Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 20th, ’24

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April 20th, 2024




Movies are Back? At CinemaCon, Theater Owners and Studios Will Make the Case
Ryan Faughnder

This week in Las Vegas, movie studios and theater owners will gather to bellow a simple message from the Colosseum stage at Caesars Palace, like King Kong roaring from the depths of Hollow Earth:

Movies are back.

Or perhaps more accurately, some movies are back. Alternatively, movies are more “back” than many people had thought they would be.

CinemaCon typically serves as an enthusiastic pep rally for the theater industry, full of heady exaltation for the magic of the big screen and defiant chest-thumping from the National Assn. of Theatre Owners, the Washington-based trade group.

The truth, however, is that the news for the box office has been mixed recently as the cinema business continues its long recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and two overlapping Hollywood strikes that sapped the release schedule. On the plus side, though, it hasn’t been as bad as it could have been.

Film analytics company Gower Street on Sunday estimated that global box office for 2024 will total $32.3 billion, a mild improvement from the firm’s original projection of $31.5 billion published in December. Gower Street attributed the slight bump to better than expected first-quarter results from international markets, excluding China.

Still, the projection, if accurate, represents a 5% decrease from 2023 sales figures. The revised estimate for this year remains 18% lower than the average of the last three pre-pandemic years, the firm said. Total revenue hit a record $42.3 billion in 2019.

In the U.S. and Canada, the first three months of the year generated nearly $1.65 billion for the movie business, which was a tad better than expected but still down 6% from the same period of time in 2023.

Helping matters was a smattering of films that did better than expected, including “Dune: Part Two” ($265 million, domestic), “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” ($135 million) and “Bob Marley: One Love” ($96 million). Franchise installments “Kung Fu Panda 4” and “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” also brought audiences to their local multiplexes.

“The beat wasn’t on a breakout performance, instead, several films outperformed — a sign that consumer demand is robust w/ legs to next year,” wrote Wells Fargo analyst Omar Mejias, in a research report. Mejias upgraded the stock of Cinemark, the nation’s No. 3 cinema operator, to “overweight” (or “buy”), sending the shares soaring.

In a note to clients, B. Riley analyst Eric Wold said the latest results “demonstrate the resiliency of post-pandemic moviegoing demand.”

Most analysts think the domestic box office will total $8 billion to $8.5 billion in 2024, down at least 6% from the prior year. The second quarter got off to a slow start, with the Dev Patel action movie “Monkey Man” and 20th Century Studios’ “The First Omen” doing worse than expected (neither cost much to make, luckily for the studios).

As the overall results show, people still want to go to the movies. But they mostly want to see certain kinds of films more than others. Sequels and reboots continue to dominate the charts, though the occasional action thriller (“The Beekeeper”), rom-com (“Anyone But You”) or music biopic can poke through.

Each of the major studios at CinemaCon will try to make their splash with big upcoming movies for the rest of the year and beyond, though the all-important summer slate is thin compared with last year‘s, in part because of strike-induced production delays. (Want to follow the goings on in Las Vegas? My colleague Christi Carras is covering the event for The Times.)

Disney is betting on “Inside Out 2” to reverse its flagging fortunes in animation, as well as the next Marvel installment, “Deadpool & Wolverine”; Universal can tout “The Fall Guy,” “Despicable Me 4” and “Wicked”; Warner Bros. will try to keep its momentum going with “Furiosa” and its “Joker” sequel; and Paramount, as sale speculation abounds, has “A Quiet Place: Day One” and “Gladiator II” to crow about.

The presenter lineup reflects the quirkiness of the film business’ current state, in which niche programming can often do surprisingly well.

On Tuesday, Sony’s Crunchyroll will address exhibitors following the cinema owners association’s state of the industry rundown, a recognition of the increased power of anime on the big screen (props to GKids’ release of “The Boy and the Heron,” which recently grossed a strong $73 million in China). Later in the festivities, Angel Studios, the company behind last year’s surprise smash “Sound of Freedom,” will give a breakfast presentation.

There remain serious risks in the exhibition business. Attendance was on the decline even before the pandemic shuttered theaters, thanks to changing consumer habits and competition for people’s time and money from other entertainment options.

The industry has demonstrated an over-reliance on Imax-friendly studio action tent poles, when theater chains need a deep and diverse roster of movies in order to thrive. AMC, the world’s largest theater company, continues to see its stock price fall (down more than 50% so far this year) as it contends with its heavy debt load. Alamo Drafthouse has reportedly explored a sale.

It remains to be seen whether the global box office will ever get back to the $40 billion-plus days of 2019 and earlier years. A clearer picture will emerge in 2025 when the writers’ and actors’ strikes are further in the past. But overall, there’s a strong case that moviegoing has proved to be relatively sturdy despite persistent difficulties.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...-the-wide-shot





‘We’re the Last Bastion of Rental’: the Video Stores Resisting the Rise of Streaming

Cheap DVDs, torrenting and streamers looked to have killed off video rentals. But a group of cinephile shop owners are keeping the flame alive
Kyle MacNeill

A man shuffles along a royal blue carpet and props himself up against a stacked shelf of videos. Reeling off a list of films, he is handed three store-branded DVD cases. In return? A crisp fiver – plus his thoughts on South Korean horror flicks without any dialogue. This isn’t a sepia-tinged flashback from the past. Nor is it all just a dream. It is 2024 and the transaction is taking place at Snips Movies, one of the UK’s last video rental stores, tucked away in a town in Wirral since 1995. The odd passerby does a double take, staring back at the shop’s welly-green facade to confirm its reality.

Snips’ owner, Dave Wain, is part of a small cast of movie mavericks refusing to let video rental fade to black. Alongside Snips, just two other original video rental stores still stand. There’s TVL Allstar Video in Haverhill, opened in 1984, a detached brick video and print shop that’s barely changed in the last 40 years. Then there’s 20th Century Flicks in Bristol, which manager Dave Taylor says began as a “slightly piratical enterprise knocking out dubious copies of ET”, and has a focus on queer and arthouse cinema. Another, For Your Eyes Only in Forest Hill, south London, survived until November last year. A few months earlier, a parked car rolled down a hill and smashed through the shop window. Stranger Still, this literal block-buster was also a sequel – the exact same thing had happened before. A local fundraiser tried to save the business, but the damage had been done and owner Gulam Charania was forced to close after 25 years.

For the next generation, there’s VideOdyssey, which was opened by journalist and Tarantino enthusiast Andy Johnson in Liverpool in 2018, offering an immersive movie experience, VCR hire and an arcade. While the original rental crew may be sceptical of a non-original shop trying to tap into a video revival, it proves that there’s an audience for new stores. Hackney’s film emporium Ümit & Son, too, deserves a special mention. While not really dealing in video rental any more, it does rent out its micro-cinema. Owner Ümit Mesut and film-maker Liam Saint-Pierre run a cult film club, Ciné Real, screening films with a 16mm projector in its red-curtained back room to cool young things who believe film-on-film is anything but hackneyed.

Unlike the UK’s other surviving stores, video rental wasn’t always part of the Snips script – it started out as a womenswear boutique. “My dad had no interest in films. But in the mid 90s it was a lucrative proposition and, by chance, the guy adjacent was a video butcher,” Wain says. A what? “Oh, he sold videos and he did butchery. It didn’t really pass food standards. People would rent a VHS and get it home and out would come this meaty aroma. It was quite unforgettable.”

After buying up the butcher’s beefy stock, Snips now houses a head-spinning 15,000 films, which range from retro Euro-sleaze to the latest releases. Gaz, the customer in the shop with a thing for South Korean flicks, has been a regular for 16 years. “People have been waxing lyrical about saving our libraries. This right here is a veritable library,” he says, eyes widening. “It’s the last bastion of video rental.”

It wasn’t always like this. After VHS came to the UK in the late 70s, scores of video rental stores cropped up and Blockbuster opened its first British branch, in south London, in 1989. (Both Taylor and Wain cut their teeth at Blockbuster but were turned off by its lack of heart.) At its peak, there were more than 800 Blockbusters in the UK, alongside another major chain, ChoicesUK, and thousands of indie outlets. For years, these shops were ubiquitous, their names in lights on almost every street in the country.

The remaining owners remember this golden age of rental well. “The business was massive,” AllStar Video owner Colin Richards recalls. “On a weekend we would have six staff and it would be constant service. It wasn’t uncommon to rent out 1,000 movies over the week.” But when affordable DVDs for retail came into play (accompanied by even cheaper pirate DVDs) the scene changed. A little later came postal services such as LoveFilm, with its absence of late fees. “It was the first axe blow,” Taylor says.

More damaging was the torrent of torrent sites. “That was us on notice. We knew it wasn’t long before internet speeds could let you download movies. We lost the students in about 12 months,” Taylor says. “It became a battle of attrition of cutting out bits of the shop to its bare bones,” he adds. And then the on-demand services truly crashed the party. In 2012, Netflix, itself originally a postal service, landed in the UK with an ominous tudum and a stream of streamers followed. It all but wiped out the remaining video rental stores.

