Asks James Poniewozik in "We Are All Background Actors/Why should you care about the strikes in Hollywood? Because they are much more than a revolt of the privileged" (NYT).
You could, I guess, make the argument that if someone is insignificant enough to be replaced by software, then they’re in the wrong business....
“We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” Fran Drescher, the actors’ guild president, said in announcing the strike....
You may think of Hollywood creatives as a privileged class, but if their employers think about them like this, are you sure yours thinks any differently of you?...
You may never notice background actors... Yet they’re the difference between a sterile scene and a living one. They create the impression that... there is a full, complete universe....
Poniewozik, the TV critic for the NYT, interweaves 3 themes that I think are quite different and I'd like to separate:
1. The work done by background actors — how valuable it is to us, the viewers, who ought to want movies and TV shows made with real actors filling out the scenes.
2. The need to make acting a good enough career with a reliable income for a wide swath of human beings. They'd like to pay you for one day's work, while they scan your face, a face they could then use a million times, instead of hiring a thousand actors a thousand times.
3. The extent to which computers are coming to replace all human workers. Time for all of us to dig in and resist the threat?
Are any — or all — of these concerns enough to outlaw the face-scanning shortcut? Let's keep the 3 ideas separate:
1. If there is aesthetic value to using real background actors, then it's like other aesthetic choices — e.g., shooting on location — that increase the cost of a production. We, the viewers, make the ultimate choice. If we love and lavish money on expensive productions with more elaborate realism, then we might get more of them. But we might also love movies and TV shows that wouldn't be made at all if the costs weren't kept down.
2. This is the real labor issue. The actors have a union and they are sticking together. And yet Poniewozik's argument is that they are us. How so?
3. Here, maybe we are all doomed. Is it time to wake up?
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“Oppenheimer” reportedly has no CGI. And it was entirely filmed in 70mm IMAX.
I don’t recall the glamorous Hollywood unions raising any concerns when blue collar union jobs were being lost to “automation.” Did I miss their concern all those terrible years when the blue collar workers losing their jobs were told to learn how to code?
An industry where the robots took over - trading on Wall Street. No jobs there anymore. No one crying about it. Sorry not sorry your background acting job is going away.
These are some of the issues I raised the other day. Background is a blue collar job in Hollywood. Do we want an economy in which regular people are employed in unglamorous work, or do we only want the elites earning money?
Shooting on location is no longer necessary. The Volume is new and used sparingly right now (see The Mandalorian), but it will become more integrated. Utilizing computer and AI to create virtual worlds is very exciting. No one needs to travel, and delicate environments aren't impacted with film crews. But places are not humans.
I used to disparage unions until I saw the inner workings of SAG. During the pandemic, when no one in Cali was working, the union paid my son a salary. As a background actor he was offered health care and has an established retirement plan. It's easy to hate on the multi-millionaires who think we care about their political musings. Their salaries pay for a lot of little people to make a living, though, and they stand up for those people in a clinch.
the viewers, who ought to
maybe i "ought to".. But, i DON'T
Back in the day, studio extras got much? Lunch?
Back in the day, studio contract players got how much? $150 a week?
Watch movies from "the Golden Era of Hollywood" It's the same actors and actresses in ALL the movies.
In another year and a half, computers will be able to generate complete people without face scanning.
What's going to happen to the porno industry then?
(i Know, you think you're talking about Films, not porno.. i KNOW, You THINK there's a difference)
The truly important goal will be to replace university professors with AI.
Why scan an actor for background uses at all? AI-generated images, from scratch, can possibly (probably?) replicate background "persons" just fine. I guess it would depend on how close the backgrounders were to the up-front action, but even so, in a such a scene who really concentrates on what's behind the principal characters?
Side issue: which is Fran Drescher's real voice?
I used to worry that if I took 2 weeks vacation, they would realize they could do without me.
Perhaps this is S1m0ne (2002) becoming reality.
In the railyard scene of Gone With the Wind, half the Confederate soldiers were mannequins, rocked by the humans in the scene, so there would be twice the number of wounded soldiers.
The movies have always used as few humans as possible.
What the writers and actors protest against is that their contributions to the film industry can be replaced, are being replaced, by less costly wordsmithing and faces generated by computers. They cannot win this protest. There is no requirement for the film industry to use live actors or live writers.
