at his sales force: “You’re not salesmen anymore,” he says. “You’re male models. I want you at every country club, yacht club, tennis club. Wherever the elite go, you go!” The phone’s function is no longer the point. “When they ask you, don’t say, ‘It’s a phone that does email,’” he says. “It’s not a cellphone — it’s a status symbol.”Writing in Playboy in early 2014, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek mused on our experience of brands and “the mysterious je ne sais quoi that makes Nike sneakers (or Starbucks coffee).” I don’t know whether Ben Affleck ever read that article, but there’s a strange level on which his film repeats, again and again, something Zizek imagined about Nike. If such a company were to outsource production to overseas contractors, design to design firms, advertising to ad agencies and distribution to retailers, what would be left? “Nike would be nothing ‘in itself,’” Zizek wrote. “Nothing other than the pure brand mark ‘Nike,’ an empty sign.” In “AIR,” it is Damon’s character — Sonny Vaccaro, a marketing executive — who finds a new answer. His radical idea is to commit the entire basketball budget to Jordan. Nike, he says, must tap into something deeper, to turn a shoe into a man and a man into a shoe. The vice president of marketing is puzzled: “You want to anthropomorphize a shoe?” The film leaves it to Jordan’s mother, played by Viola Davis, to underline how that’s done: “A shoe is just a shoe,” she says, “until my son steps into it.” “BlackBerry” is caustic, while “AIR” is, ultimately, a feel-good celebration of the brand-identity revolution that changed sports forever. “Tetris” feels more confused. (We watch Henk Rogers become a millionaire by getting the Soviets to license some handheld-gaming rights, but whether Nintendo or someone else gets them feels more meaningful to Rogers than to consumers.) While watching each of the three films, though, I found myself thinking about the words etched on the backs of so many devices: “Designed by Apple in California/Assembled in China.” Each of these stories is interested in the inventors and innovators who create the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more. In “AIR,” the only real acknowledgment of this comes from that vice president of marketing, who expresses mild ambivalence about Nike’s factories in Taiwan and South Korea — a confusing gesture in a movie about a company that, in 1998, had its real-life chief executive lament that it had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.” This year, in Michigan, Times reporting found underage factory workers who said inhaling the dust from producing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos left their lungs stinging. Feelings about this spring’s eruption of brand flicks have been mixed. In The Wall Street Journal, Joe Queenan called this spate of product bios “great news,” expressing hope that “AIR” might open the door for more footwear-origin stories. (Why not Uggs or Birkenstocks?) In the opposite ideological corner, you’ll find Boots Riley, the leftist musician and filmmaker (“Sorry to Bother You”), arguing on Twitter that commodity flicks are Hollywood’s effort to “push back on radicalization of the working class.” It’s certainly possible that these movies expose something vapid about our consumer society — say, our readiness to attach our humanity to empty slogans or to praise “visionaries” whose vision isn’t about fighting injustice or reaching the stars but merely selling us tons of plastic.Still: All these brand films, and all the reviews of them, seem to acknowledge the same point. The day-to-day texture of our lives, they suggest, may be dictated less by brave explorers or crusading lawyers and more by people with office jobs who make products and then make us want to buy them — people whose decisions shape our habits, our choices, our sense of ourselves. The part these films do not yet fully agree on is whether this fact is worth celebrating or deeply depressing.Source photographs: Apple TV+; Amazon Studios; William West/AFP, via Getty Images. More

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      in Television

      Why There Is Talk of a Writers’ Strike in Hollywood

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      TV and movie writers want more money, but Hollywood companies say the demands ignore economic realities. The deadline to sort out those differences is approaching.Television and movie writers want raises, saying that Hollywood companies have taken unfair advantage of the shift to streaming to devalue their work and create worsening working conditions.The companies bristle at the accusation and say that, while they are willing to negotiate a new “mutually beneficial” deal with writers, the demands for an entirely new compensation structure ignore economic realities.Whether the sides can settle their differences will determine if the entertainment industry can avoid its first writers’ strike in 15 years.Unions representing more than 11,000 television and movie writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood’s nine largest studios, including Amazon and Apple, began talks on March 20 for a new three-year contract. The current agreement expires on May 1.The Writers Guild of America, West, and the Writers Guild of America, East, have the strength to bring Hollywood to a halt if they do not get a deal to their liking. Chris Keyser, a co-chair of the W.G.A. negotiating committee, said in an interview that this moment for writers was “existential.”“The industry is almost always unfair to labor,” Mr. Keyser said. “This time it’s broken — it’s actually broken.”Here is what you need to know:Will there be a strike?No outcome is certain, but little in the posturing so far suggests an easy resolution. Producers have begun to stockpile scripts by asking writers to complete as many ahead of the May 1 deadline as possible.The negotiations will likely be acrimonious given the seismic changes in the industry. The rapid transition to streaming entertainment has upended nearly every corner of Hollywood, and writers believe they have been left behind.Unlike directors and actors, writers have historically been willing to strike. The most recent strike stretched from 2007 into 2008, lasting 100 days. One in 1988 dragged on for five months. A walkout must first be authorized by union members; the W.G.A. has signaled that it could conduct a vote as early as the first week in April.Authorization gives the union leverage, but it does not mean a strike is inevitable. In 2017, writers overwhelmingly gave the go-ahead for a strike (with 96 percent of the vote). The sides ultimately reached an agreement a few hours before the first pickets hit studio sidewalks.The entrance to NBC Studios in Manhattan.