A year later, Blockbuster left the UK. Since then, making a profit has been virtually impossible and the industry has been reeling. Rent is also a major issue. Somehow, though, these few stores still survive. But all rely on bonus features – Snips sells cards and party supplies, TVL Allstar does everything from photocopying to repairing scratched DVDs, and Flicks has two mini-cinemas to hire for parties and private screenings.

They are also supported by regulars. Some do so as part of a wider desire to bolster small businesses, such as farm shop owner Andrew, who visits Snips while I’m there. “You’ve got to keep the culture alive and keep passing it down,” he says, railing against the megacorp streamers. Others simply haven’t changed their ways of watching. “I think some of our customers would be quite tickled by the fact that the video shops are seen as quite unusual,” Taylor laughs.

But it’s not just charity or habit – supporters believe film rental can offer something better than streaming. For Wain, cost is king – Britons now spend £300 a year on average for on-demand services. “Watching films has become elitist. Now people with the most money who can subscribe to the most streaming sites have a choice but the working class doesn’t,” he says. Snips, living up to its name, offers a flagship bargain deal of three films for a fiver. For Richards, it’s all about experience. “You go home with a bag of popcorn, sit down and watch the film together. You aren’t as distracted. You’re creating an event,” Richards says.

Then there’s the choice. Gaz bemoans the fact that streaming services don’t feature classics or a truly wide range of films (Netflix UK, for example, has just a third of Snips’ offering). Another solution to this is Cinema Paradiso, the UK’s last rental-by-mail service, boasting 100,000 titles. “We believe it’s the largest film archive in Europe, if not the world, and it’s still going strong,” owner Zoran Dugandzic says. “We still have tens of thousands of customers, most of them with us over a decade. Pensioners really like to see a postman bringing a new disc.”

But the bricks-and-mortar stores offer something extra – a community. “You can come in for a DVD and spend a good half hour meeting different people and chatting about film,” Andrew says.

“Every person who rents a film from us gives us a review of it when they bring it back. They look forward to coming back to go into such detail like they’re real critics. We love it,” says Richards.

For me, standing in Snips, there are two great joys. First, the decision-making process: the kaleidoscopic array of DVD cases draws the eyes to flicks that algorithms wouldn’t dare suggest. Then, there’s the nostalgia. There is something truly magical about tangible media: the ritual of popping a disc out of the case, the artwork, the kitsch DVD menus, the blue carpets.

Wain, though, is wary of this. “I have an issue with the word ‘nostalgia’. I get people coming in dropping to their knees saying it reminds them of being 16. And that’s really nice. But for me it’s about tomorrow,” he says.

Taylor feels the same way: “Nostalgia suggests what we do isn’t real or relevant or part of the present.”

Can video rental stores really still survive, or even enjoy a revival? There seems to be more than a popcorn kernel of hope. The streaming sites, after all, also face problems down the line with higher subscription fees and their offputting new advertising policies. Plus, all the owners of these rental stores have experienced a younger crowd coming in, craving physical video.

Wain has seen the excitement of this next generation first-hand. Just before I head home the Snips owner spins a yarn. “Recently, a kid from the local school came in and rented out Rebel Without a Cause. His three mates came with and mocked him mercilessly.” He flashes a smile. “Fast-forward two months later and they’re all renting films.” Perhaps, thanks to these rental rebels, we really will see a sequel to the golden age of video.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...o-rental-shops





Characters Enter the Public Domain. Winnie the Pooh Becomes a Killer. Where is Remix Culture Going?
Andrew Dalton

The giant stuffed bear, its face a twisted smile, lumbers across the screen. Menacing music swells. Shadows mask unknown threats. Christopher Robin begs for his life. And is that a sledgehammer about to pulverize a minor character's head?

Thus unfolds the trailer for the 2023 movie “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” a slasher-film riff on A.A. Milne's beloved characters, brought to you by ... the expiration of copyright and the arrival of the classic children's novel into the American public domain.

We were already living in an era teeming with remixes and repurposing, fan fictions and mashups. Then began a parade of characters and stories, led by Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse with many more to follow, marching into the public domain, where anyone can shape something into new stories and ideas.

After a two-decade drought brought on by congressional extensions of the copyright period in 1998, works again began entering the public domain — becoming available for use without licensing or payment — in 2019. The public began to notice in 2022, when Winnie the Pooh was freed for use as the 95-year copyright period elapsed on the novel that introduced him. That made possible “ Blood and Honey ” a sequel, which dropped last month, a forthcoming third, and plans for a “ Poohniverse ” of twisted public domain characters including Bambi and Pinocchio.

Pooh going public was followed this year by a moment many thought would never come: the expiration of copyright on the original version of Mickey Mouse, as he appeared in the 1928 Walt Disney short, “Steamboat Willie.”

Classic characters, new stories, fresh mashups. Will it be all be a bonanza for makers? Are we entering a heyday of cross-generational collaboration or a plummet in intellectual property values as audiences get sick of seeing variations of the same old stories?

Films from Hollywood’s early talkie era have started to become public. King Kong, who has one of his enormous feet in the public domain already because of complications between companies that own a piece of him, will shed his remaining chains in 2029. Then, in the 2030s, Superman will soar into the public domain, followed in quick succession by Batman, the Joker and Wonder Woman.

The possibility of new stories is vast. So is the possibility of repetition. Classic stories and characters could get, well a bit tiresome.

“I don’t feel like it’s going to make that big a difference," says Phil Johnston, an Oscar nominee who co-wrote Disney's 2011 “Wreck It-Ralph” and co-wrote and co-directed its sequel, 2018's “Ralph Breaks the Internet."

“Like, ‘Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey’ was was a novelty, made a bit of a splash, I guess. But if someone makes ‘Steamboat Willie’ (into) a jet ski movie or something, who cares?” he says.

Many creators were clearly anxious to do something with "The Great Gatsby," which has been subject to several reinterpretations in very different flavors since it became public in 2021, says Jennifer Jenkins, a professor of law and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of Public Domain.

“We have our feminist retellings of `The Great Gatsby,' where Jordan gets to tell the story from her perspective, Daisy gets to tell the story from her perspective," Jenkins says. “We got prequels, we got sequels, we’ve got musicals, TV shows, we’ve got the zombie version because we always do. These are things that you can do with public domain work. These are things that you can do with with Mickey Mouse.”

But the newly available works and characters are arriving after years of parent corporations demanding that every creation be tied to their intellectual property. And with some big, “ Barbie ”-sized exceptions, the returns are growing thinner, and artists themselves are a little sick of it.

While Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen have been public-domain gold mines at various times, other properties have proven more problematic. The forthcoming “ Wicked,” starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, will be yet another attempt at using the public-domain work of author Frank Baum’s Oz — filtered through a hit novel and Broadway show — to glom onto the classic status of the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” film. Previous tries led to little success, and most were outright flops, most recently 2013's “Oz the Great and Powerful,” from Disney.

Some of the most effective use ever of public domain properties came from Disney itself in its early decades, turning time-tested folktales and novels into modern classics with “Snow White,” “Pinocchio” and “Cinderella.” It would later become the primary protector of the most valuable rights in entertainment, from the Marvel universe to the Star Wars galaxy to its homegrown content.

That has meant a major flowering through the years of fan art and fan fiction, with which the company has a mixed relationship.

“When you look at how the Disney organization actually engages with fan art, there’s a lot of looking the other way," says Cory Doctorow, an author and activist who advocates for broader public ownership of works. "I always thought that there was so much opportunity for collaboration that was being missed there.”

When the law extending copyright by 20 years passed in 1998, musicians including Bob Dylan were among the key figures who had implored Congress to act. Younger generations of musicians, who came up awash in sampling and remixing, made no discernible outcry for another extension. In part this could be because in the streaming era, many of them make little off recorded music.

Jimmy Tamborello, who records and performs electronic music under the name Dntel and as part of The Postal Service — a group whose very name caused trademark headaches with the official version at its inception — says artists are generally happy to allow others to turn their work into new things. The problem is companies that come between them.

“I think no one would care if it was just artists to artists," Tamborello says.

Johnston says age and experience have made him feel less possessive about his own work. But his attitude changes if the re-maker is not an artist but artificial intelligence. That was a key issue in last year's Hollywood writers and actors strikes — and is yet another facet of remix culture that, alongside copyright expirations, could change the faces of some of history's most renowned characters in ways no one has ever considered.

“If a writer feels for me, it’s fine,” Johnston says. “If an AI steals from me, that sucks.”
https://www.newstimes.com/entertainm...e-19405038.php





Axios Sees A.I. Coming, and Shifts Its Strategy

“The premium for people who can tell you things you do not know will only grow in importance, and no machine will do that,” says Jim VandeHei, C.E.O. of Axios.
Katie Robertson

In the view of Jim VandeHei, the chief executive of Axios, artificial intelligence will “eviscerate the weak, the ordinary, the unprepared in media.”

The rapid rise of generative A.I. — and its implications for how people will discover and consume news — has unsettled many media executives. Like them, Mr. VandeHei has spent the past year or so pondering how to respond.

Now he’s becoming one of the first news executives to adjust their company’s strategy because of A.I.

