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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie and we have a great guest with us today, a famous actor, Greg Jbara. Greg, it is very good to see you.
Greg Jbara
Hello, Rich. You can see me now actually.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, yes. We'll talk about Greg's background on stage, on film, and of course, on television programs. Today, we've got a very important topic that might not seem important, but it is. It's about the strike of the actors and the writers in Hollywood, for a big umbrella title. We're going to just jump right into it with our guest, Greg Jbara, award winning actor. Greg, I know that you're well known to very many people. I think at an early age you wanted to get into the arts, you were talented enough to get into Juilliard. Your career took off from there. Can you give a little bit of the career arc and don't leave out anything important, like winning a Tony Award and being nominated elsewhere. I think it's important for people to know.
Greg Jbara
Well, the real starting point is being a child who grew up through the Wayne Westland public school system. Because from K-12, as you well know, there were opportunities available to us that don't exist as readily [now] - at least not in the Wayne Westland community - as prevalent as it was but when we were going to school the Boomers were throwing tax money at education and we had a TV studio in our high school, we had a 68 member male chorus in our high school that I was a member of, there was a very active student politics, foot sports - everything you could possibly want. And I had, over the years, found that I had a knack in the performing arts and gratefully had the opportunity to develop those talents. When physics - though a passion - didn't become my journey in life because the academic world is a little more competitive...I was very competitive as a performing arts person and went to the University of Michigan. My parents said, no, you're not going to be an actor, you're going to be a communications major. I went, okay, and then all I did was non-departmental theater while I was at Michigan, with a minor in physics and a major in communications. While I was there [I was] being cast in every non-department show that was happening. To my parents dismay, changing my major to theater - and doing nothing but - being a founding class member of the musical theater program that is now in existence...also, the impact jazz dance company that still is thriving as a non-department dance company with the students at Michigan - still happening today. Those are all things I did. But the faculty, my mentors, the musical theater programs, we didn't know whether it was going to take off, [they said] you have a an ability to compete on a higher level; I was encouraged to look at other programs. I call it the Michigan Mafia, because then Sharon Jensen, a Michigan alumnus, was the president of the League of Professional Theatre Training Schools and I got on the phone with her because she was best friends with my voice teacher and mentor, Connie Barron. She told me all about the league schools. I made the decision that if I was going to leave Michigan - and that meant even if Michigan's musical theater program didn't work - I could go to Wayne State or Eastern or other options and stay in state. But I knew if I really wanted to do this, I needed to go to New York. The idea being, as a student when I finally did get accepted into Juilliard, that all of your work that you do in your last two years is open to the public so the industry gets to see your breadth of ability over two years, where people who get really great training, say in the middle of America, have to go and beat the pavement in New York or Los Angeles. They're kind of starting at ground zero once they're done with graduation if they're not in a program that has, say, a presentation at the end that serves up their graduating class, which is pretty prevalent now in the training programs. But I went to New York knowing that that's where I had to be because I also like to sing, I can move without embarrassing myself. Then when I survived the four years at Juilliard - because then they did a cut of the original 26 students after the second year; they cut the class down and not just to cut the class, they let students go who really don't need the training, who are ready to fly and be pushed out of the nest so they're not just taking their money. Then there are students that probably need to rethink what they really want to do in life and those people are let go. But also, when you're in repertory, meaning you're doing three or four shows a year and you have 26 actors, it'd be very difficult to give all 26 actors meaty work in all the productions. So by having a smaller class toward the end of your year, you're able to better challenge every single actor and fortunately, I survived that entire process.
Richard Helppie
Did you start on the stage, on the screen, or through television? Where did you get going?