Hollywood can film a human actor's ass for two hours, or they can use an AI-generated ass to make their Academy Award winning movie. Either way, the prophecy of Idiocracy is fulfilled.
There are plenty of jobs that cannot be replaced by a digital replica, so that's a very weak argument.
I don't recall Hollywood every treating background actors well. They seem to be important when actors need to fluff up their numbers both on stage and for strikes.
Face scanning is a problem... for actors. It isn't a problem for various jobs that requires use of hands, which is ironic since hands are what AI draws poorly.
Computers have been coming to replace humans since the 1980's, and what I know about computers is that they seem to get worse as at replacing my job as I get older.
We should probably ask AI (ChatGPT, for one opinion) on what we should do.
Many people used to cut down wheat. Then horse power, and mechanization. Then latge harvesters, each driven by a single person. Now harvesters are automated and (potentially) multiple harvesters ‘driven’ by a single person. Harvesters will drive themselves.
Outrageous.
Actors, writers are part of the entertainment industry. This is a non-essential industry. We could talk about mental health, and the cultural significance of such entertainment, but it’s being continuously eroded and destroyed, ironically by that very same industry. What value do you have?
How does animation fall into this discussion?
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
"Why don't you give them spoons?"
“We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,”
Isn't this the same tired argument always raised about automation (broadly defined) and technology in general?
AI this year. Waaay overblown IMHO.
Robots
Internet
Computers
Machinery in general
Steam engine
Printing press
Thousands of other examples.
It has always created more and better jobs than it has destroyed.
Same thing will happen here.
John Henry
Where were these people when US jobs were being shipped to China, millions were impoverished and entire industries and communities were destroyed?
What have these people had to say as American workers are being replaced by a flood of literally millions of illegal immigrants? How many of these people eagerly hired illegal immigrants to do their landscaping? To do their housekeeping? Build their homes? They all love paying low wages and they love the fearful submissiveness servants with a precarious legal status always show them.
I'll tell you what they've had to say and continue to say.
They vilely slander anyone who doesn't agree that they are entitled to cheap help as a racist, a Nazi, a loathsome and contemptible subhuman who should be marginalized by society and should not be allowed to speak or publish their opinions and objections. "Shut up, racists. Remember your place, filthy poors." That's what they've had to say.
Now here they come crying.
An interesting parallel might be the music wars of the 1930s.
The musicians union refused to allow their members to make records on similar grounds.
They got paid once for playing (still do) but the music was listened to many times.
They also had a problem with radio. Instead of people needing to listen to musicians a few at a time in a live venue, millions could listen.
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/11/the-music-wars-of-the-1940s/
John Henry
Using CGI backgrounds and AI generated actors, soon some 20 yr old in his basement will make an Oscar winning movie.
How many in Hollywood, background actors or not, were against importing millions of guests workers (H-1bs etc) to replace American jobs and supported illegal and legal immigration to bust unions and drive down wages in other industries?
And when mel gibson and others have been greylisted and blacklisted by Hollywood did SAG fight for them or not? And who did SAG support in 2016 or 2020?
The fact is that the "Entertainment Industry" from top to bottom is Stalinist Anti-American Left. They're also greedy and put out a toxic unwatchable product.
So, who cares? Maybe ChatGP can write better scripts and CGI actors can be more engaging and likable.
I think one of the large transformations taking place is the adoption of amateur versions of entertainment. I know in my house there is only one modern scripted show that is watched and even that completed its run last year (Disney's owl house). The rest is youtube or shows from the 90s and aught's.
The strikes have no impact in my house since we don't consume their work anymore.
I think this battle is more about how to make and split the $ in this fractured media environment. It has been building for a while and perhaps the AI threat made the bubble pop.
1. Real versus synthetic. Some people pay a premium for organic food, while others take the cheap and easy route.
2. Actors are a pain-in-the-ass. Popular actors get paid way too much for a job that isn't particularly dangerous or difficult. Some take that to mean they are special, and should tell the rest of us how to live. Fewer actors sounds okay to me.
3. They should learn how to code. Only kidding, AI will replace that. The skilled trades won't be replaced by AI, so maybe do that instead.
The old advice, "learn to code," is out-of-date. The new advice should be, learn to do something that a computer can't do.
Computers aren't good at fixing things or building things. They aren't good at taking care of health problems. As zoom-school taught us, they aren't good at teaching kids. Computers can be of some help in lots of these areas, but they can't take over the job.