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHow would a strike affect audiences?There will be a gradual halt in the production of many television shows, except for reality and news programs, which would be mostly unaffected.Viewers will notice the fallout first among entertainment talk shows, including “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” If a strike lasts several weeks, “Saturday Night Live” would not be able complete its season. Soap operas, already on viewership life support, would run out of new episodes after about a month.Plenty of high-profile TV series have coming seasons that are already finished. But premieres for fall series like “Abbott Elementary” would be delayed by a monthslong strike, and viewers would begin to notice fewer scripted TV series by the end of the year. Reality and international shows will start to run in heavy rotation.Moviegoers would not experience immediate effects; movie studios work about a year ahead, meaning that almost everything planned for 2023 has already been shot. The risk involves 2024, especially if studios rush to beat a strike by putting films into production with scripts that aren’t quite ready.The offices of the Writers Guild of America West in Los Angeles.Andrew Cullen for The New York TimesWhat are the writers’ complaints?Every three years, the writers’ union negotiates a contract with the major studios that establishes pay minimums and addresses matters such as health care and residuals (a type of royalty), which are paid out based on a maze of formulas.And though there has been a boom in television production in recent years (known within the industry as “Peak TV”), the W.G.A. said that the median weekly pay for a writer-producer had declined 4 percent over the last decade.Because of streaming, the former network norms of 22, 24 or even 26 episodes per season have mostly disappeared. Many series are now eight to 12 episodes long. At the same time, episodes are taking longer to produce, so series writers who are paid per episode often make less while working more. Some showrunners are likewise making less despite working longer hours.“The streaming model has created an environment where there’s been enormous downward pressure on writer income across the board,” David Goodman, a co-chair of the guild negotiating committee, said in an interview.Screenwriters have been hurt by a decline in theatrical releases and the collapse of the DVD market, union leaders said.Between 2012 and 2021, the number of films rated annually by the Motion Picture Association fell by 31 percent. Streaming services picked up some slack, but companies like Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO Max, have been cutting back on film production to reduce costs amid slowing subscriber growth.Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesAre the companies in a position to pay more?They would argue this isn’t the best time for it.Disney said in February that it would cut $5.5 billion in costs and eliminate 7,000 jobs to address streaming losses, an atrophying cable television business and steep corporate debt. Warner Bros. Discovery has already cut thousands of jobs as part of a $4 billion retrenchment. NBCUniversal is also tightening its belt as it contends with cable cord-cutting and a troublesome advertising market.The writers are unmoved by this. Mr. Keyser noted that Netflix is already profitable (to the tune of $4.5 billion last year), and that rival companies have said their streaming services will be profitable in the next year or two. “We don’t get to negotiate again until 2026,” Mr. Keyser said. “We’re not waiting around until they’re profitable.”Who’s doing the negotiating?In a rarity for Hollywood, the chief negotiators are both women. Carol Lombardini, 68, leads the studio effort; she has worked at the producers’ alliance for 41 years. Ellen Stutzman, 40, leads the W.G.A. effort. She was appointed only about a month ago, after David Young, who has served as the ferocious negotiator for writers since 2007, stepped aside, citing an unspecified medical problem.Ms. Stutzman, who has been with the W.G.A. for 17 years, said in an interview that Mr. Young would play no part in these negotiations. She called him “a wonderful mentor.”Are the studios aligned?Absolutely, according to the producers’ alliance. “The A.M.P.T.P. companies approach this negotiation and the ones to follow with the long-term health and stability of the industry as our priority,” the alliance said in a statement, referring to impending contract renewal talks with directors and actors. “We are all partners in charting the future of our business together and fully committed to reaching a mutually beneficial deal.”But differences start to appear when you talk to senior executives on a company-by-company basis. In private conversations, they point out that the group is much less monolithic than in the past. It now includes tech companies like Amazon and Apple, for example, whose primary business is not entertainment.Striking members of the Writers Guild of America passed out leaflets in Rockefeller Center in 2007.Librado Romero/The New York TimesIs the W.G.A. united?For generations, ever since the end of the silent film era, Hollywood writers have complained that studios treat them as second-class citizens — that their artistic contributions are underappreciated (and undercompensated), especially compared with those of actors and directors. This sentiment runs deep among writers and has historically resulted in extraordinary unity.In 2019, when film and TV writers fired their agents in a campaign over what they saw as conflicts of interest, many agency leaders figured that the W.G.A. would eventually fracture. That never happened: After a 22-month standoff, the big agencies effectively gave writers what they wanted.What about collateral damage?Tens of thousands of entertainment workers were idled during the 2007 strike, and the action cost the Los Angeles economy more than $2 billion, according to the Milken Institute. This time around, many of the small businesses that service Hollywood (florists, caterers, chauffeurs, stylists, lumber yard workers) have only started to regain their footing after pandemic shutdowns, increasing the stakes of a strike and potentially leading to community fissures. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Phantom’ Ends. For Musicians, So Does the Gig of a Lifetime.

