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vodkertonic · 3 years

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Okay, I don’t know how true this is - but this is huge fucking news.

I’ve been saying this for a while now, but Disney, Amazon and co. are trying to return to the studio system of the old Hollywood days that got - rightly - discontinued in the 1960s. Those were the days when each studio owned their own cinemas that could only stream their movies, where they owned actors who could only play in their movies (unless hired out by others) - and that led to people like Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe etc. literally being owned by studios that fed them non stop pills and driven to overdose.

That’s the end point. That’s not the point we’re at now. But you’ll notice that in the last 3 or 4 years, every major production company now has a streaming platform. Much like up until the late 1960s in America, you can only see movies on company-owned platforms. This, with Johansson, is a huge step further - the largest production company in the world - who breached contract, not the other way around - are now essentially blacklisting Johansson from working with them for speaking out against them. Sure, this isn’t a blacklist on the level of the red and lavender scares - but if they can do this to Johansson, the biggest actor in the world, it sets a huge fucking precedent for blacklisting anybody who stands up for workers’ rights.

It also sees Disney - and other companies will follow suit, as they always do - moving a step closer to owning their stars. What Disney is trying to say is that Disney and Johansson are not equal partners in the contract, but that Disney has the ultimate say over everything. This idea that the contract is a formality is absolutely fucked, because it means that artists have no rights under the corporations, and if they want to continue to work they have to obey. Nobody is signing exclusive contracts yet, but you bet this is reverting to Judy Garland times.

We are not going forwards. The movie industry is going backwards to the days of Louis B. Mayer (and it’s capitalism’s fault) and we all need to boost the fuck out of this. The courts will handle the Disney case - but we must support ScarJo (I say as very much a non ScarJo fan) and make sure that she continues to have a career after this, to set the precedent that audiences will not stand for future blacklisting.

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