Greg Jbara
My first job was actually for the Detroit Free Press. (Rich Helppie: No kidding.) My very first union job was on-camera commercial for the Detroit Free Press. It was cast in New York and shot in New York and I was still a student...oh...actually I graduated, I just graduated. But that was my first on-camera job. My first voice-over job, while I was still a student, was 14 national commercials for Norelco. Back then, there was the Molson Golden couple that was like witty banter, sexy dialogue between a couple talking about Molson Golden beer. So Norelco wanted to do the same thing showcasing their products by having this attractive couple being that witty. Well, they hired the models, they didn't like the way they sounded; they hired Lauren Brown and myself to be the voices. So we overdubbed everything on those commercials and that was my foray into working as an actor. The one class that I wish I had while I was at Juilliard was finance because there's common sense...I mean that you have to pay taxes. There's withholding for FICA, but I just assumed it was all being done; you produce a paycheck, goes to the payroll department at your talent agency, they take their ten percent, you get your check, and I look and I go, okay, they're taking X amount out. But for my entire life, since I was a janitor at Wingdale Plaza in Wayne, Michigan next to Marshall Junior High, I always wrote "exempt" on my tax returns because I never made more than $5,000. Habitually, when I booked that job - not knowing - I wrote exempt, and ended up with a significant debt. My student loan - about $10,000 - that my very creative and brand new accountant - who nearly had a heart attack - managed to work out. He still quotes me to this day, he goes, the first thing out of your mouth...when I said oh, here's all the money you're going to owe, do you have anything? I had like $300 in my pocket. I said, well, good thing I'm young. Because ultimately, it took about eight years but I got out from underneath that debt while I was a working actor doing commercials.
Richard Helppie
So your fame, not only from being a Tony Award winner on Broadway in Billy Elliot, which I had the privilege to see, you were great in that, and being on television programs - which I'm not sure I can talk about during the strike period - and being in movies, you were also well known at the Internal Revenue Service, okay. I mean, you've really literally covered the waterfront here. [Laughter]
Greg Jbara
It's true. I hope...may no one listening ever have to suffer this, but the government finds your source of income and then they start leaning on it. The great thing about being an actor, where you're constantly looking for new work, is by the time they found a commercial I did and start leaning on an income, I'd already booked another one so they could start taking that money. It was a slow, brutal process but ultimately, it's behind me. It's the first thing I ever teach on a master class is get to know your fiscal responsibilities.
Richard Helppie
Well, that is very germane to what we want to talk about today because the entertainment industry is an industry. It is a business and in a business we have owners, we have marketeers, we have financiers, and we have labor. You've been at this game for a long time. Now we're hearing that there's a strike in Hollywood; this is the way it's being presented and most people either don't know, don't care or both, but I think this has implications beyond the entertainment industry - my take on it. Your challenge today is to take me from the level of a reasonably intelligent kindergartner to something into the Ph. D. range. So you can assume absolute ignorance and infinite intellect. What you do and what you've done in your career is very opaque to people that are not there. I don't even understand the names of all the players and how things work. But I'm above average in finance if you ever need some help with that, and the IRS has no idea who I am - I hope. [Chuckles] So Greg, who are the players in this drama right now? We've heard about SAG and WGA, and Studio Heads...who are the combatants here?
Greg Jbara
Since probably the 60s, which was the last very important creative strike against the producers, AMPTP is the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, all the people that create entertainment content, they have this organization that represents them when it comes to negotiating contracts with all the different unions. Then you've got...it's them against, currently, the WGA - the Writers Guild and they are all the people who create the stories, who put pen to paper, who do the rewrites. They are Shakespeare; the play is the thing. Without content, without great stories, without great writers writing great stories, you don't have entertainment. And then the other party that is currently striking against AMPTP is SAGAFTRA, and it's Screen Actors Guild And Television Radio Artists. The Screen Actors Guild...they used to be two separate entities. Screen Actors Guild used to represent just people who worked in film, like if your work was recorded on celluloid, on film, because back in the day there was just film. The people that did radio were AFTRA union members. Then video came along with television and television - because it's not on film, it's an electronic signal, analog - they became a part of AFTRA. As years went on and new media came out, and they're streaming and everybody's got a movie camera on their phone, the unions found they had better power if they worked together in negotiations. And like in 1960 with the emergence of television and all the producers who, when they made a movie - you make a movie, you pay an actor - the fee that they get includes all their days of working and then the right for that producer to air that film theatrically in theaters. That used to be all there was then television came along. The producers who own these films then can resell that content to television networks and run it ad nauseam. It took several years but finally the union said, hey, wait, you're making more money because you're reselling content that didn't exist when we initially had our contracts, it's time that we rethink how this all works. [They] went through a strike, and some very impressive celebrity leadership at the time including Ronald Reagan and Tony Curtis, they came to an agreement and there was a residual structure that now was in place and that held up through network television. Now we've got this thing that is called electronic media...there's another term...I should know this and I do, but I'm 62 almost and I'm allowed to forget everything. [Laughter]
Richard Helppie
Well, is this kind of getting into the pivot from theatrical release and network television to streaming, where there's content being produced and placed out there?