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      Last fall, as show No. 13,781 of “The Phantom of the Opera” came to a close, the applause overpowered the thundering music. The members of the orchestra, packed into the pit under the stage, could not see the crowd, but they could hear and feel them.The standing ovation brought Kristen Blodgette, the show’s associate conductor, to tears. She held her red-nailed hands in prayer, in gratitude to the musicians.Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash hit — the longest-running musical in Broadway history — is scheduled to give its final performance at the Majestic Theater next month. These days, since the announcement of the closing last September, the musical “feels more like a rock concert,” said Kurt Coble, a violinist with the show.Mr. Coble is part of Broadway’s largest pit orchestra, which will disappear along with the show. It holds 27 full-time musicians, 11 of whom have been with “Phantom” since it opened in the late 1980s. The consistent work has allowed many of the longtime musicians, who have essentially grown up and older with the show, to build comfortable, even lucrative lives. And that is no small feat for any artist seeking stability in New York City.Crowds waiting to go into “The Phantom of the Opera” in 1988. The show has been on Broadway for 35 years.Jack Manning/The New York Times“Phantom” will end its run at the Majestic Theater in April, and its 27-member pit orchestra — the largest on Broadway — will vanish along with the show.Unlike the actors who have short-term contracts with “Phantom,” full-time musicians get a “run-of-show” agreement, which guarantees their jobs until the production closes. In 1988, when “Phantom” first opened, “there were some wide-eyed optimists who thought the show could run as long as five to six years,” recalled Lowell Hershey, a trumpeter who has been with the production since the beginning. “And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that would be really good.’”“Phantom,” of course, surpassed that prediction. During its 35-year-run, the musical has created more jobs and generated more income than any other show in Broadway history, according to Michael Borowksi, its press representative.The security of the “Phantom” paycheck has helped many of its musicians start families, send children to college, buy property, save for retirement. “Broadway was never meant to be a steady job, but for us, it was a steady job,” said concertmaster Joyce Hammann, who has been with “Phantom” since 1990. “I can’t overstress how unbelievably lucky we have all been for all these years.”“Broadway was never meant to be a steady job, but for us, it was a steady job.” Joyce Hammann, concertmaster“Phantom” maintains a traditional pit setup, a sunken open cave wedged between the audience and the stage. Although live music remains one of the essential elements of a Broadway musical, many producers have sacrificed pits to build bigger stages or increase seating. These days, it’s common to see musicians onstage with performers, or to not see them at all, as many of them work in distant rooms that pipe their music into the theaters.“Even if we want our musicians to be in the pit, the decision lies in how each production believes it will succeed,” said Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. “Unfortunately, they are not always right — the shows that have had the longest runs have been the shows with large orchestras in the pit.”Many producers have given up on orchestra pits, but “Phantom” keeps a traditional setup.Mr. Coble knows how special the pit experience can be. “Sometimes I feel like I am a blacksmith in the early 20th century, people still had horses but not as many,” he said. “But you can never get rid of musicians. You’ll always need live music.”Pit musicians might not be able to see the show as it unfolds, but they have their tradecraft down pat. “Phantom” runs like a clock. The chandelier always swings over the pit, marking the beginning of the show, and then comes crashing down at the climax of Act 1. The patter of footsteps overhead marks the New Year’s Party in Act 2, which tells the musicians to make way for an actor who snakes his way through the pit and sits below the conductor, waiting to fire a shot into the auditorium. Then, when the shot sounds, they cover their ears and wait for the smell of powder, which signals that it is time for them to pick up their instruments again.“I don’t get terribly sentimental over it because it’s a job after all, it’s work, it’s not easy, it’s not a vacation.”Kurt Coble, violinistRegardless of whether they have a chair on Broadway (a full-time contract) or not, musicians are paid per show and are supported by Local 802, a strong union that provides them with health care and a pension, among other benefits. (When Broadway shows went dark during the pandemic, “Phantom” producers continued to pay the health insurance for their chair musicians.)Ed Matthew, a clarinetist, said that when he started playing on Broadway in 1994, he made about $140 a night. As of this month, the base wage for a musician at “Phantom” is about $291 per show.“We have to get along with each other because we are tucked in like sardines in a can.”Ed Matthew, clarinetistBefore getting hired by “Phantom,” many of its musicians juggled jobs. Peter Reit, a French horn player, made fur coats in the garment district, tended bar and sold vacuum cleaners before joining the orchestra in 1987, when rehearsals for the musical started.“I used to do my budget week to week with all my freelance work, and the first thing I noticed when I had this job was that I could now budget month to month, and that was an incredible stress relief,” said Mr. Reit, 63, who retired in 2021. He now teaches music at SUNY Purchase and Vassar College.The orchestra sits close together in the claustrophobic pit.The regular pay and benefits allowed members of the pit to concentrate on other aspects of their lives, like raising children. “Most of the support for my family was based upon what I could earn, and that took a lot of pressure off as a provider,” said Mr. Hershey, the trumpeter.Ms. Hammann, the concertmaster, has an 18-year-old son who grew up in the theater. When he was a baby, he sat with the stagehands while she played the show. “To have had the flexibility when I needed to be home with him, that’s not something one is able to do in many work environments, so it’s been tremendous,” she said.