Mr. VandeHei says the only way for media companies to survive is to focus on delivering journalistic expertise, trusted content and in-person human connection. For Axios, that translates into more live events, a membership program centered on its star journalists and an expansion of its high-end subscription newsletters.

“We’re in the middle of a very fundamental shift in how people relate to news and information,” he said, “as profound, if not more profound, than moving from print to digital.”

“Fast forward five to 10 years from now and we’re living in this A.I.-dominated virtual world — who are the couple of players in the media space offering smart, sane content who are thriving?” he added. “It damn well better be us.”

Axios is pouring investment into holding more events, both around the world and in the United States. Mr. VandeHei said the events portion of his business grew 60 percent year over year in 2023.

The company has also introduced a $1,000-a-year membership program around some of its journalists that will offer exclusive reporting, events and networking. The first one, announced last month, is focused on Eleanor Hawkins, who writes a weekly newsletter for communications professionals. Her newsletter will remain free, but paying subscribers will have access to additional news and data, as well as quarterly calls with Ms. Hawkins.

Membership programs will next be built around Sara Fischer, a media reporter, and the business editor Dan Primack, who writes the daily Pro Rata newsletter, according to a person familiar with the company’s plans.

“I’m trying to align the company with the people who have a ton of talent: They thrive, we thrive,” Mr. VandeHei said.

Axios will expand Axios Pro, its collection of eight high-end subscription newsletters focused on specific niches in the deals and policy world. The subscriptions start at $599 a year each, and Axios is looking to add one on defense policy. The company just hired an executive, Danica Stanciu, to oversee the expansion into more policy areas. Ms. Stanciu was instrumental in growing Politico Pro, Politico’s premium subscription offering, into a thriving business.

“The premium for people who can tell you things you do not know will only grow in importance, and no machine will do that,” Mr. VandeHei said.

Part of the pivot entails a restructuring of Axios’s leadership team. Sara Kehaulani Goo, the editor in chief of the Axios newsroom, will head up the editorial side of events and running new platforms. Aja Whitaker-Moore, the executive editor of the newsroom, will be promoted to editor in chief and will oversee all published content.

“I hope the next leg of this journey can really be focused on how we take the subject matter expertise to the next level,” she said.

Axios was started in 2017 by Mr. VandeHei, a co-founder of Politico, along with Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz. In August 2022, Cox Enterprises acquired Axios in a deal that valued the company at $525 million, with its founders staying on as minority shareholders.

Mr. VandeHei said Axios was not currently profitable because of the investment in the new businesses. The company has continued to hire journalists even as many other news organizations have cut back. An Axios spokeswoman said that Axios Local now had nearly two million subscribers across 30 newsletters, and that Axios’s national newsletters had about 1.5 million.

In addition to figuring out how A.I. could change news consumption by the public, many media companies are racing to figure out how to address the ingestion of their content by A.I. chatbots. The New York Times, for example, sued Microsoft and OpenAI in December for copyright infringement, arguing that millions of articles were used, without authorization, to train the tech companies’ chatbots.

Mr. VandeHei said that while he thought publications should be compensated for original intellectual property, “that’s not a make-or-break topic.” He said Axios had talked to several A.I. companies about potential deals, but “nothing that’s imminent.”

“One of the big mistakes a lot of media companies made over the last 15 years was worrying too much about how do we get paid by other platforms that are eating our lunch as opposed to figuring out how do we eat people’s lunch by having a superior product,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/b...-strategy.html





Participant, Maker of Films With Social Conscience, Calls It Quits

The company had critical and commercial hits over two decades but never made money consistently and faced a challenging entertainment landscape.
Brooks Barnes

For 20 years, Participant Media has been Hollywood’s pre-eminent maker of activist entertainment, backing socially conscious films like “An Inconvenient Truth,” a climate change cri de coeur, and “Wonder,” about a boy with birth defects. Its movies have won 21 Academy Awards.

But the company never quite managed to do good while also making money, at least not consistently. Matt Damon in a fracking drama (“Promised Land,” a 2012 Participant effort) has a hard time competing with “Avengers: Infinity War” in 3-D.

On Tuesday, the company’s founder and financial lifeline, the eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll, pulled the plug — a decision based, at least in part, on the atrophying entertainment business. Participant relies on studios and streaming services to distribute its content, and those partners are cutting back — especially on the “niche” films and shows in which Participant specializes — as they contend with continuing weakness at the box office, higher labor costs and increased profit pressure from Wall Street.

Streaming services like Disney+ and Netflix have started to sell ads, and advertisers prefer all-audience, apolitical content. Eat-your-broccoli documentaries and dramas that explore underrepresented communities (both Participant sweet spots) are harder to sell than ever.

“The entertainment industry has seen revolutionary changes in how content is created, distributed and consumed,” Mr. Skoll said in an email to Participant employees that was viewed by The New York Times. A spokesman said Mr. Skoll was unavailable for an interview.

Participant will immediately lay off most of its 100 employees. A skeleton staff will remain for a time to work on coming films like “Out of My Mind,” about a nonverbal sixth grader with cerebral palsy, and “BLKNWS,” about what the media leave out, or misrepresent, in reporting on Black culture.

Mr. Skoll has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Participant since its founding in 2004. The company, working with partners like DreamWorks, found critical and commercial success with movies like “The Help” (2011), focused on racial reconciliation, and “Spotlight” (2015), about a newspaper’s investigation into child abuse.

Participant’s documentary film division was second to none. “An Inconvenient Truth,” released in 2006, still ranks as one of the most successful documentaries in box office history; it cost $1.5 million to make and collected $50 million. Participant also backed “The Cove,” a searing 2009 documentary about dolphin hunters, and “RBG,” an affectionate 2018 portrait of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Participant was dealt a blow in 2021 when its longtime president of documentary films, Diane Weyerman, died of lung cancer.)

The company often operated at a loss. When asked about profitability, Participant executives would purse their lips and somewhat impatiently explain the concept of a “double bottom line,” meaning performance measured by profit (the first bottom line) or social return (the second).

A money-losing Participant movie could still be “profitable” if the social impact was large enough, they said. “The Soloist,” starring Jamie Foxx as a homeless musical genius, cost $60 million to make in 2009; it took in $38 million. But it went down as a win in Participant’s books because of an accompanying action campaign that involved school curriculum guides and the collection and dispersal of 250,000 pairs of jeans to people living on the streets.

Over the last decade, other activism-oriented entertainment entrepreneurs have followed Participant’s lead. Ava DuVernay’s company, Array, describes its mission as “amplifying work from Black artists, filmmakers of color and women of all kinds.” Barack and Michelle Obama founded Higher Ground Productions.

Somewhat paradoxically, Participant itself has rarely been stronger.

David Linde, a former chairman of Universal Pictures, has run Participant since 2015. When he arrived, the company was in crisis. Bets on movies like “The Beaver,” focused on mental health, were not paying off. Mr. Linde’s predecessor had made the ill-advised decision to start a cable channel, Pivot, and expand into digital publishing. The company’s head count swelled to nearly 300.

Mr. Linde shut down Pivot, sharpened Participant’s social action campaigns and routed funds toward the development of film and television ideas. The result was a string of critical and commercial hits, including “Roma,” a period drama that brought attention to domestic workers, and “Green Book,” a racial issues film in the form of a road trip. “Green Book” won the Oscar for best picture in 2019; it cost $23 million and sold $322 million in tickets worldwide.

Mr. Linde declined to comment on the decision to shut down Participant.

Mr. Skoll’s involvement with Participant has waned in recent years. He said in the note to Participant employees that he wanted to focus more on his philanthropic foundation, which champions social entrepreneurship. In 2021, citing smoke from wildfires, he moved to Florida from California.

“I did what I could in my time there and I’m grateful,” he wrote on X when he left the state. “Onwards to a new chapter.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/b...eff-skoll.html





US Senate to Vote on a Wiretap Bill That Critics Call ‘Stasi-Like’

A controversial bill reauthorizing the Section 702 spy program may force whole new categories of businesses to eavesdrop on the US government’s behalf, including on fellow Americans.
Dell Cameron

The United States Senate is poised to vote on legislation this week that, for the next two years at least, could dramatically expand the number of businesses that the US government can force to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant.

Some of the nation’s top legal experts on a controversial US spy program argue that the legislation, known as the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), would enhance the US government’s spy powers, forcing a variety of new businesses to secretly eavesdrop on Americans’ overseas calls, texts, and email messages.
Those experts include a handful of attorneys who’ve had the rare opportunity to appear before the US government’s secret surveillance court.

The Section 702 program, authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was established more than a decade ago to legalize the government’s practice of forcing major telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on overseas calls in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

On the one hand, the government claims that the program is designed to exclusively target foreign citizens who are physically located abroad; on the other, the government has fiercely defended its ability to access wiretaps of Americans' emails and phone conversations, often years after the fact and in cases unrelated to the reasons the wiretaps were ordered in the first place.

