VF: “Long-Term Damage”? Bob Iger, Ted Sarandos, and David Zaslav’s Bad-PR Summer
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mud
Aug 20 '23, 08:12
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With Hollywood’s writers and actors on strike, studio bosses were obvious candidates to be cast as the villains. Some believe they played the role too well.
BY NATALIE JARVEY AND JOE POMPEO
AUGUST 18, 2023
In the largest screening room on the MGM lot in 1933, Louis B. Mayer completed his transformation into a Marvel-worthy villain. As the Great Depression raged, he solemnly shared with top executives and stars that the studio was at risk of going belly up. Americans weren’t going to the movies, and MGM’s rivals were in a panic about a complete production shutdown. To save MGM—and really all of Hollywood—employees would need to take a 50% pay cut. “I, Louis B. Mayer, will work to see that you get back every penny when this terrible emergency is over,” the Scott Eyman biography Lion of Hollywood quotes him as saying.
Spoiler alert: They never got their money back. Mayer—on his way to becoming the highest-paid executive in America—received a bonus that year after MGM posted profits, and as Eyman writes, the actors and writers unions were born out of workers’ discontent over the industry-wide cuts.
Ninety years later, amid the first double strike in over 60 years, the titans of Hollywood are fighting a narrative that relatively little has changed, particularly as they have collected paychecks of eight figures or more. Though the struggle to establish new contracts with both the writers and actors is ongoing, the major studios may have already lost the optics war. “It’s been amazing to me how lopsided the PR battle has been,” says Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. “The actors and writers are sending in the Spartan hordes while Rome is crumbling, and you’ve got Bob Iger doing one of the biggest foot-in-mouth cases of any executive ever.”
In case you somehow missed it, he’s referring to the Disney CEO’s unfortunately timed July 13 interview with CNBC’s David Faber, right before the actors strike began, during Allen & Company’s annual Sun Valley conference. There, at a luxurious retreat widely referred to as summer camp for billionaires, Iger called the unions’ demands “just not realistic.” It was a shot across the bow in the ongoing labor negotiations that only further incensed picketers. The following day, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher called Iger’s comments on the strike “terribly repugnant and out of touch,” adding that, if she were Disney, she would “lock him behind doors” and forbid him from commenting publicly on the strike again. Executives at Iger’s level regularly make headlines, but during the strikes the criticisms have become more personal than usual.
It was always going to be difficult for the studios to win the hearts and minds of the public during their contract talks with SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, something more than one studio-side source concedes to Vanity Fair. “Optics are important here,” says an exec who stresses that Hollywood itself isn’t in a good place, the studios having collectively laid off thousands of employees over the last year as they face pressure from Wall Street to extract profits from their streaming businesses. “I don’t know how we position ourselves.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, has not commented much publicly about the negotiations, but their members have of course been called out from the picket lines. “We’ve got a message for Mr. Iger,” actor Bryan Cranston said during a speech at a recent rally. “I know, sir, that you look at things through a different lens. We don’t expect you to understand who we are. But…we will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots. We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living. And lastly, and most importantly, we will not allow you to take away our dignity!”
Before Iger picked up a lightning rod and held it over his head, it was David Zaslav who’d been cast as a villain in Hollywood’s saga of the summer. On May 20, as the writers strike dragged on into its third week, Zaslav was met with boos and picket-style chants during a commencement speech at Boston University, which was conferring an honorary degree upon the 63-year-old Warner Bros. Discovery boss. The hostile reception caught WBD off guard. Zaslav’s speech had been booked two years in advance, and it was a meaningful appearance for the suddenly embattled mogul, who earned his law degree from BU in 1985. (The university’s president publicly scolded “students who were appallingly coarse and deliberately abusive to Mr. Zaslav.”)
Zaslav and his lieutenants were less surprised when, days later, he came in for backlash after cohosting a star-studded soiree at the French Riviera’s Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc during the Cannes Film Festival, a fête which signified, as The New York Times suggested, “the A-listification of Hollywood’s newest mogul.” Some in Zaslav’s orbit thought that going through with the bash was a bad idea given the position that he and the company were in. But it had been in the works for the better part of a year and was seen as an important symbolic event, a celebration of film and the 100th anniversary of Warner Bros. So WBD made what was described to VF as a “clear-eyed” call to proceed, fully aware that it would probably be used against them. (Hollywood stars, from Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese to Leonardo DiCaprio, Scarlett Johansson, and numerous others, apparently had few, if any, qualms about showing up.)