“What more can we ask for than to have had this show for 35 years?”Kristen Blodgette, associate conductorIn the late ’80s, when Ms. Blodgette, the associate conductor, was eight months pregnant with “the first ‘Phantom’ baby,” as she calls her daughter, the show’s conductors, who were all men, wore tuxedos, she said. She opted for a dress. Thirty-four years later and now a grandmother, Ms. Blodgette wears a thick velvet black gown with black socks (and no shoes) because she likes “to feel grounded” while conducting.Broadway chairs may play up to eight shows a week and are required to attend at least 50 percent of the shows per quarter, according to union rules. This allows some musicians to work side gigs for extra money and to pursue passion projects. When Mr. Matthew, the clarinetist, joined the company in the early aughts, he was able to hold onto his job at G. Schirmer, a classical music publishing company. The combined paychecks allowed him and his wife to buy a co-op apartment in Long Island City, Queens, and to save for retirement, he said.“There were some wide-eyed optimists who thought the show could run as long as five to six years. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that would be really good.’”Lowell Hershey, trumpeterMr. Coble, the violinist, joined the pit 25 years ago. Though grateful for the stability, he still yearns for more creative outlets. “I think of myself more like an artisan than an artist because I have very little freedom when it comes to playing music by someone else,” he said.But the flexibility of his work schedule has allowed him to write scores for horror films and to play, as his mother likes to call it, “unpopular music.” When he is not working at the Majestic, he spends his time with the PAM Band (Partially Artificial Musicians), a robotic orchestra that he built to play whatever songs he wants. Now that “Phantom” is coming to an end, he said, “I’ll spend a lot more time on my own project, but it’s certainly not as well-paying as the show.”“You don’t want to take up too much space and you also want to fit in,” said Mr. Matthew, a clarinetist, about the orchestra pit.There are five substitute musicians on call for each Broadway chair. Although substitutes receive the same union benefits as full-time chairs, they lack the consistency of an eight-show week. “Being a sub is hard because you are constantly waiting for the next call, you have no control in your life,” said Nick Jemo, a trumpeter who started subbing at “Phantom” in 2009 before joining the pit full-time five years later. Some subs have been filling in at “Phantom” for more than 10 years, and they keep coming back.“You want to bring your entire being into that show — it’s got everything you’d ever want to express in an instrument,” said Brad Bosenbeck, who started subbing for one of the two viola chairs at “Phantom” when he was 26. Mr. Bosenbeck, now 31 and still a substitute, said he doesn’t take the job for granted. “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world that I get to do what I love and get paid for it.”“Being a sub is hard because you are constantly waiting for the next call, you have no control in your life.”Nick Jemo, trumpeterWith the show’s closing, many of its musicians are thinking about their next chapters. Some believe that “Phantom” might return to Broadway in a few years with a reduced orchestra, like the production in London. A few veteran musicians, including Mr. Hershey, will retire. Ms. Hammann looks forward to teaching, which she started doing when the pandemic kept her away from the pit. Ms. Blodgette will conduct at “Bad Cinderella,” Mr. Lloyd Webber’s new musical. Most say they will try to sub at other shows.“The show closing feels liberating,” said Mr. Coble, who admitted to fantasizing about being a strolling violinist in a fancy restaurant, dressed up as the phantom and playing variations of the score. “I’ll play my last performance like I’ve tried to play every other show, and when it’s over I’ll just move on to something else. I don’t get terribly sentimental over it because it’s a job after all, it’s work, it’s not easy, it’s not a vacation.”“You want to bring your entire being into that show — it’s got everything you’d ever want to express in an instrument.”Brad Bosenbeck, violistThe musicians won’t miss some aspects of the show, like the claustrophobic pit, where they sit so close to each other that if one of them opens a candy bar the rest can smell it. “We have to get along with each other because we are tucked in like sardines in a can,” Mr. Matthew said. “You don’t want to take up too much space and you also want to fit in.” The radio program “This American Life” produced a segment a few years ago about some of these frustrations.Despite the intimate, tense energy of the “Phantom” pit — “it is its own magical elixir,” Mr. Bosenbeck said — most musicians said they didn’t have many opportunities to connect with each other outside the theater. “One of the things that makes this ending bittersweet is that everyone has been in my life for so long and I’ve been in theirs for so long, and yet we didn’t get an opportunity outside of waiting in the bathroom line or arriving early to really speak to everybody,” Ms. Hammann said.The musicians have few opportunities to connect outside the theater, but they have fixed routines while they are working.During these final weeks, as audience members watch the tortured love story onstage, the pit musicians will continue their routine underneath it. A ghostly image of Ms. Blodgette will appear on four small screens scattered throughout the orchestra so musicians can follow her lead. Mr. Jemo, after a temporary stint with “Bad Cinderella,” will return, repositioning his chair to catch a glimpse of his girlfriend, a dancer in the show. One music stand will continue to showcase a collection of miniature toys — a smiling crocodile, a head-shaking turtle, a deer’s face and a tiny plastic hand holding fresh radishes.