Greg Jbara
Right. And since streaming has been out there...it's called something content...anyway, they said, look, we're only going to pay a minimal amount right now to figure out what actually this beast is. The laborers - the directors, the writers, the all the stagehands, all the actors, everyone - said yeah, that's fair till we figure out what it is. It's more than ten years, and all the streaming manufacturers, Netflix, Disney +, they're making a lot of money in subscriber sales and now they have tangible ways of tracking what's being seen, who's seeing it, that sort of thing, yet they're not disclosing what that information is. They don't want to say here's how we know, because now what the directors and the actors want - now that we know the beast is and you're going to make X billion dollars a year - is a very, very, very, very small percentage of profits, the same - even less actually - than the ratio that's happening currently with the existing residual structure for television and for film. They just want a piece of the action now and the streaming creators, owners; they don't want to share. That's basically it in terms of dollars.
Richard Helppie
I thought that was curious because I was doing some reading in preparation for this and take a writer, for example, that a show would get picked up for a season they would write 22 episode, they knew they had an income stream, they knew that if the show went into syndication that they got a residual. Now they contracted to do something that's streaming, they, number one, don't know how long they're going to work, because they don't know how many episodes there are going to be, number two, there isn't a clear path to residuals because - ha ha, fooled you - since we're not sending it out on network TV you don't get any part of that streaming revenue. And where, wait a minute, there's some I might want a binge [watch] that was made ten years ago and the crew, the actors, never got a chance to benefit from my subscription; if I'm understanding that right?
Greg Jbara
That's a very accurate assessment. What's frustrating is, if you subscribe to Variety Magazine or entertainment weeklies or monthlies, there are actually ratings for the top viewed streaming entertainment content. They can calculate, in minutes, viewing time; there are calculations where the people who own the content know that there's 8.7 million minutes of eyes on this show in any given block of time; the ability to track usage. One of the other sticking points is the unions understand that you're a subscriber base, it's not like network television where a hot show, they can sell their commercial time for X amount of dollars and really hot shows are getting more money per 30 seconds on a TV show than others. In streaming, with subscriber base, everybody pays 15 bucks, and they have the right to watch whatever they want. But the content providers are able to track that activity and they don't want to divulge that. The actors are going, we don't want more money for things that are tanking, if people aren't watching it, of course, but for the shows that are doing well, there should be a small pool of your profit from that period of time and it gets divvied out based on which shows are outperforming the others. That's basically the same thing that happened with television, which is...network TV is phasing out. The other scary thing is there won't be network broadcasting as we know it, it's all going to be streaming content and unless we figure out a way to fairly spread the wealth, it's going to run away from the the labor class. That's the scary part. And that's just the finance, that's not technology yet, which we haven't even touched on.
Richard Helppie
Well, one of the things that I think has come up with this is that why should the average person in Wayne Westland, Michigan care about this strike? The Hollywood glamour...you get recognized places because of the productions that you've been in and in a better day, we can talk about some of the wonderful stuff you've done recently. The perception of your average person is that everybody's living in Bel Air with a swimming pool and a Rolls in the driveway and a small, well-groomed dog next to them; I think that's kind of got all the pieces in there. They're wondering, well, why should I care about what's going on, between the haves and the haves in Hollywood?