The 702 program works by compelling the cooperation of US businesses defined by the government as “electronic communications service providers”—traditionally phone and email providers such as AT&T and Google. Members of the House Intelligence Committee, whose leaders today largely serve as lobbyists for the US intelligence community in Congress, have been working to expand the definition of that term, enabling the government to force new categories of businesses to eavesdrop on the government’s behalf.

Marc Zwillinger, a private attorney who has twice appeared before the FISA Court of Review, wrote last week that the RISAA legislation expands the definition of “electronic communications service provider” (ECSR) to include data centers and commercial landlords—businesses, he says, that “merely have access to communications equipment in their physical space.” According to Zwillinger, RISAA may also ensnare anyone “with access to such facilities and equipment, including delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utilities providers.”

Zwillinger had earlier criticized the ECSR language this year, leading House lawmakers to amend the text to explicitly exclude certain types of businesses, including hotels.
Zwillinger noted in response that the need for those exclusions is proof enough that the text is overly broad; an exception that merely serves to prove that the rule exists: “The breadth of the new definition is obvious from the fact that the drafters felt compelled to exclude such ordinary places such as senior centers, hotels, and coffee shops,” he wrote. “But for these specific exceptions, the scope of the new definition would cover them—and scores of businesses that did not receive a specific exemption remain within its purview.”

This analysis quickly flooded inboxes on Capitol Hill last week, with some Hill staffers and privacy experts quietly dubbing the ECSR language the “Stasi amendment,” a reference to the East German secret police force notorious for infiltrating industry and forcing German citizens to spy on one another.

Digital rights groups have pointed to Zwillinger’s assessment while lobbying US senators this week to vote against the RISAA. “While the Department of Justice wants us to believe that this is simply about addressing data centers, that is no justification for exposing cleaning crews, security guards, and untold scores of other Americans to secret Section 702 directives,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at Demand Progress, which has taken to calling the ECSR text the “Make Everyone A Spy provision.”

In an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, decried comparisons between the ECSR text and the East German secret police, saying critics of the provision were “massively exaggerating” the 702 program's domestic reach.

The Senate is expected to vote on RISAA on Wednesday, though a few procedural hurdles remain. A two-thirds majority vote will be needed to get the bill to the floor, and another two-thirds majority is required to prevent privacy defenders from filibustering the bill. Once those hurdles are cleared, however, a simple majority is needed to send the FISA reauthorization bill to the White House.

There is almost zero chance of US president Joe Biden rejecting the bill. The administration has spent months sending top lieutenants to the Hill to champion its cause. Biden’s support for the 702 program stands in stark contrast to the views of his campaign rival, former president Donald Trump, who last week commanded his supporters in Congress to “KILL FISA.”

Ron Wyden, the senior US senator from Oregon, argues that RISAA represents “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.” A leading privacy hawk in Congress, Wyden joined the Senate Intelligence Committee just prior to the 9/11 attacks and has served for more than two decades.

The US House of Representatives passed RISAA last week in a 273–147 vote. An amendment aimed at requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain search warrants before accessing wiretaps on US citizens was rejected after a vote on the amendment ended in a tie.

Members of the House Intelligence Community allied with the Biden White House and its spy agencies to defeat the amendment in what multiple House sources referred to as a “campaign of fear.” An hour before the vote on Friday, Himes openly threatened US lawmakers supporting the warrant requirement, claiming that if it passed, he’d ensure those lawmakers face the brunt of the blame in the wake of any future terrorist attacks.

“If we turn off the ability of the government to query US person data, the consequences will be known soon,” Himes said. “And we will audit why what happened happened. And accountability will be visited.”

For years, the US government has claimed that it would be impossible to estimate the number of Americans who are being eavesdropped on under Section 702. While statistics on the program are difficult to come by, it is known to have captured hundreds of millions of individual calls, texts, and emails while in the process of targeting only a few million individuals. (The FBI claims that, following a series of recent internal reforms, the 702 program now targets fewer than 300,000 individuals per year.)

While Section 702 is hailed as a powerful tool against terrorism, cybercrime, and drug trafficking, US spy agencies are likewise authorized to target foreigners on the basis that they’re believed to receive or possess “foreign intelligence information,” an ambiguous term legal experts argue could extend to a virtually unlimited number of activities with any number of tenuous ties to “foreign affairs.”

While attempting to paint the program as merely a threat to Americans who communicate with Hamas, ISIS, or other designated terrorist groups, House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner did little to reject claims last week that the 702 program can also be aimed at foreign dignitaries and politicians of allied European nations. Notably, the US does not recognize any foreign citizen abroad as having privacy rights, and US spy agencies may freely target them without congressional approval. The 702 program exists because the government relies on US businesses to implement its wiretaps and ensnares Americans’ communications in the process.

Much of the criticism aimed at the 702 program stems from revelations in a declassified court filing last year that describes rampant abuse by agents of the FBI, which is known to have scoured the wiretap database for information on tens of thousands of American protesters, journalists, political donors, and at least one sitting member of Congress.

The FBI has implemented a number of internal policies in recent years designed to limit lower-ranking FBI employees from unilaterally authorizing searches that target Americans—reforms that Turner and other spy agency surrogates claim are sufficient to stave off future abuse.

The program’s critics, meanwhile, say relying on the FBI to internally police itself is a mistake, pointing to decades of surveillance abuses and political intelligence gathering carried out in clear violation of US law.
https://www.wired.com/story/senate-s...csr-provision/





U.S. Officials Scramble to Stop Major Internet Firms from Ditching FISA Obligations
Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris

U.S. government officials were scrambling Friday night to prevent what they fear could be a significant loss of access to critical national security information, after two major U.S. communications providers said they would stop complying with orders under a controversial surveillance law that is set to expire at midnight, according to five people familiar with the matter.

One communications provider informed the National Security Agency that it would stop complying on Monday with orders under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables U.S. intelligence agencies to gather without a warrant the digital communications of foreigners overseas — including when they text or email people inside the United States.

Another provider suggested that it would cease complying at midnight Friday unless the law is reauthorized, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

The companies’ decisions, which were conveyed privately and have not previously been reported, have alarmed national security officials, who strongly disagree with their position and argue that the law requires the providers to continue complying with the government’s surveillance orders even after the statute expires. That’s because a federal court this month granted the government a one-year extension to continue intelligence collection.

Section 702 requires the government to seek approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for the categories of intelligence it wants to collect. The court has issued “certifications” for collection involving international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and foreign governments and related entities. Those certifications are good for one year and were renewed this month at the government’s request.

U.S. officials have long argued that the law is a vital means of collecting the electronic communications on foreign government adversaries and terrorist groups. But its renewal has become an unusually divisive flash point, aligning conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats who are wary of granting the government broad surveillance authorities without new restrictions.

The people familiar with the efforts to keep the companies in compliance declined to name them, but they said their loss would deal a significant blow to U.S. intelligence collection.

“It’s super concerning,” said one U.S. official of the potential loss of intelligence. “You can’t just flip a switch and turn it back on again.”

U.S. officials began to hear Friday afternoon that the providers were planning to stop compliance unless Section 702 was reauthorized.

Senators are attempting to come to an eleventh-hour agreement on amendments on the legislation Friday night to quickly reauthorize the measure and avoid any lapse. Last week, the House renewed Section 702, but only for two years — and only after privacy hawks failed to pass an amendment that would have required U.S. intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant to review Americans’ communications collected under the program. That bid failed in a dramatic 212-212 tie vote.

The House approval came despite former president Donald Trump’s entreaty on social media to “KILL” the bill.

First passed in 2008 and reauthorized several times since then, the law enables the NSA to collect without a warrant from U.S. tech companies and communications providers the online traffic of non-Americans located overseas for foreign intelligence purposes. Communications to or from foreign targets deemed relevant to FBI national security investigations — about 3 percent of the targets, according to the government — are shared with the bureau. But the law is controversial because some of those communications may involve exchanges with Americans, which the FBI may view without a warrant.

“The House bill represents the biggest expansion of surveillance in 15 years since Section 702 was originally created, and a shameful Congress would be expanding surveillance at a time when reforms are needed,” said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project.

U.S. security officials, for their part, for years have extolled the benefits of the law, with White House officials saying that the intelligence collected accounts for more than 60 percent of the president’s daily briefing. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray recently disclosed that it helped the bureau discover that Chinese hackers had breached the network of a U.S. transportation hub, and that it had helped thwart a terrorist plot last year in the United States involving a potential attack on a critical infrastructure site.

“Failure to reauthorize 702 — or gutting it with some kind of new warrant requirement — would be dangerous and put American lives at risk,” Wray told Congress this month.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/u-...ns/ar-AA1nkFlf





The Internet is Carried Around the World by Hundreds of Thousands of Miles of Slender Cables that Sit at the Bottom of the Ocean.

These fragile wires are constantly breaking — a precarious system on which everything from banks to governments to TikTok depends.

But thanks to a secretive global network of ships on standby, every broken cable is quickly fixed.