“I may be the only musician in the world who has radishes in their music stand,” said Karl Bennion, a cellist who accidentally took the vegetable to a show in 2017 and since then has made it a tradition.“I may be the only musician in the world who has radishes in their music stand.”Karl Bennion, cellistThe music stand of cellist Karl Bennion, who has done it up with tchotchkes.In between songs, some musicians will play Sudoku and crossword puzzles; others will read. “A good book can really make going to work even more joyful,” Mr. Jemo said. He and Mr. Hershey, his trumpet partner, had a big French dictionary that sat between them, and often they reached for it at the same time.At the end of every show, musicians will continue to interact with audience members, some of whom like to peek into the pit to thank them as they pack their instruments.“What more can we ask for than to have had this show for 35 years?” Ms. Blodgette asked. “When I started doing this, I was single, I did not have a child, my parents were alive,” she said. “Through all of the chaos of life, this was here.”The security of the “Phantom” paycheck has helped many of the show’s musicians start families, send children to college, buy property, save for retirement. More

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      in Theater

      New Broadway Labor Agreement Includes Pandemic-Prompted Changes

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      The deal, ratified by members of Actors’ Equity, provides salary increases for performers and stage managers, and allows producers to make short-term hires.The union representing theater actors and stage managers has ratified a new contract that provides pay increases for those working on Broadway and, in a move prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, allows producers to make short-term hires to cover absent actors.Actors’ Equity Association announced Monday that its membership had voted in favor of the three-year contract, which by late 2024 would raise the minimum salary for performers working on Broadway to $2,638 per week. That reflects three years of pay increases: 5 percent this year, 4 percent next year, and 4 percent the following year.The Broadway contract, negotiated by Equity and the Broadway League, applies to commercial productions on Broadway, as well as to so-called sit-down productions, which are extended runs of commercial shows elsewhere in the country.The contract is important because Broadway is the segment of the American theater world where artists can most reliably make a living wage, and also because provisions in this contract influence others in the industry. The union will next turn its attention to negotiating contracts for touring shows and regional theaters (the regional theater contract also applies to the four New York nonprofits that operate Broadway houses).This Broadway contract, which goes into effect immediately, is the first negotiated since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. As shows returned, the challenge of staying open when company members tested positive for the coronavirus called attention to the important work of understudies, swings and standbys who keep shows going when illness strikes, and also highlighted the tension between a historic show-must-go-on ethic and disease transmission.The contract is the first to provide paid sick leave for anyone working on an Equity contract; previously, those earning above a certain amount were not entitled to paid sick days. In another first, the contract caps how many roles a swing can cover in one performance.And the contract allows for the use of short-term actors, with rehearsal time, to cover performer absences. The provision was a concession by the union to the producers.The union also highlighted a few wins for its members: a limited number of very long rehearsal days, and fewer rehearsal hours post-opening.The contract includes several new provisions prompted by discussion within the industry, and the broader society, about diversity concerns. Among them: commitments to employ technicians for certain hair styles, to consider gender identity when identifying spaces for dressing rooms and bathrooms, to set up a committee to talk about onstage intimacy, and to improve casting notices for those with disabilities.Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity, said the deal was a compromise reflecting the economics of the moment. The contract was ratified by a smaller margin than some previous pacts, suggesting disagreement within the union’s membership about whether it was good enough.“The industry is not entirely back yet, and while we were looking to reinvent the whole way the theater industry operates, we’re also faced with real financial considerations,” Shindle said.She said the wage increases were significant at a time when inflation is high, as are real estate costs in New York (which, of course, is where many Broadway workers live). She also noted that many in the industry had not had work while theaters were shut down, making their current salaries more important.Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said in a statement that she was pleased with the ratification of the agreement, “which we believe represents a significant step forward for our industry.”She said several provisions “were ultimately directly responsive to the push from the union for less time spent in rehearsal and more time off for actors,” and she also hailed the diversity provisions, which were, she said, “in the forefront of our priorities.”“A key component to these changes is language that will allow us to hold everyone, including actors working on our productions, to the same standards when creating a safe and inclusive working environment for all,” she said. “We were able to achieve all of these significant improvements for each side while providing a meaningful and yet responsible economic package.” More

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      Julia Reichert, Documentarian of the Working Class, Dies at 76

