Coop Scoop: Meet Hollywood's Marie Antoinette

The zillionaires who killed Hollywood want writers to pick up the tab

Disney’s Bog Iger: Let Them Eat Cake

July 18, 2023

By Marc Cooper

The bespoke suits who have turned Hollywood into one big trash machine, filling theaters and streamers with literal reeking garbage aimed at 11 year old comic book readers, are not just happy making gigantic salaries, they also want to inflict some real pain on the writers and the actors who actually draw anybody in to their racket.

The photo above is Disney boss Bob Iger who has managed to emerge as one of, if not the most, villainous face of studio management as the historic writers and actors strike is shutting down Tinseltown. Hey, not picking on good old Bob. Any of these guys who run any of the mega-studios are suitable stand-ins for vilification. Spin the wheel.

I mean David Zaslav who now runs the Warner-HBO-Discovery outfit was named the most overpaid CEO in America last year. After all was said and done, after all the corners were cut, after all the spreadsheets were shuffled, after all the producers and writers got screwed on the “back end” of their deals, this putz walked away with…are you ready… $247 million in “compensation.” I repeat, $247 million. Zaslav is good at shooting his mouth off, but nowadays it’s Mr. Iger who has foot in mouth disease.

Fancying himself as an enlightened contributor to society, Iger is much more a modern day Marie Antoinette, and taking home somewhere around $50 million a year, he’s had the temerity to tell the strikers they are not being “realistic.” As if the grown-ass man who pals with Mickey Mouse and Sleeping Beauty and makes more money, year after year, than some small towns take in annually, is living in the same world as the average studio worker who makes more like $75,000 a year. It’s you, Bob, who needs to get fucking real! (BTW, Hollywood is so crooked that the official "salaries” of dudes like Iger are in the $1-3 million range. But no industry in America is more skilled at cooking and juggling books than Hollywood so to that paltry couple of a million you have to add things like “stock options,” non-compensation compensation, expense accounts, swollen bonuses and, bingo, you have grown that “salary” by ten or twenty or a hundred fold.

Hollywood learned these accounting tricks by historically and repeatedly fucking over producers and directors who are promised at time a percentage of profit after expenses. And ask any producer what the goniffs who run the studios drum up as “expenses” and at what level to make sure that back end pay out is anemic as possible. Hmmm? Like $39,000 a day for catering a cast and production crew of 50 people for three months straight?

Iger has been arrogant enough to say recently that the actors and writers are “adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing that is quite frankly very disruptive and dangerous.”

Disruptive? It was actors who insisted on streaming? Dangerous? WTF is Iger mumbling about? What…the WGA is now run by the Taliban? Whatever the failings of the Hollywood unions, the much bigger danger to all of us —at least mentally and morally— are the rich guys in the C-Suites who to quote CCR are all about me me me.

Again, Iger is not alone in criminalizing his own employees and contractors. Nor is he necessarily the worst, if that can even be calculated. Another studio exec pinhead was quoted last week saying management strategy to break the strike was eviction and, presumably, starvation. His suggestions was “to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

The Atlantic’s Xochitl Gonzalez has a very fine piece on how the studio suits screwed themselves and now want to scapegoat the creative talent and why guys like Iger and Zaslav are indeed scared shitless — if not speechless.

Hollywood’s CEOs are suffering. Not primarily from labor disputes or industry disruption or public-relations issues, but from vincible ignorance, which seems to be endemic in C-suites of all industries. Under pressure to deliver to Wall Street, too many CEOs have lost the plot of their own movie. They are not running companies to profitably deliver a good product, such as a book or a cup of coffee or, in this case, a movie or TV show. They are running companies to deliver good profit. The quality of their product has ceased to matter.

If you doubt this, consider that when Emmy nominations were announced last week, the lions’ share went to HBO Max, a prestige platform that has ceased to exist by that name, because Warner Bros. Discovery took the streaming arm of the legacy brand and folded it into a messy app crowded with low-budget reality programs. We are in the upside-down.

Streaming has already wrought havoc on writers and actors. Instead of residual checks, the creatives get to watch themselves every week, or binge a whole day, watching themselves 10-12-25 times in different episodes ad infinitum, often for one initial paycheck. There are no-name utility actors who made more in residuals from one TV episode five years ago than they made in a 5 season streamed series.

And the writers? You know greedheads like Iger and Zaslav are wetting their pants, dreaming of the day when those pesky, overpaid, cranky and infinitely more intelligent writers can just be replaced by an intern with an AI chatbot. I mean, it is all about profit, isn’t it? Ain’t got much to do with enriching the The Culture nor making sure Mr. and Mrs. Writer don’t face evictions.

I have to say, even at my ripe old age and my current excessive level of cynicism, this stuff really makes my head swim. Have we really become such an unequal society that these studio heads make tens of millions per year (for peddling trash) and we tolerate such craziness? Or just shrug our shoulders?

Well, I guess I’m the naive one. After all, the criminal coup-plotting former president goes into court today, the most important case in recent American history, and it will be overseen by an inexperienced air head who he recently appointed as a federal judge (though she had ZERO experience as any sort of judge).

So, you tell me. Is that any more delusional, any more eye-watering aggravating, any more absurd, than these studio jokers raking home a million or thee million dollars a week bitching ou writers and actors who would like to be treated fairly? And, who by the way, are the actual base and foundation on which the fortunes of their overseers rest?

Upside down world, indeed, Pluto.

(Disclaimer: I am an emeritus member of the Writers Guild and a former union steward for AFTRA).