Greg Jbara
Because it's not haves and haves. It's less than ten percent - I can speak from the acting pool, just guesstimate. Over 80% of the 160,000 actors who are a member of SAGAFTRA can't make enough money a year to pay their health insurance. They can't make their twenty some thousand minimum to have health insurance; they don't make enough money in a year. That's the majority of the membership. That's who we all...I mean, gratefully, I'm 62, I paid my dues on Broadway...another interesting example that I thought of was, even in a Broadway show, my last two Broadway shows, you don't make any money for the first six months of your commitment. You agree to sign on at a really low rate so that the show's affordable and they can get it on its feet. And then it's not till you stick around for a year that your salary starts to increase incrementally. I'm saying this very simply, I didn't save any money the first six months, I only was able to pay for my costs, expenses, with a family with two children and still paying for my house in Los Angeles while I was living in New York doing the show. It was six months in before I actually was putting money in savings. And if the show had closed, I would have invested that time creatively on that show and I wouldn't have had anything to show for it, I'd start back at ground zero. So that's a part of the system even in theater. That was the show that ultimately, gratefully, I won the Tony Award for; Billy Elliot - and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the last two shows. As an artist, you go, alright, I'll take a risk with you - because it is a risk but once things start paying off, everybody deserves their fair share, it's just understood. It's how things have been done. It's the right thing to do.
Richard Helppie
I'm looking at some of the things you sent me about where things stand in the negotiation. The incredible amount of detail; from hairdressers to someone that comes on site, on location - I think if I'm using the right term - and there are both a stand-in and a double, whether a dancer lip syncs songs or not, how they should be paid. Frankly I was astonished with, on the studio side of it or the producer side of it, just things that seem eminently reasonable and the answer was rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected. And I'm wondering, is this a lot different than the strike in '07? You were just getting going back in '07 or were you well into your career by that time?
Greg Jbara
In '07 I was gratefully doing a Broadway show or finishing up...no, no, actually, I was between shows. I was here in LA, but literally no income and with two children to feed and a mortgage and a car to make payments on. There was no work in Los Angeles and I literally had to go after...gratefully enjoying the year and a half I did Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in New York. But my wife and I lying awake at night, couldn't sleep because we're worrying about finances. And I'm going, I may have to put my hat in the ring for for another Broadway show - because theater is under a different union - I can work as a stage actor, just to make ends meet. So it did have an effect. But I can remember that I was grateful. I'm not personally hanging on to a hardship other than I forgot that there was a strike going on in 2007 that really made it...
Richard Helppie
When I observe this strike - and look, being a Detroit guy we've seen strikes, right, they come and go, and we generally know where the battle lines are being drawn - using the car industry is a great example, of course, I'm sitting here in the cradle of organized labor and the car companies needed the labor because otherwise they couldn't put out a product. No product, no revenue; no revenue, no profit; no profit, no shareholder growth and so forth. I'm wondering, in the situation that exists today in Los Angeles and Hollywood, is part of the reluctance on the part of the studios to settle or to negotiate better just because there's so much content out there? There's lots of data that says there's just too much being produced, that there's not enough people to watch all the stuff that's coming out. Are they saying that we're sitting on enough content, we're going to choke the union.
Greg Jbara
Well, that's definitely that one of their considerations, the reality is the streaming. They also threw so much money, like bidding wars, on content. They all wanted everything so they can have stuff for their subscribers and actually a lot of money got wasted in that process. But yeah, right now they're sitting - horrible as it is, in addition to the one film that's doing very well, I worked on two other independent features last summer. I'm thinking - and I've been having dialogue with the producers - this is your time. This actually is like, ideal. One of the films has already been snatched up for distribution because the streamers are looking for [content] because no one else is producing stuff. It was like, I may end up...my TV gig may be done if the strike goes long enough and I'll be unemployed but at least that movie that I made last summer will have a life because right now there's a need for that content.
Richard Helppie
Because of the strike we're not at liberty to say anything about the show, the movie that's out there. But you've got a box office hit out there that I think going to be looked at as a pivotal work of the era. Under a non-strike situation, the producers would want you on the talk shows and the entertainment shows and being interviewed about the picture and about your role in the picture and about where [cross talk]
Greg Jbara
There are at least 30 other major stars who are much bigger than I am [Laughter] but all of that doesn't exist because, well, the talk shows are done - no writers, no talk shows. They were about to premiere in New York, and then the actress had to...they actually pushed the premiere up an hour so they could at least do their red carpet and then they were done. It's really strange, you really feel...because I'm an actor, I love talking about myself. That's why I was so intimidated today; oh, my gosh, I have to really think about smart things to say, like I have to really understand this big economic issue.