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      She took home, to Ohio, a 2019 Oscar for “American Factory,” and in a long career teaching and making films, she paid special attention to working women.Julia Reichert, a filmmaker and educator who made a pioneering feminist documentary, “Growing Up Female,” as an undergraduate student and almost a half-century later won an Academy Award for “American Factory,” a documentary feature about the Chinese takeover of a shuttered automobile plant in Dayton, Ohio, died on Thursday at her home in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was 76.Steven Bognar, her husband and filmmaking partner, confirmed the death. The cause, diagnosed in 2018, was urothelial cancer, which affects the urethra, bladder and other organs. She learned she had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2006.Ms. Reichert, a longtime professor of motion pictures at Wright State University in Dayton, was in the forefront of a new generation of social documentarians who came out of the New Left and feminist movements of the early 1970s with a belief in film as an organizing tool with a social mission. Her films were close to oral history: Eschewing voice-over narration, they were predicated on interviews in which her mainly working-class subjects spoke for themselves.“Growing Up Female” (1971), which she made with her future husband, James Klein, a classmate at Antioch College in Ohio, was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2011.Her documentaries “Union Maids” (1976), made with Mr. Klein and Miles Mogelescu, and “Seeing Red” (1983), also made with Mr. Klein, were both nominated for Academy Awards.Both movies mix archival footage with interviews. “Union Maids” profiles three women active in the Chicago labor movement during the Great Depression. “Seeing Red” portrays rank-and-file members of the Communist Party during the 1930s and ’40s.Ms. Reichert was again nominated, in 2010, for the short documentary “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which she directed with Mr. Bognar, her second husband.“The Last Truck” documented the closing of a an automobile assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, some of it clandestinely filmed by workers inside the plant. The movie served as a prologue to “American Factory,” which Netflix released in conjunction with Barack and Michelle Obama’s fledgling company Higher Ground Productions, and which won the 2019 documentary-feature Oscar.Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped, spanning continents as it surveys the past, present and possible future of American labor.”The movie is suffused in ambivalence. Having purchased the same plant documented in “The Last Truck,” a Chinese billionaire converts it into an automobile-glass factory and restores lost jobs while confounding American workers with a new set of attitudes.In 2020, Ms. Reichert and Mr. Bognar were invited by the comedian Dave Chappelle to document one of the outdoor stand-up shows he hosted during the Covid pandemic from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs. The two-hour feature “Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life” had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall as part of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.Although Ms. Reichert addressed a variety of social issues in the documentaries she directed and produced, her enduring interests were labor history and the lives of working women. Her last film, “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” directed with Mr. Bognar, brought those two concerns together, focusing on the organizing of female office workers beginning in the 1970s.Ms. Reichert with Mr. Bognar and Chad Cannon, who composed the score for “American Factory,” at a screening of the film in Los Angeles in 2019.Araya Diaz/Getty ImagesJulia Bell Reichert was born on June 16, 1946, in Bordentown, N.J., a city on the Delaware River about eight miles southeast of Trenton. She was the second of four children of Louis and Dorothy (Bell) Reichert. Her father was a butcher in a neighborhood supermarket, her mother a homemaker who became a nurse.One of the few students from her high school to go to college, Ms. Reichert was attracted to Antioch because of its cooperative work-study program. Her parents were conservative Republicans, but once she was at Antioch Ms. Reichert’s political orientation shifted left. She canvased for the Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, during the 1964 election and hosted a feminist program, “The Single Girl,” on the campus radio station. She later credited her radio experience with honing her documentary skills.“I came out of radio,” she said in an interview with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists before winning the 2019 Oscar. “So without having to spend any money, I learned a lot about interviewing and editing and mixing music and how to talk — how to tell a story in a time frame.”Ms. Reichert also took a film course at Antioch with the avant-garde filmmaker David Brooks and organized a documentary workshop with Mr. Klein. After making “Growing Up Female,” which was originally intended for consciousness-raising groups, she and Mr. Klein founded a distribution cooperative, New Day Films, which focused on bringing new documentary films to schools, unions and community groups.The couple also collaborated on the documentary “Methadone: An American Way of Dealing,” in addition to “Union Maids” and “Seeing Reds.”Vincent Canby of The Times, who discovered “Union Maids” in early 1977 on a double bill in a limited run at a downtown Manhattan theater, called it “one of the more moving, more cheering theatrical experiences available in New York this weekend.”He was similarly supportive of “Seeing Red,” which was first shown at the 1983 New York Film Festival, and which is arguably the most sympathetic portrayal of American Communists ever put onscreen. Mr. Canby considered it “a fine, tough companion piece to ‘Union Maids.’” Rather than dogma, he wrote, the subject was “American idealism.”Ms. Reichert started a filmmaking program at Wright State University with Mr. Klein. She also directed a quasi-autobiographical feature film, “Emma and Elvis” (1992), written with Mr. Bognar, about a married documentary filmmaker who becomes involved with a young video artist. Although the film received only limited distribution, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised it in The Chicago Reader for “making a filmmaker’s creative/midlife crisis meaningful, engaging and interesting.”Mr. Reichert and Mr. Bognar during the filming of “American Factory.”NetflixMs. Reichert’s most personal film — the first she directed with Mr. Bognar — was “A Lion in the House,” a documentary about children with cancer completed in 2006 after having been in production for close to a decade. It was inspired in part by her adolescent daughter’s struggle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her daughter recovered, but after the film was completed Ms. Reichert was herself diagnosed with cancer.