A scathing Zaslav critique in July by a freelancer for GQ (one of VF’s sister publications) turned into its own public relations mess, further fueling the Zaslav news cycle. Since the Cannes soiree, Zaslav has kept his head down for the most part; unlike Iger, he didn’t chat with CNBC during Sun Valley as he typically would. That doesn’t mean the scrutiny has cooled off. On the contrary, WBD is bracing for big Zaslav pieces that are said to be in the works at two major-league publications, one of which is a long-simmering magazine feature with three prominent bylines attached. (We’ll leave that as a blind item for now.)
Iger softened his public stance on the strike in the company’s early-August earnings call, declaring his “deep respect and appreciation” for Hollywood’s creative community, and saying he is personally committed to finding a solution to the ongoing dispute. The feeling is that it would have been best if both he and Zaslav had followed the lead of, say, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and taken a step away from the spotlight. “Silence and careful movements would have really been the key to weathering this,” says an executive at a major media company. “Instead, they both very much stepped right in it, and I think created long-term damage from a PR perspective. Iger had more reputational damage, because he’s seen as the king of Hollywood.”
That’s not to say Sarandos hasn’t weathered his share of criticism since the strikes began. You could reason, after all, that Netflix set the stage for this whole mess by supercharging the streaming wars, and many writers argued just that during the earliest days of the strike. As picketers flocked to the Netflix offices in Los Angeles and New York, Sarandos backed out of the PEN America Literary Gala “given the threat to disrupt this wonderful evening.” The company also canceled plans for its first-ever Upfront Week advertising showcase. “It is head-scratching to many of us that Sarandos has not become more of a target,” says a plugged-in Hollywood insider. “Behind closed doors, everyone on both sides is like, ‘He got us into this. Now he needs to get us out of it.’”
From what we hear, Sarandos—who in his first strike-era earnings call announced expected savings related to the production shutdown, while also positioning himself as a pro-labor son of a union electrician—has been getting more involved in the negotiations of late. Sources familiar with the talks say Iger has also become more hands-on, particularly as the AMPTP and WGA resume their talks. Other engaged leaders who we hear have pushed for more face-to-face meetings are Zaslav and Sony boss Tony Vinciquerra. Meanwhile veteran entertainment executive Peter Chernin, who was an instrumental figure in resolving the last writers strike, has stepped in recently to lend a hand.
It might be too late for any one executive to come out of this conflict looking like a winner, but that didn’t stop one communications veteran from quipping recently, “They should hire publicists.” After all, the writers and the actors have more than a little experience crafting messages and winning people over to their side. In contrast to a Deadline story published on the eve of the SAG-AFTRA strike, the studio party line has been that they don’t regard the contract talks as a battle. Encouragingly, WGA negotiating committee cochair Chris Keyser recently said much the same: “This isn’t a war we’re in, it’s a negotiation. It’s just a negotiation. There is no face-saving here for either side because there is no winner or loser.”
A few months of intensely scrutinized faux pas and agita-inducing press will, of course, fade in many, if not all, memories. These guys are still going to be in charge after the strikes come to a close and the Town eventually gets back to business. Iger recently re-upped his contract through 2026 and has successfully reduced streaming losses. Zaz is chipping away at WBD’s debt load and riding high on Barbie’s success at the box office. Sarandos has the dark horse hit of the summer with (presumably inexpensive) reruns of the legal drama Suits, and Netflix is back to adding subscribers at a solid clip.
As one of our sources notes, “If your shareholders love you and the strike is settled, things can look a lot different for you in six months.”
Still, Chapman University’s Galloway has an idea that might have helped these CEOs along the way: to avoid the comparisons to Mayer and his ilk, they could have reserved some of their multimillion-dollar compensation packages for a fund to help workers struggling as a result of the production stoppage and industry-wide layoffs. “Even then, they would probably be criticized,” he says, “but at least people would see that they’re willing to have some skin in the game.”
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