This is the story of the people who repair the world’s most important infrastructure.
Josh DziezaBy

OnOn the afternoon of March 11th, 2011, Mitsuyoshi Hirai, the chief engineer of the cable maintenance ship Ocean Link, was sitting in his cabin 20 miles off Japan’s eastern coast, completing the paperwork that comes at the end of every repair. Two weeks earlier, something — you rarely knew what — damaged the 13,000-mile fiber optic cable connecting Kitaibaraki, Japan, and Point Arena, California. Alarms went off; calls were made; and the next day, Hirai was sailing out of the port in Yokohama to fix it.

The repair was now nearly done. All that remained was to rebury the cable on the seafloor, which they were doing using a bulldozer-sized remotely operated submersible named Marcas — and, of course, the paperwork.

Suddenly, the ship began to shudder. Hirai got to his feet, found he could barely stand, and staggered out of his cabin, grasping the handrail as he pulled himself up the narrow stairway to the bridge. “Engine trouble?” Hirai asked the captain, who’d already checked and replied that everything seemed normal. The ship continued to tremble. Looking out from the bridge, the sea appeared to be boiling.

They turned on the television. An emergency alert showed that an earthquake had struck 130 miles northeast of their location. The shaking finally stopped, and in the silence, Hirai’s mind leapt to what would come next: a tsunami.

Hirai feared these waves more than most people. He had grown up hearing the story of how one afternoon in 1923, his aunt felt the ground shake, swept up her two-year-old brother, and sprinted uphill to the cemetery, narrowly escaping floods and fires that killed over 100,000 people. That child became Hirai’s father, so he owed his existence to his aunt’s quick thinking. Now, he found himself in the same position. He knew tsunamis become dangerous when all the water displaced by the quake reaches shallow water and slows and grows taller. The Ocean Link, floating in less than 500 feet of water, was too shallow for comfort.

In the family tree of professions, submarine cable work occupies a lonely branch somewhere between heavy construction and neurosurgery. It’s precision engineering on a shifting sea using heavy metal hooks and high-tension lines that, if they snap, can cut a person in half. In Hirai’s three decades with Kokusai Cable Ship Company (KCS), he had learned that every step must be followed, no matter how chaotic the situation. Above all else, he often said, “you must always be cool.”

Across Ocean Link’s 400-foot deck, the ship’s 50 crew members were emerging from their cabins and workstations, trying to figure out what had just occurred. Over the intercom, the captain announced that there had been an earthquake, a tsunami was coming, and the crew should ready the ship to evacuate to deeper water. The crew fanned out to check fuel tanks and lash down machinery. Inside a darkened, monitor-filled shipping container on the starboard deck, the submersible’s pilot steered Marcas back toward the ship as fast as the bulky robot’s propellers could carry it. Minutes later, the submersible was hoisted aboard and the Ocean Link was underway.

The tsunami passed under them imperceptibly on their way out to sea, and when they came to a stop three hours later, the television was showing the first images of destruction. Members of the crew who weren’t working gathered on the bridge to watch the news, which continued to display a tsunami warning, a map of Japan with its eastern seaboard glowing red. They took turns trying to reach loved ones using the ship’s satellite phone, but no calls went through.

As night fell, periodic aftershocks thumped against the hull. Hirai thought about his wife, who was working at a department store in Yokohama near the Ocean Link’s port; his son, a junior in high school at the time; and his parents, whom the family lived with in his hometown of Yokosuka — none of whom he’d been able to reach. Everyone had someone they were worried about.

But Hirai also began to think about the work he knew lay ahead. The Ocean Link was one of a small number of ships that maintain the subsea cables that carry 99 percent of the world’s data. Positioned in strategic locations around the planet, these ships stand ready to sail out and fix faults the moment they are detected, and most of the time, they are more than equal to the task. But earthquakes, Hirai knew from experience, were different. They didn’t just break one cable — they broke many, and badly. If what he feared had happened, Japan risked being cut off from the world in its moment of need.

Sure enough, that night, a call came from headquarters confirming the Ocean Link was safe and directing them to remain at sea until further notice, followed by messages announcing cable failure after cable failure, including the one they had just finished repairing.

Cable industry professionals tend to be pragmatic people, preoccupied with the material realities of working planet-scale construction. But in conversations about landing high-bandwidth cables in digitally neglected regions or putting millions of people back in contact with every fiber strand melted together, they often hint at a sense of larger purpose, an awareness that they are performing a function vital to a world that, if they do their jobs well, will continue to be unaware of their service.

For the Ocean Link crew, this awareness was bound up in a still unfolding national tragedy. They knew that whenever they returned to land, they would have to care for their loved ones quickly, because they would soon be going back out to sea. For how long, no one knew.

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”

Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”

Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.

The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog. Few people set out to join the profession, mostly because few people know it exists.

Hirai’s career path is characteristic in its circuitousness. Growing up in the 1960s in the industrial city of Yokosuka, just down the Miura Peninsula from the Ocean Link’s port in Yokohama, he worked at his parents’ fish market from the age of 12. A teenage love of American rock ‘n’ roll led to a desire to learn English, which led him to take a job at 18 as a switchboard operator at the telecom company KDDI as a means to practice. When he was 26, he transferred to a cable landing station in Okinawa because working on the beach would let him perfect his windsurfing. This was his introduction to cable maintenance and also where he met his wife. Six years later, his English proficiency got him called back to KDDI headquarters to help design Ocean Link for KCS, a KDDI subsidiary. Once it was built, he decided to go to sea with it, eventually becoming the ship’s chief engineer.

Others come to the field from merchant navies, marine construction, cable engineering, geology, optics, or other tangentially related disciplines. When Fumihide Kobayashi, the submersible operator — a tall and solidly built man from the mountain region of Nagano — joined KCS at the age of 20, he thought he would be working on ship maintenance, not working aboard a maintenance ship. He had never been on a boat before, but Hirai enticed him to stay with stories of all the whales and other marine creatures he would see on the remote ocean.

Once people are in, they tend to stay. For some, it’s the adventure — repairing cables in the churning currents of the Congo Canyon, enduring hull-denting North Atlantic storms. Others find a sense of purpose in maintaining the infrastructure on which society depends, even if most people’s response when they hear about their job is, But isn’t the internet all satellites by now? The sheer scale of the work can be thrilling, too. People will sometimes note that these are the largest construction projects humanity has ever built or sum up a decades-long resume by saying they’ve laid enough cable to circle the planet six times.

KCS has around 80 employees, many of whom, like Hirai, have worked there for decades. Because the industry is small and careers long, it can seem like everyone knows one another. People often refer to it as a family. Shipboard life lends itself to a strong sense of camaraderie, with periods of collaboration under pressure followed by long stretches — en route to a worksite or waiting for storms to pass — without much to do but hang out. Kobayashi learned to fish off the side of the ship and attempted to improve the repetitive cuisine by serving his crewmates sashimi. (His favorite is squid, but his colleagues would prefer he use the squid to catch mackerel.) Hirai, an enthusiastic athlete, figured out how to string up a net on the Ocean Link’s helideck and play tennis. Other times, he would join the crew for karaoke in the lounge, a wood-paneled room behind an anomalous stained-glass door containing massage chairs, a DVD library, and a bar. A self-described “walking jukebox,” Hirai favored Simon & Garfunkel and Billy Joel, though he said the younger members of the fleet didn’t go in for it as much.

The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. But there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. Others, like Global Marine’s Wave Sentinel, were once ferries. Global Marine recently told Data Centre Dynamics that it’s trying to extend the life of its ships to 40 years, citing a lack of money. One out of 4 repair ships have already passed that milestone. The design life for bulk carriers and oil tankers, by contrast, is 20 years.

“We’re all happy to spend billions to build new cables, but we’re not really thinking about how we’re going to look after them,” said Mike Constable, the former CEO of Huawei Marine Networks, who gave a presentation on the state of the maintenance fleet at an industry event in Singapore last year. “If you talk to the ship operators, they say it’s not sustainable anymore.”

He pointed to a case last year when four of Vietnam’s five subsea cables went down, slowing the internet to a crawl. The cables hadn’t fallen victim to some catastrophic event. It was just the usual entropy of fishing, shipping, and technical failure. But with nearby ships already busy on other repairs, the cables didn’t get fixed for six months. (One promptly broke again.)

But perhaps a greater threat to the industry’s long-term survival is that the people, like the ships, are getting old. In a profession learned almost entirely on the job, people take longer to train than ships to build.

“One of the biggest problems we have in this industry is attracting new people to it,” said Constable. He recalled another panel he was on in Singapore meant to introduce university students to the industry. “The audience was probably about 10 university kids and 60 old gray people from the industry just filling out their day,” he said. When he speaks with students looking to get into tech, he tries to convince them that subsea cables are also part — a foundational part — of the tech industry. “They all want to be data scientists and that sort of stuff,” he said. “But for me, I find this industry fascinating. You’re dealing with the most hostile environment on the planet, eight kilometers deep in the oceans, working with some pretty high technology, traveling all over the world. You’re on the forefront of geopolitics, and it’s critical for the whole way the world operates now.”

The lifestyle can be an obstacle. A career in subsea means enduring long stretches far from home, unpredictable schedules, and ironically, very poor internet.