Richard Helppie
You've got to dig back to that physics background and I'm thinking you'd be a good host on Jeopardy except that that's not being shown anymore because of the strike and Mayim Bialik, who's a wonderful host, I've just love it because she's so smart and so nice, a qualified scientist in her own right. She's like, hey, I'm not going until the strikes over. You'd be a good pair with her. You guys are both smart and well known actors.
Greg Jbara
Well, thank you. I play smart well.
Richard Helppie
You play smart well. [Chuckles]
Greg Jbara
I play smart well.
Richard Helppie
We all try that, Greg, okay, we all try. [Laughter] Remember, I came from the same roots as you did and ended up with a very successful company and making meetings in Wall Street. They never knew that I had never gone to the Ivy League. Maybe my accent gave me away and stuff but I learned to moderate my speech and the like.
Greg Jbara
Yeah, you're saying you're a good actor yourself?
Richard Helppie
Well, a lot of it's theater. A lot of it is theater and your storytelling and backed up with a lot of numbers. But a lot of times we'd get 20 minutes; what's the market, what's the competition, what's your edge, what are your finances, and then you got the hooks and you were done. And that was supposed to sell stock for you, which I think we did an above average job.
Greg Jbara
What you don't know...we didn't discuss. I'm in the closet right now. And this is where...
Richard Helppie
Actually you are in a physical closet right now.
Greg Jbara
This is dry cleaning plastic right here. This is where actors really do all their work because I will self-tape. Self-tape means either recording for voice-over work or I put a green screen behind me or this blue screen and I work in the bedroom when no one's in the house. I audition myself now; it's been a product since COVID. It existed pre-COVID but with COVID right now also the producers are saving ridiculous amounts of money by not having to pay for a brick and mortar location to hold casting sessions because everybody now puts themselves on tape. But I always say a good actor knows how to audition and sell himself and do it literally in the three minutes that they have the attention span for to decide whether you're the guy and that's really what actors do. I'm not the actor who gets a phone call and they say hey, we got a big studio picture role for you. That picture that will-not-be-mentioned was a job which was a byproduct of me putting myself on tape.
Richard Helppie
So there's like a strata of actors that they like - I'm just going to name one, like a Tom Cruise or a George Clooney or someone like that - they get a call and they say we want you for this picture. Those guys don't have to audition.
Greg Jbara
They guarantee butts in the seats. They are a money-maker, that's what they do. And also you can Google and look, a vast majority of those top percenters are donating millions of dollars to the support fund right now, to help cover the costs for all the below the line people who are struggling because of this strike. They've all...like, dozens of million dollar donors for the cause. So it's not like they're just sitting back going, oh, this isn't my problem; they're there. Also, I can remember a year I made $20,000 after making more as a stage actor and doing commercials, and my agent said - in New York, I was in New York - he goes, you know, there are families with six people living in a tenement apartment in New York City who get by on $20,000 a year. I wasn't complaining, I just went, wow, that's a slow year, thank goodness for waitering jobs and catering jobs. But that's who the strike is for.
Richard Helppie
I know there was a rally recently, downtown Los Angeles, Teamsters and the hotel workers were supporting the UPS drivers who are on strike and that the Writers Guild showed up to support. (Greg Jbara: Yes, and the Screen Actors Guild too.) Oh, did they? Okay, great. I have my theory about why they wanted to support; what's your cut on it? Why that level of support? Why would they care?
Greg Jbara
Well, because we all know that the biggest problem is, the big companies don't want to give away, they don't want to share any profits they don't have to. You need solidarity, you need all the rest of the community, hopefully you can put eyes on it. I got texts today from people I know who are fans, who are going, hey, is the strike still on? And I'm thinking, oh, for actors who are it's like, that's not a good thing, the world needs to know that this is still an ongoing issue, and it's going to probably continue for six months, easily.
Richard Helppie
Before we get into talking about how this might get resolved here's the parallel, I see. If you're a UPS driver, the greatest threat to your livelihood is a self-driving truck - and it's coming. If you're in the entertainment industry, the technology that's coming is AI, artificial intelligence. Why is AI such an important factor today in these negotiations? I know that is a real pivotal point.