We're a long way from being rendered redundant by computers.
Twenty-First century Luddites, and bound to be as successful.
Seems the problem is that the background actors want their images used but to also get paid when the image is used showing them doing things they did not do.
The larger issue should be a ban on using the images of people to make videos of them doing things they did not themselves do. Even in a green screen, the actor did take their own actions then the scene was generated around that. But should people's images be able to be used to show them moving in ways they did not, nor consented to having their image used to show?
This latter implication has impact far beyond background actors. Ban such use across the board, in Hollywood, everywhere.
"In the railyard scene of Gone With the Wind, half the Confederate soldiers were mannequins, rocked by the humans in the scene, so there would be twice the number of wounded soldiers."
- Because the day of that filming the Extras Guild simply couldn't provide enough warm bodies to completely fill out the scene. It wasn't a matter of not wanting to pay extras, there simply weren't enough available. Mannequins cost money too.
Robert Marshall said...
The old advice, "learn to code," is out-of-date. The new advice should be, learn to do something that a computer can't do.
Oh, this will be a very big issue as AI renders most of what colleges do outside of STEM. Here is a very good assessment from a professor:
=====
But, I want to go to the other end of the spectrum, which is intellectual services. It used to be, if you wave your Bachelor's degree, you're going to get a great job. When I graduated from college, it was a sure thing that you'd get a great job. And, in college, you'd basically learned artificial intelligence, meaning, you carried out the instructions that the faculty member gave you. You memorized the lectures, and you were tested on your memory in the exams. That's what a computer does. It basically memorizes what you tell it to do.
But now, with a computer doing all those mundane, repetitive intellectual tasks, if you're expecting to do well in the job market, you have to bring, you have to have real education. Real education means to solve problems that the faculty who teach don't really know how to solve.
And that takes talent as well as education.
So, my view is we've got to change education from a kind of a big Xerox machine where the lectures are memorized and then tested, into one which is more experienced-based to prepare a workforce for the reality of the 20th century. You've got to recognize that just because you had an experience with, say, issues in accounting, doesn't mean that you have the ability to innovate and take care of customers who have problems that cannot be coded.--Econtalk podcast with economist Ed Leamer, April 13, 2020
I'm curious about how digital replication of extras will affect the film experience of the viewer. I like to watch my favorite movies more than once. I already know the plot and ending, but on multiple viewings I take notice of the extras, the scenery, the props, and I often stop a frame to study it. These are often the things in the movie that make it seem real, enough so that you will laugh, cry, be afraid, or otherwise moved. Think of all the extras in Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List.
Plenty of movies use cardboard cutouts or dummies or even non-union locals for scenes that need crowds of people. Background acting isn’t a career—it’s usually considered to be an entry-level gig, on the way to 2 line, then supporting player, then star.
The concerns regarding occupational obsolescence are genuine. The question is this: why should the issues raised by those concerns be more compelling in the context of the entertainment industry than they are in the context of industries like mining, oil drilling, textiles, etc.?
The entertainment industry has been cheerfully advocating for putting lots of Americans out of work. Let's see how this shakes out.
1. Mikee @ 7:26 AM cites an old example. More recently, in Gladiator the background people in the stands of the Colosseum were just part of the CGI'd Colosseum. There were fairly indistinct so no one really cared, including the audience and apparently the actors union. As CGI gets better, quicker, and cheaper, the CGI'd background people will get more distinct and eventually, after the uncanny valley is overcome, will be placed in the same scene as the main actors. At some point, background actors will be limited to live productions - the theater, SNL, etc. I think that's inevitable unless the union can somehow gain that featherbedding. But I think the technology and economics are inevitable.
2. I believe we were a healthier civilization when entertainers - actors, singers - had to make their money giving live performances. I don't think there's a lot of value to the civilization or the culture by having people employed to be in backgrounds. Good for those who can get the work but not work or a skill I think the broader culture needs to fight to keep viable. But of course, if the paying audience disagrees enough, it'll continue.
Though I do think the re-use of a particular person's digital likeness in perpetuity is an issue. But that's likely to be a matter of $$ to the person giving that consent, and then the inevitable ratcheting downward aka race to the bottom $.