“Everyone complains about that,” said Kaida Takashi, a senior advisor at KCS, who is trying to get the Ocean Link set up with Starlink. It’s a generational difference, he said. For someone like him, a 62-year-old ham radio enthusiast, Wi-Fi barely fast enough to email is a luxury. Other industry veterans reminisced about the days when they felt fortunate to get faxes on board, or waiting for the mailbag in port, or the novelty of using the very cable they were laying to make calls from the middle of the ocean. But for people who grew up with an expectation of constant connectivity, the disconnection of shipboard life can cause visible discomfort. “It’s a part of them,” one industry veteran marveled of his younger colleagues. “They can’t let it go.”

The industry’s biggest recruiting challenge, however, is the industry’s invisibility. It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thinking about technology romanticizes moments of invention over the ongoing work of maintenance, though it is equally important to the deployment of functional technology in the world. There are few better examples than the subsea cable industry, which, for over a century, has been so effective at quickly fixing faults that the public has rarely had a chance to notice. Or as one industry veteran put it, “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world, because things just work.”

The Ocean Link spent two nights at sea before receiving orders to return. As they neared land, Hirai saw debris from the tsunami’s backwash floating in the water: fishing nets, tires, the roofs of buildings, the bloated body of what he guessed was a cow.

The earthquake measured 9.1 on the Richter scale, the fourth largest ever recorded and the largest to ever hit Japan. But it was the series of tsunami waves that arrived half an hour later that dealt the most destruction, surging miles inland and sweeping buildings, cars, and thousands of people out to sea. The death toll would eventually climb to nearly 20,000, and the day would become a national tragedy referred to simply as “3/11.”

The full extent of the devastation was still becoming clear when the Ocean Link returned, but the disaster had already entered a new phase. One hundred and sixty miles north of Tokyo, a 50-foot tsunami wave overtopped a seawall protecting the Fukushima power plant, swamping the emergency generators that were cooling the reactors through its automatic post-quake shutdown and precipitating a nuclear meltdown.

Hirai’s wife and son had made it back home to their house in Yokosuka, where they lived with Hirai’s parents. Kobayashi’s family, too, was safe. Some crew lost loved ones; others sent family to stay with relatives in the south out of fear of radiation. They all knew that they had only a few days before they would be sent back out to sea.

The disaster had severed phone lines and wrecked cell towers, causing phone service to cut out almost immediately after the earthquake struck. Instead, people turned to email, Skype, and other online services that were mostly able to route around damage to the network. There was a sense, according to one engineer’s postmortem presentation, that the internet was the only media that survived.

But its survival was more tenuous than the public knew. While the cables connecting Japan to the rest of the world survived the initial destruction, later that night, as millions of people tried to find their way home with trains stopped and power intermittent, engineers in Tokyo network operation centers watched as one cable after another failed. By the next morning, seven of Japan’s 12 transpacific cables were severed. Engineers working through the night and following days managed to shift traffic to those that remained, but the new routes were near their maximum capacity. The head of telecom company NTT’s operation center at the time estimated that if another cable failed, it would have lost all traffic to the US. With servers for most major internet companies located there, Japan would have effectively lost the internet.

Normally, the sequence of repairs would be determined by whichever cable owner reported the fault first, but given the extraordinary circumstances, the usually self-interested cable owners agreed to defer to KCS. The priority was to repair a cable — any cable — as fast as possible.

It was impossible to know the state of the cables on the ocean floor, so like forensic investigators, Hirai and the other engineers had to work with the sparse facts available. By having the cable landing stations on either side of the ocean beam light down their end of the line and time the reflections back, they were able to locate the faults nearest to them within a few meters. Most of the faults lay in deep water, in the canyons channeling into the Japan Trench. This, plus the timing of the faults, indicated it wasn’t the quake that broke them but the underwater avalanches it triggered.

Submarine landslides are awesome events whose existence was only discovered in the 1950s, when scientists analyzed the timing of 12 cable faults that severed communication between Europe and North America two decades earlier. Before then, according to oceanographer Mike Clare, “It was assumed that deep water was boring and nothing happens down there.” In fact, the ocean floor is riven with mountains and canyons that experience avalanches that dwarf anything found on land, cascades of sediment and debris racing for hundreds of miles. Hirai had dealt with them in Taiwan in 2006, one of the most notorious events in the annals of cable repair.

On December 26th, an earthquake dislodged sediment on Taiwan’s southern coast and sent it rushing 160 miles into the Luzon Strait, one of several global cable chokepoints. Nine cables were severed and Taiwan was knocked almost entirely offline. Banking, airlines, and communications were disrupted throughout the region. Trading of the Korean won was halted. The cables, buried under mountains of debris, were nearly impossible to find. It took 11 ships, including the Ocean Link, nearly two months to finish repairs.

Often in a multi-cable disaster like the Taiwan earthquake, every ship in the region comes to assist. But with Japan, there was an unprecedented complication: the majority of the faults were located offshore of the ongoing nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Ship operators deemed assistance too risky, which meant that, for the time being, the Ocean Link was on its own.

The crew felt not only duty bound to work but uniquely capable of doing so. They had dealt with radiation before, though not at this scale. In 1993, shortly before the Ocean Link was to lay a cable linking Japan, Korea, and Russia, they learned the Soviets had dumped radioactive waste in the ocean along the planned route. With some trepidation, KCS proceeded with the job. They bought Geiger counters and protective gear, flew in nurses from the US with chemical weapons training, and scanned the water for radiation as they went. When none was detected, they put the gear in storage.

Now, as they readied the ship for departure, an employee was dispatched to the depot to find the old radiation gear. A local university donated a few more sensors and trained the crew on how to use them.

They decided to begin with the same cable they had just finished repairing when the earthquake struck. On a drizzling afternoon eight days after returning to port, with smoke still rising from the Fukushima power plant, the Ocean Link set back out to sea.

To the extent he is remembered, Cyrus Field is known to history as the person responsible for running a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean, but he also conducted what at the time was considered an equally great technical feat: the first deep-sea cable repair.

Field, a 35-year-old self-made paper tycoon, had no experience in telegraphy — which helps explain why, in 1854, he embarked on such a quixotic mission. Though small bodies of water like the English Channel had been bridged by telegraph, failure was routine and costly. Cables shorted out, snapped under tension, snagged on rocks, were sliced by anchors, twisted by currents, tangled around whales, attacked by swordfish, and devoured by a “miserable little mollusc” called the Teredo worm with an appetite for jute insulation.

Field fared no better. Twelve years after he began, he had endured severed cables, near sinkings, and had one “success”: a cable laid in 1858 that prompted celebrations so enthusiastic that revelers set fire to New York City Hall. The cable failed weeks later.

Field tried again seven years later only for the cable to snap halfway across the Atlantic. The next year, he set out yet again, promising not only to finally lay a working transatlantic cable but to recover the broken cable and finish that one, too.

By that time, a crude method had been developed for fixing cables in shallow water. A ship would drag a hooked grapnel anchor across the seafloor, until, like the tremor of a fishing line, increasing tension showed they’d caught the cable, which they would then haul on board to fix. Field’s plan was basically this but bigger: bigger hooks, stronger rope, more powerful winding engine, all aboard the largest ship afloat, a passenger liner called the SS Great Eastern that had been retrofitted for the mission. William Thomson, the project’s scientific adviser and the future Lord Kelvin, did the math and deemed it feasible.

“When it was first proposed to drag the bottom of the Atlantic for a cable lost in waters two and a half miles deep, the project was so daring that it seemed to be almost a war of the Titans upon the gods,” wrote Cyrus’ brother Henry. “Yet never was anything undertaken less in the spirit of reckless desperation. The cable was recovered as a city is taken by siege — by slow approaches, and the sure and inevitable result of mathematical calculation.”

Field’s crew caught the cable on the first try and nearly had it aboard when the rope snapped and slipped back into the sea. After 28 more failed attempts, they caught it again. When they brought it aboard and found it still worked, the crew fired rockets in celebration. Field withdrew to his cabin, locked the door, and wept.

Cable repair today works more or less the same as in Field’s day. There have been some refinements: ships now hold steady using automated dynamic positioning systems rather than churning paddle wheels in opposite directions, and Field’s pronged anchor has spawned a medieval-looking arsenal of grapnels — long chains called “rennies,” diamond-shaped “flat fish,” spring-loaded six-blade “son of sammys,” three-ton detrenchers with seven-foot blades for digging through marine muck — but at its core, cable repair is still a matter of a ship dragging a big hook along the ocean floor. Newfangled technologies like remotely operated submersibles can be useful in shallow water, but beyond 8,000 feet or so, conditions are so punishing that simple is best.

“It hasn’t changed in 150 years,” said Alasdair Wilkie, chair of the Atlantic Cable Maintenance & Repair Agreement (ACMA). “The Victorians did it that way and we’re doing it the same way. I just think it’s one of those things that, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Nor have the causes of faults changed in the last century and a half. The first submarine cable, strung across the English Channel in 1850, survived for a single day before — in what may be apocryphal cable industry slander — a French eel fisherman accidentally hooked it, sliced off a piece, and came ashore bragging about his discovery of a new type of metal seaweed. In his history of global telecommunications, How the World Was One, Arthur C. Clarke declared this the first blow in a war between cable companies and other users of the sea that has continued to this day.