“A Lion in the House” won multiple awards, including a Primetime Emmy, the 2006 Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary award and the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best documentary.Ms. Reichert’s marriage to Mr. Klein ended in divorce in 1986. She married Mr. Bognar, who survives her, in 1987. She is also survived by her daughter, Lela Klein; three brothers, Louis, Craig and Joseph Reichert; and two grandchildren.Ms. Reichert was very much a regional filmmaker. After graduating from Antioch, she remained in the Dayton area and became a source of inspiration for other Midwestern documentarians, including Michael Moore and Steve James. She also produced a number of films.In an appreciation written for a 2019 retrospective of her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich recalled that Ms. Reichert had “defied every stereotype I’d had of independent filmmakers.”“She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t arrogant or egotistical,” wrote Ms. Ehrenreich, the author, of “Nickel and Dimed” (2001), about the working poor in America. (She died in September.) “The daughter of a butcher and a house cleaner turned registered nurse, she dressed and spoke plainly, usually beaming with enthusiasm, and never abandoned her Midwestern roots.”She might have added that virtually all of Ms. Reichert’s films were explicitly collective enterprises.A scene from “American Factory,” depicting workers at an auto-glass factory in Ohio.Netflix, via Everett CollectionIn an email, Mr. Klein wrote that he and Ms. Reichert “came of age with a sense that it was only through community that the type of work we wanted to see being made could happen.”“And Julia really lived her beliefs,” he added.Despite her politics, Ms. Reichert was by her account less interested in ideology than she was in people. In an interview with Cineaste magazine, she called the subjects of “Seeing Red” “some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever want to meet.”“They made a very positive life choice, despite everything they went through,” she said.“American Factory,” which deals with the mutual culture shock experienced by Chinese and American workers and their reconciliation, was Ms. Reichert’s most ethnically and racially diverse film. The movie, she told an interviewer, “tries to be very fair by listening to everyone’s point of view — that of the chairman” — Cao Dewang, the billionaire Chinese entrepreneur who purchased and reopened the factory — “union people, anti-union people, and workers.”Indeed, Mr. Cao, a product of Communist China who teaches American workers the hard realities of global capitalism, is in many respects the film’s protagonist.Although a fully committed artist, Ms. Reichert wore her politics so lightly that almost no one seemed to notice when she concluded her Oscar acceptance speech for “American Factory” by cheerfully citing the best-known phrase from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto.”“We believe that things will get better,” she said, “when the workers of the world unite.”Lyna Bentahar contributed reporting. More

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      Overlooked No More: Dorothy Spencer, Film Editor Sought Out by Big Directors

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      She worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Frank Capra and John Ford, and she was known for her deft touch, particularly with action movies.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Dorothy Spencer was asked what it took to become a film editor, her answer was always the same: patience.In a five-decade career, she worked as an editor on more than 70 movies and received four Academy Award nominations across a range of genres: the Oscar-winning 1939 western “Stagecoach”; the espionage thriller “Decision Before Dawn” (1951); the costume epic “Cleopatra” (1963); and the disaster movie “Earthquake” (1974). She was sought out by directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for her deft touch, both with fight scenes and with subtle character moments.Bringing clarity to a confusing sequence might require sifting through 11 reels of footage, but Spencer easily got lost in her work.“I enjoy editing, and I think that’s necessary, because editing is not a watching-the-clock job,” she wrote in American Cinematographer magazine in 1974. “I’ve been on pictures where I never even knew it was lunchtime, or time to go home. You get so involved in what you’re doing, in the challenge of creating — because I think cutting is very creative.”Bill Elias, who worked with Spencer in the Universal Pictures editing department, spoke to her work ethic.“Every time I saw her,” he said in an interview, “she was sitting down at a Moviola” — the industry-standard film-editing machine in the era when the job required physically cutting and splicing film.In the movie industry, where important behind-the-camera roles have generally not been open to women, editing was an exception: Though the field was still dominated by men in Spencer’s day, there have been many notable women editors over the years, including Anne Bauchens (who edited Cecil B. DeMille’s films) and Thelma Schoonmaker (who edits Martin Scorsese’s). That might be because the job, which involved sorting and restitching, was somewhere between librarian and quilt maker — professions that were traditionally considered the domains of women.Spencer’s specialty was action movies, but one would not guess that from her short stature or from her quiet demeanor. “For some reason, I always seem to get assigned to pictures that are very physical,” she wrote in 1974.Not that she was complaining.