Greg Jbara
Well, it already exists. There are and were, until the strike, there still are opportunities for an agent to submit an actor to be scanned. They said, we're going to hire you, we're going to pay you a thousand bucks. We're going to have you do all these different behaviors, and then you sign off, and we get to take that and archive it and use it for creating artificial characters. The problem is that it's a one time deal. They're going to own you and your likeness, and whatever it is you do right now there's nothing stopping it. I suppose there's nothing stopping the studios from just scanning content of work that they already own. You know what I mean? We're just going to have our computers look at these films. These are great performances, we'd like something like this. And that can't happen because it's somebody's work that's now being re-purposed, re-marketed, for something that's going to make that actor obsolete. So just to have survival...
Richard Helppie
Greg, think about obsolete, think about this. Why would you need a Meryl Streep, a Marlon Brando, when you can just create them at whatever age you need them to be. You could just make tomorrow's movie stars because look, if the artificial intelligence is coming to writing, it's coming into set design, it's coming into the the camera moves, why not just create the stars? And here's the big thing; will the audience in that future even care? Will it be normalized? Will it be accepted or maybe even preferred? And there goes one of the most human things we can do is impart stories through acting. Is it weird for me to ask this question of an actor, am I being overly dramatic about what that technology change could mean?
Greg Jbara
No, and what you put so eloquently is we don't yet know whether humanity will go, oh, this is fine, I'm being entertained and it works so this is good enough. Or how do we campaign to show how vitally important it is that the living, breathing storyteller is the key to leaning forward in your seat as an audience member? So Christopher Nolan doesn't do digital, he doesn't do any CGI because he believes that when you see digital imaging, you already know that it's not real, like some part of the viewer knows that it's digital. It's not that they haven't figured out how to make it so realistic and how things are saved. He likes keeping everything. He likes to create things analog on film because he believes it has a more visceral impact on the viewer. I'm wondering, eventually will the technology get so good and that is the fear of course. But you think about like the UAW when automation came into play, isn't the question - as the manufacturer - can we actually save money with a robot and does the quality of the product not suffer? Are you getting the same quality with automation that you would have gotten with a human being? And if the answer is yes, then it makes sense to start automating. But as a person who depended on that livelihood, they're going, this is what I do, how can you just erase me for profit? That's what we're facing. I mean, that's what we're facing.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. If someone might say, well, we're always going to have the stage, but then I wonder will people be as entertained going to see a live show. My passion for the Purple Rose Theatre is because I think live theater is really important. We need to develop writers and artists and actors and people that do set design and learn how to direct and tell stories with real people. But if the Purple Rose Theater ticket is 35-ish dollars, which is a bargain - by the way, you don't have to pay to park in Chelsea ; quick plug there - but you can go to a movie theater and watch a full length feature film for $11 and it's all CGI, all artificial intelligence. As it gets better and better it'll be hard to tell the difference between a real analog shot and that artificially created one, will people still crave that real experience?
Greg Jbara
I don't know. But the other thing is, it's also going to stop [people from] going to the [movie] theater. Everybody's going to be doing it in their own house; people are bingeing now in their underwear, in their bed. People aren't going to the theater for even for film anymore, because COVID taught everyone that they can stay at home. That's another huge concern.
Richard Helppie
I think another part of that phenomena - I've only seen it the few times that I do go to the theater for a movie - people that are streaming TikTok while in the theater, seems to kind of defeat the purpose...oh, yeah, I'm going to the theater.
Greg Jbara
Right. Or there used to be a time - back to actors protecting their livelihood - before cameras were on phones and if I was in a Broadway show and saw a little red light in the audience, there were a dozen ushers that confiscated that video camera because actors are not being compensated. There's a whole black market for Broadway shows that are on VHS or beta and that was back in the 80s. But now everybody, anybody can videotape, can make a movie with their phone, and you go to any live event anymore and everyone's doing this from a sporting event to a concert to theater. I have friends sending me stills of me in the movie theater this summer. And I'm going, what are you taking...what's happening? People are forgetting how to...there's value in just owning that experience for yourself. Why? That's scary to me.