The more the union sticks together on this issue, the quicker the producers and studios subject to the labor agreement get bypassed by creators who can't or won't accept the union requirements. In fact, unless the producers and studios are unique (and some certainly could be), I expect them to be on a downward trajectory due to the inflexibility and calcification resulting from unions and their agreements.
3. If and only if and when the jobs of me or mine are threatened. Part of my former professional already are but not yet in a way that I find objectionable.
This is nothing new. I was an extra on "The Patriot," (Continental Army soldier). The background extras were cut and pasted into the battle scenes to fill out the field.
If you look up "Ice Ice Matrix," you'll see the Quaker Oats guy (Wilfred Brimley) doing the middle section ("Now that the party is jumping / With the bass kicked in, the Vegas are pumpin'").
Excellent job, although the lip-flap tech isn't quite there yet.
The future's coming in hard.
The main problem at the moment is most of Hollywood's output recently, at least by the major studios, has been terrible. It is arguable that they could replace the lot of them with A.I. It would still be terrible, but it would be a lot cheaper.
The bottom line seems to me to be, learn a trade. College education, what's left of it, will be done by AI. Of course, the current regime is trying to get us back to the pre-Industrial Age.
@B. -- you're confusing extras work with background. Background is a speaking part, even a line, that requires union membership in order to be hired.
It's going to be tough for an industry that's notoriously known for being contemptuous, if not outright hostile, to the concerns of ordinary Americans, to suddenly go out and beg for sympathy and support from these same people -- unfairly or not.
I seem to recall "learn to code" coming out of the mouths of their democrat partners. Learn to code actors.
Hmmm.... Do I even have standing to have an opinion about this, since I don't watch their stupid movies?
Like, what if we were talking about, oh, comic books. Some asshole decides he can get AI to draw his comic books for him. OK. Are we upset about that? Should some collection of ink-stained wretches go on strike? It's a little late to be learning to code, but didn't all of these people used to be waiters?
The question is this: why should the issues raised by those concerns be more compelling in the context of the entertainment industry than they are in the context of industries like mining, oil drilling, textiles, etc.?
Pretty Simple, really.
The people in the industries you listed; Vote Republican
The in the Film Actors Guild (FAG) not only Vote Democrat, they contribute BIG MONEY
Sort of related
There is an excellent series on Netflix called Extras starring Ricky Gervais trying to make it as an extra.
A couple of years ago I saw a documentary about the life of professional extras. Probably on Netflix or prime.
It was pretty sad. These people chasing extra gigs all over town getting paid a pittance with no hope of ever becoming an actual actor.
One suspects that if you pointed out that they could do better at Mcdonalds they'd say "what, and leave show business?"
Kind of like adjunct "professors".
SAG has about 25,000 members. About 1,000 make their prima living as actors.
Screenwriter Guild has a similar proportion.
John Henry
John Henry
In the end the people with jobs will be the plumbers, carpenters, electricians, trash collectors, and a lot of other people that Democrats look down upon.
Ironic?
Actors, marionettes, silhouette puppets - same thing.
If your "digital likeness in perpetuity is an issue" don't sign it away.
If you're replaced rapidly, you were essentially a burger-flipper.
If you were of higher quality, you could negotiate a contract without it or be hired by another.
Unions were created to destroy this dynamic.
As others here have said, the inevitable extinction of actors due to CGI has been greatly exaggerated. Can someone name an example of a movie where I was duped by CGI actors? The crowd in Yesterday was way fake and was xeroxed live actors. Young Mark Hamill, dead Carrie Fisher- we all know. Those supposedly composite stills of hot woman- do they fool you?
I’ll start to feel for victims when my autonomous vehicle drives me to the movies…
Will the heads of movie and TV studios be replaced with AI?
I think not.
Speaking of digital replicas, a graphics pro can blend several peoples' likenesses into one person who looks like nobody in existence. No consent will be needed from anyone to use such likenesses in perpetuity, and in all media. Who can then complain?
The unique human image will start to compete with simulacra. Competition lowers prices. Skill will supersede surface.
Maybe the Tonys and Obies will gain greater public significance after movies become mostly venues for a few human 'stars' but lots of AI/CGI? I'm afraid that most people won't care.
Barry Diller thinks actors' AI concerns are exaggerated, and top execs and actors should take a 25% pay cut.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/barry-diller-face-the-nation-transcript-07-16-2023/
It's a selling point: All-Human Movie!
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