“I like working on action pictures very, very much,” she said. “They’re more flexible, and I think you can do more with them.”“Stagecoach” (1939), the movie that made John Wayne a star, was one of four films for which Spencer was nominated for an Academy Award.Movie Poster Image Art/Getty ImagesDorothy Spencer, who was known as Dot, was born on Feb. 3, 1909, in Covington, in northern Kentucky, near the border of Ohio. She was the youngest of four children of Charles and Catherine (Spellbrink) Spencer. When she was a child, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where her older sister, Jeanne, began acting in movies (which she didn’t enjoy) and then became a writer and editor (which she did).Following her sister’s example, Dot started working in the film industry when she was a teenager — first as a junior employee at the Consolidated-Aller Lab, then as an assistant editor on silent movies like “The Strong Man” (1926) and “Long Pants” (1927), the first two features directed by Frank Capra.For four years beginning in 1937, Spencer worked with the editor Otho Lovering, cutting 10 films. She earned $5,000 in 1939 (about $102,000 in today’s dollars), but she still lived with her parents. That year marked the release of John Ford’s acclaimed western “Stagecoach,” which follows a group of strangers traveling together through perilous territory in the American Southwest in 1880. It was her most notable collaboration with Lovering — and not just because it made John Wayne a star.The editing of “Stagecoach” was regarded as masterly. Orson Welles said that he taught himself film editing by screening a print of “Stagecoach” 45 times at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Some aspects of the editing were groundbreaking: In his book “Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice” (2001), Don Fairservice pointed out that “Stagecoach” contained one of the earliest uses — maybe even the first — of the now-commonplace technique called a prelap, in which as one scene ends, dialogue from the next is already beginning on the soundtrack.Also innovative was the editing of the climactic action sequence, when Apache warriors attack the stagecoach. A fundamental law of film editing is the 180-degree rule: Although you can splice together a scene from diverse angles, you will confuse viewers if you cross an invisible 180-degree boundary, flipping the perspective so that a character who was facing left now faces right.In the attack sequence, Spencer and Lovering repeatedly and deliberately broke that rule. As David Meuel observed in his book “Women Film Editors: Unseen Artists of American Cinema” (2016), “by disorienting and confusing the audience, it created a closer bond between viewers and the characters in the stagecoach, who are themselves thoroughly disoriented and confused. So, rather than compromising the cinematic experience, this deliberate breaking of the 180-degree rule actually intensified it.”Spencer began working solo in 1941, and over the next decade she averaged two movies a year, working with notable directors like Hitchcock (“Lifeboat,” 1944), Elia Kazan (“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” 1945) and Ernst Lubitsch (five movies in which Spencer showed off her impeccable comic timing, including “To Be or Not to Be,” 1942).She made most of those films as a staff editor at the 20th Century Fox studio, a job she took in 1943 and kept for the next 24 years. During her tenure, the Hollywood studio system collapsed and the aesthetics of editing evolved; for example, dissolving from one scene to another went out of style.Spencer remained a constant, working with geniuses and journeymen, deferring to directors who had a vision in mind but offering creative flourishes when there were opportunities.“When you work with a new director who has never had any editing experience, he often asks for the impossible,” she wrote in 1974. “You can’t tell him it won’t work. You just have to do it his way and let him realize that maybe he was wrong.”In the soapy “Valley of the Dolls” (1967), directed by Mark Robson and based on Jacqueline Susann’s best seller about three young women struggling with the temptations of show business, she cut together some striking montages that nodded to the French New Wave. In one sequence, Patty Duke spits out water in the shower, does a multiple-exposure somersault, exercises on a rowing machine (with the top half and the bottom half of the screen deliberately out of sync) and gets married — a significant plot point, seen only in a black-and-white still photograph.Spencer needed all her unflappability and dedication on “Earthquake,” the eighth movie she made with Robson, which featured Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Richard Roundtree and the destruction of Los Angeles.Many scenes of seismic mayhem were filmed with multiple cameras, meaning that she had to wade through 200,000 feet of film. Her feedback spurred Robson to change his approach to filming the earthquake: Early in the shoot, she realized that “the shake wasn’t very noticeable because there was nothing in the foreground to serve as a reference for the degree of background movement.” So Robson made sure there was a prominent steady object to orient viewers.By the time of “Earthquake,” Spencer was mostly retired and living in the rural town of Encinitas, Calif. She edited one last movie — “The Concorde … Airport ’79,” another disaster film — but otherwise kept her distance from Hollywood; her death at 93, on May 23, 2002, went unnoticed in the press.Frank J. Urioste, a three-time Oscar nominee for film editing himself, said in an interview, “I wanted to work for her one time, just so I could say I got to work for Dorothy Spencer.”If he had, he might have learned a lesson about striving for perfection: “The more you see a film, the more critical you get,” she wrote in 1974. “But a paying audience sees the film only once, so perhaps they won’t catch it.” More