Richard Helppie
Most weddings now, they say, hey, we've got a photographer and a videographer, put your phone down. And everybody but one or two people, Aunt Nancy or Uncle Billy, don't do it because they have to have it on their phone. But Greg, as far as the strike goes, two questions. They may have the same answer. One is when do people start really noticing that this strike has gone on, and two, are the issues resolvable?
Greg Jbara
I think it's going to end up being a PR issue, because even our leadership did not say cancel your streaming subscriptions. One of the thoughts is you need millions of people to cancel the subscription for it to hit the companies in the pocketbook; 10,000 people aren't going to make a difference. Several other companies, interestingly, were showing losses this second quarter. I think it's going to go back to it has to be what's right and what's fair. Unfortunately, what's profitable, is leading these...because even with my TV job - when Les Moonves was still head of CBS and all of his officers down the road at CBS - they all came from creative places, they all came up through the ranks, they were all artists on some level and found their place in the upper echelons. They all have a love and a passion for the artist as the source material and what an artist does because that was their life and they understand that. These big corporations now that are running all the entertainment stuff - even at CBS - it's being countered now, the artistic soul is dying. If it's not profitable, it makes no sense to us. I'm kind of grateful where I am in my career because when the TV film thing starts to...if it all does implode, I can possibly go back to the stage as something. But I'm also 62 and it's like kindness doesn't play a card anymore. Doing the right thing is gone. Fairness; there's a stat that shows 0.007% of each individual company's profits is what's being asked for from their billions of dollars profit each year and they're just not willing to start giving that up.
Richard Helppie
Another parallel with the auto industry. It used to be there were car guys, car guys populated every executive corner, and then really starting with Chrysler - I won't name the fellow that was the finance guy - they started looking at everything through a financial lens and the cars became crap. Nobody got excited about them. It's the same type of slippery slope that potentially we could get on here in the entertainment industry.
Greg Jbara
And it will, it will, it's happening. It's just insidious and slow and terrifying.
Richard Helppie
Yeah, a lot of streaming companies are losing money. As an investor, I keep an eye on that. There are some that I've invested in and some that I've gotten in and out of; there will be a shakeout, they're not all going to survive. It comes down to - I'll be my financial nerd for a moment - a thing called an addressable market. How big is the addressable market? How much content can your average household consume multiplied by how many households there are worldwide. There's your addressable market. Then how much market share can you capture for that, and the numbers clearly show some are going to make it and some are not going to make it. But that doesn't mean that the individual properties, the movies, and the television programs, and the like, aren't going to be profitable in their own right. In the aggregate a particular producer, even one that's completely vertically integrated, may not make it as an enterprise, but some of their products are actually going to be pretty darn good properties (Greg Jbara: Right.) You'll see libraries of content being sold even more so than we've seen today. (Greg Jbara: Sure.) It's on its way, it's happened, it happens in every other industry. It'll come down to three or four powerhouses like it does in every other industry and then it'll be supplanted by some new technology that the existing people will try to stifle. They will enlist the government to try to keep other competitors out. As long as we don't complete our march towards censorship, we'll probably be okay and figure out a way around that.
Greg Jbara
I love your optimism. I like to believe the same. It's just going to be brutal.
Richard Helppie
Greg, this has been a great conversation. Are there any thoughts that you want to leave with the listeners, the viewers and the readers of The Common Bridge?
Greg Jbara
Yeah, I always worry that people just kind of look at headlines, that humanity doesn't yet know how to deal with information as quickly as it comes. So I would encourage, for anyone who wants to know why they should care about the strikes that are going on, it's really easy - because I'm not into big words myself - go ahead and click something and take the two and a half to five minutes to read something to better understand what the issues are, as opposed to just looking at the headlines and going, ah, the have-alls are whining again, because it's really not about that. It's a universal issue that we all deal with on some level. Nobody wants their livelihood, their craft, the way they sustain their family to be eliminated. It's about survival and kindness and fairness. So take the time to read the articles. You'll be grateful that you did because you'll have a better understanding and a bit more empathy, I think.
Richard Helppie
I concur. Film, theater, television programs are part of our culture; define who we are, they let us discuss things. Of course I'm a hearty endorser of getting beyond the headlines, that's what this program is about. With our guest star of stage, film, and television, Greg Jbara, this is your host Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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