Humans continue to be by far the single greatest threat to cables. Fishing accounts for about 40 percent of faults, according to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC). Bottom trawling, particularly as it extends into new regions and deeper water in pursuit of depleting fish stocks, is especially damaging. Last year, Chinese fishing vessels severed cables to one of Taiwan’s outlying islands, triggering an international incident. (Severing Taiwan’s cables is one of the first moves in war games of a Chinese siege.) The year before, trawlers cut multiple cables off the coast of Scotland, knocking several islands offline. Dragged anchors from cruise ships, cargo vessels, and pleasure boats are another common culprit. Last year, an improperly moored mega yacht knocked out all communication for the Caribbean island of Anguilla.

One thing that is not a threat to cables, many in the industry are eager to emphasize, is sharks. The idea that sharks eat submarine cables — repeated in news stories and even some government reports — stems from an incident in the late 1980s when AT&T was testing one of the first subsea fiber optic cables off the coast of the Canary Islands. The cable kept suffering mysterious faults, and when a repair ship hauled it up, teeth were found embedded near the breaks. A study was launched. Bell Labs scientists measured jaw radii and bite strength and, at one point, tried to feed captured sharks samples of cable. The culprit turned out to be a deepwater crocodile shark, possibly attracted to the electromagnetic field emitted from the power repeaters.

Wrapping cables in metal tape seems to have solved any shark problems. Nevertheless, when an old YouTube video of a shark biting a cable went viral in 2014, it incited global news coverage. The ICPC issued a statement (“Sharks are not the nemesis of the internet — ICPC findings”) saying that it didn’t even look like a data cable, fish bites haven’t caused a fault in many years, and that humans are almost always to blame. Yet the myth endures, possibly because there is something satisfying about the idea of the modern world being brought down by the appetites of a prehistoric creature, and possibly because the idea of sharks eating the internet seems only slightly less improbable than the internet consisting of tubes on the bottom of the sea.

On March 22nd, with the world’s attention fixed on the crisis at Fukushima, the Ocean Link reached its worksite 160 miles to the south. They had chosen one of the faults farthest from the meltdown, but the winter wind was blowing from the north and the crew remained inside the ship until it was deemed safe to go outside.

As the chief engineer and one of the oldest members of the crew, Hirai felt it was his duty to perform the radiation checks. He pulled on the slick yellow coveralls and boots, strapped on a mask and goggles, and opened the heavy steel door leading to the foredeck.

The sky was overcast and low, and the ship rocked on a building swell as Hirai walked out onto the pocked green-painted deck and held out the wand of his Geiger counter to see what the wind carried. To his relief, it registered only background radiation. Next, he walked to the side and lowered a sensor into the sea. Again, nothing. He would do it all again in two hours, but for now, work could begin.

They spent the first day and night surveying the worksite, moving slowly along the cable route while measuring the depth and current. Conditions worsened overnight and dawn greeted them with 15-foot waves and gale-force winds, too violent for delicate cable work. They would have to wait.

At the most basic level, a broken cable is fixed by patching the break with a piece of new cable, but because the break is miles away on the ocean floor, this must be done in several steps. The first step is to cut the cable near the break (often, the cable will have been damaged but not cleanly severed, and cables are laid with so little slack that they cannot be pulled to the surface in one piece). This is done by dragging a bladed grapnel across the cable in a so-called “cutting drive.” The ship then swaps the bladed grapnel for a hooked one and catches one end of the severed cable, hoists it to the surface, and attaches it to a buoy. Then they catch the other cable end, splice the spare cable to it, and tow the spare cable back to the first buoyed cable to complete the patch. The ship is now holding a working cable but one that is considerably longer than it used to be. This process of bringing each cable end to the surface separately means that every repair makes a cable longer — in deep water, by several miles. In order to minimize slack that could get tangled and snagged, the loop of new cable is towed to the side of the original route until it can lay taut on the ocean floor once again.

The Ocean Link had repaired this same stretch of cable five years earlier, which meant they had already added the slack required to bring it to the surface, no cutting required. It should have been sitting on the seafloor in the form of a 12-mile loop. If they could catch it, Hirai reasoned, they would save time and — this was important — precious spare cable. Every cable ship is stationed next to a depot with a certain amount of spare cable for each system in its jurisdiction. If the Ocean Link used too much on their first repair, it would take six months to manufacture and deliver enough new cable to fix the remaining faults.

By the afternoon, the Ocean Link was still plunging through heavy seas, but with the storm predicted to pass overnight, they decided to begin. From the arsenal of yellow-enameled grapnels strapped to the foredeck, Hirai selected a “jamming-type sliding prong,” a mace-like implement comprised of two metal bars studded with foot-long barbs, well suited for dragging across rocky seabed without getting stuck. They lowered it over the bow sheave and into the water. The ocean floor was more than three miles down, and it took the grapnel more than six hours to hit bottom. The Ocean Link began to move slowly forward.

From this point onward, Hirai or another engineer would be in the cable control room — an instrument-filled command center behind the bridge — their attention fixed on the tension meter, a circular dial set into a pale green wall. The retro-looking analog gauge was less precise than a digital one but far better for intuitively conveying changes in tension than a jittery numerical readout. The steady wavering of its arm would mean the grapnel was plowing through the gray ooze of the ocean floors. A staccato spike; they had hooked a rock. A steady rise; the cable had been caught. Part of being an effective chief engineer, Hirai found, was the ability to read what was happening on the ocean floor from the limited information of the moving dial.

At 6AM the next day, the engineer on duty saw the telltale rise of a caught cable, and the Ocean Link came to a stop. They had hooked the cable on the first run — rare in an earthquake repair — and began to reel it in.

Almost immediately, there was a sign something was amiss. The tension was rising too high too fast. The cable must be pinned under debris, Hirai thought. He ordered the winding engine to slow lest the cable snap, reeling in the grapnel at a grinding 10 feet per minute.

The morning passed, then the afternoon, Hirai suiting up every few hours to check for radiation. The drum engine continued its slow rotation. Night fell. Half past midnight, after 19 hours of winding, the cable reached the surface.

The grapnel came over the bow and was illuminated by the deck lights. Hirai was horrified at what he saw. They had caught the cable, but it was mangled unlike anything he had seen before. Hooked around one of the grapnel’s lower barbs, the cable’s polyethylene and wire sheath had been stripped by extreme tension and sprang in coiled loops like Slinkys put through a dryer.

It was a dangerous situation. There was no telling how much tension a cable this badly damaged could withstand. It was like a three-mile rubber band stretched tight from the ocean floor, being tested with every rocking wave. If it snapped, the grapnel would fly across the deck, killing anyone it hit before smashing into the cable engine room.

They had to get the cable off the ship, but doing so involved working closely with the explosive bundle hovering, taut, above the deck. First, crew members lashed chains to either end of the cable to take the tension off the grapnel, which they then swapped for a version with a sharp blade at its center, typically used for severing cables on the ocean floor. This done, they evacuated the foredeck.

The grapnel, cable, and chains were slowly lowered back over the prow and into the sea, the ship maneuvering delicately to minimize any sudden changes in tension. Once the cable was safely beneath the waves, they released the chains. Suddenly, pulled tight over the blade, the cable split and sank back to the ocean floor.

For Hirai, relief at a disaster averted was soon followed by foreboding. The landslides created by the earthquake must have been far greater than he had imagined, dragging the cable for miles, mangling it, and burying it beneath who knew how much debris. He couldn’t think how to proceed.

Debates about the future of cable repair have become a staple of industry events. They typically begin with a few key facts: the ships are aging; the people are aging; and it’s unclear where the money will come from to turn things around.

For much of the 20th century, cable maintenance wasn’t a distinct business; it was just something giant, vertically integrated telecom monopolies had to do in order to function. As they started laying coaxial cables in the 1950s, they decided to pool resources. Rather than each company having its own repair vessel mostly sitting idle, they divided the oceans into zones, each with a few designated repair ships.

When the telcos were split up at the turn of the century, their marine divisions were sold off. Cable & Wireless Marine became Global Marine. AT&T’s division is now the New Jersey-based SubCom. (Both are now owned by private equity companies; KCS remains a subsidiary of KDDI.) The zone system continued, now governed by contracts between cable owners and ship operators. Cable owners can sign up with a nonprofit cooperative, like the Atlantic Cable Maintenance & Repair Agreement, and pay an annual fee plus a day rate for repairs. In exchange, the zone’s three ships — a Global Marine vessel in Portland, UK, another in Curaçao, and an Orange Marine vessel in Brest, France — will stand ready to sail out within 24 hours of being notified of a fault.

This system has been able to cope with the day-to-day cadence of cable breaks, but margins are thin and contracts are short-term, making it difficult to convince investors to spend $100 million on a new vessel.

“The main issue for me in the industry has to do with hyperscalers coming in and saying we need to reduce costs every year,” said Wilkie, the chair of the ACMA, using the industry term for tech giants like Google and Meta. “We’d all like to have maintenance cheaper, but the cost of running a ship doesn’t actually change much from year to year. It goes up, actually. So there has been a severe lack of investment in new ships.”

At the same time, there are more cables to repair than ever, also partly a result of the tech giants entering the industry. Starting around 2016, tech companies that previously purchased bandwidth from telcos began pouring billions of dollars into cable systems of their own, seeking to ensure their cloud services were always available and content libraries synced. The result has been not just a boom in new cables but a change in the topology of the internet. “In the old days we connected population centers,” said Constable, the former Huawei Marine executive. “Now we connect data centers. Eighty percent of traffic crossing the Atlantic is probably machines talking to machines.”

Maintenance providers regard these changes with ambivalence. The cable boom means there will be no shortage of cables to fix, but it also means a future of negotiating with a handful of tech giants that can use their tremendous buying power to squeeze ship operators further.

Market forces pose one challenge; geopolitics another. Tensions with China, including the increasing difficulty of getting permission to repair cables in the contested waters of the South China Sea, are contributing to decisions to route new systems through the Philippines and other less direct passages. Conflict in the Middle East has the industry looking nervously at the Red Sea, an infamous cable chokepoint: in February, a freighter struck by Houthi rockets dragged its anchor across three crucial connections between Asia and Europe, degrading connectivity and raising the frightening prospect of conducting repairs under fire. The Red Sea vulnerability has in turn renewed interest in an Arctic route, made potentially feasible by melting sea ice, though, for years, one of the fatal flaws of this proposal has been the question of who would repair such a cable, there being no ice-capable maintenance vessels.

These and other recent events, like the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosion, have led governments to take a greater interest in cable security, often focusing on the specter of a deliberate attack. Late last year, NATO convened a symposium on undersea infrastructure and the future of “seabed warfare,” while the UK commissioned naval vessels to patrol their subsea connections. Meanwhile, the European Union, India, and other governments have proposed investing in maintenance vessels directly.

“The amount of ships is relatively limited, and there are a number of places where it could get critical,” said Christian Bueger, the lead author of a 2022 EU Parliament study on threats to subsea data infrastructure. As part of the study, he visited a cable repair ship in Cape Town, South Africa. It was old, he said, with oily, clanging machinery demanding hard physical labor — the opposite of the clean digital space he associated with the internet. One of his recommendations was that governments figure out a way to invest in cable fleets rather than rely on companies focused on cost cutting and efficiency.

The situation of SubCom illustrates the industry’s strange moment. The company has been withdrawing from maintenance work, according to industry sources, in order to focus on more lucrative installations, many of which are for Google. At the same time, the company is increasingly intertwined with the US government, which waged a pressure campaign to help SubCom beat China’s HMN Tech for the contract to build a major Asia-to-Europe cable, according to Reuters. SubCom also recently won a contract to operate the US’s first “cable security fleet.”

Like the involvement of the tech giants, industry veterans regard this new government interest with ambivalence. More funding would be welcome, but the world of subsea cables is one of unforgiving tradeoffs, and it’s easy for well-intentioned policies to go awry. One often proposed solution, for example, is to corral cables into protected corridors, which can make them easier to guard against malicious actors but also makes it possible for a single landslide to take them all out at once.

Secrecy, too, is a double-edged sword. Classifying cable locations might make them more difficult to attack while worsening exposure to what is their actual greatest threat: fishing accidents and other forms of human negligence. Greater secrecy could also heighten the tension between the industry’s near-total obscurity and its need for new recruits. Ships are a relatively easy problem to solve; they just take money. People take years to train.

The submarine cable world has never been particularly public. The industry is small and competitive, and cable owners don’t want their cables to get a reputation for breaking, so they bind maintenance providers with nondisclosure agreements. The result is that in the rare case that a fault reaches public awareness, ship operators almost never talk about it. Add in national security concerns, and the result is a code of silence that pervades the entire business. (Which is also why many of the sources in this story are “industry veterans” or other anonymous descriptors.) The industry has begun to recognize that this poses a recruiting challenge.

In 2022, the industry organization SubOptic gathered six cable employees in their 20s and 30s for a panel on the future of the industry. Most of them had stumbled into their jobs inadvertently after college, and the consensus was that the industry needed to be much better about raising public awareness, especially among the young.

“I don’t know if anyone saw, but during the pandemic, submarine cables actually went viral on TikTok,” said one panelist, a young cable engineer from Vodafone. “People didn’t know they existed, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, they were viral. I think it’s engaging with youth and children through their own avenues — yes, you can have science museums and things like that, but they are online, they are on their iPads, they’re on their phones.”

“We’ve got some pretty senior decision-makers and influencers in the subsea cable industry here,” said one audience member. “Did any of us know that we went viral on TikTok?” he asked, to laughter.

“As this panel rightfully said upfront, it’s not that we have a brand problem,” said another audience member, “we just don’t have a brand at all.”

It took the Ocean Link a month to complete its first repair. Failed grapnel runs, fishing gear entanglements, repeated radiation checks, and storms: it had been among the most difficult repairs Hirai had faced. They continued to work through the spring, but by June, they faced a dilemma.

Many of the remaining faults lay 50 miles off the coast of Chiba, deep in the Japan Trench, where eight different cable lines passed near and sometimes over each other. It was a cable chokepoint, and a landslide must have crashed down and wrecked them all. It would be difficult to catch one without cutting its neighbor. Even if they could, it wasn’t clear they had enough spare cable to fix each fault individually, with all the loops of slack they would need to add to bring the cables to the surface.

Hirai decided the only solution was to abandon the tangled mess and lay a new system on top of it. It would mean abandoning miles of cable as well as a branching unit: a 2,000-pound device that splits one cable into two different lines going to two destinations. But by reducing the number of loops, it would reduce the amount of cable required. Even then, it wasn’t clear they had enough. They did, however, have a lot of small bits of cable they had been careful to salvage during previous repairs — three miles here, five miles there. With a lot of work, they could be spliced together.

Takashi Kurokawa had joined KCS 12 years earlier, after hearing about the company from a teacher while in engineering school. Unlike many of his colleagues who moved roles every few years, after Kurokawa learned to joint, he just kept jointing. He enjoyed the way jointing’s strict rules and standards for success created a structure within which he could push himself to attain ever greater precision and speed.

The work is extraordinarily delicate. Cables must be stripped of their polyurethane sheaths, copper conducting tubes, wire armor, and enamel coating until the clear glass threads themselves are exposed. Kurokawa then takes a glass strand from each cable, cleans them in a sonic bath (touching them risks damage and splinters), cleaves their ends at perfect right angles, and places them inside a black toaster-sized box called a fusion splicer, their ends almost but not quite touching. In an instant, the device aligns the ends and zaps an electric arc between them, melting the glass together. Kurokawa then winds the newly spliced fiber into a metal tube called a joint box and does it all again for the next fiber strand. The entire process can take 20 hours, with Kurokawa and his team working in shifts. Every step demands hunched, jeweler-like focus as they seek perfect precision — not in a seismically isolated clean room but in the belly of a rocking ship. Each joint is expected to function untouched under crushing pressure for at least 25 years.

To speed matters, they decided to assemble what they could in port at Yokohama, with the Ocean Link moored and relatively stable. Working in shifts over 10 days, Kurokawa and his colleagues spliced 10 joints, four repeaters, and a branching unit — assembling a three-part, 100-mile system from the spare bits of cable they had on hand. At night, he dreamed of winding cables back and forth between storage tanks to get at the segments he needed. On June 26th, they tested the apparatus. It worked. They set sail the same day, with no estimate for how long it would take.

Hirai had mapped out the plan to a meticulous 23 steps. They began by severing the cable running from the branching unit to Murayama in the south, catching the landward end, splicing the new cable to it, and sailing northward to the point where they planned to deposit the new branching unit. There, they attached the cable to a buoy and lowered it into the ocean. Then they were off to the northern cable, which they caught, spliced, and pulled back to the buoy. It took 12 days to get here, and now came the difficult part.

The final splice is the most precarious moment of the repair. On the first splice, the ship can pivot 360 degrees around the dangling cable in order to angle into the wind and waves and maintain position. But on the second splice, there are two cables hanging off the prow, and the ship’s maneuverability is far more restricted should the weather turn foul.

With the branching unit, they had to complete two final splices — one for each leg — then deposit the whole apparatus to the ocean floor intact. This, the Ocean Link crew knew, would be its own challenge. A 2,000-pound weight dangling for miles through the water column can do funny things. In 2008, the Ocean Link was called to recover a branching unit that another cable ship accidentally dropped into the Japan Trench while trying to deploy it. With a typhoon approaching, they caught the cable, brought up the unit, and fashioned a webbing loincloth-like harness between the unit’s two legs for additional support before lowering it back to the bottom.

They would again be working in deep water — nearly four miles — but what troubled Hirai was the current. A powerful river of warm water called the Kuroshio Current snakes unpredictably up from the south along Japan’s coast, and it happened to be racing through the worksite at four knots, aquamarine and glittering in the summer sun. The Ocean Link would have to constantly adjust its thrusters to maintain position against the stream and prevent the branching unit from banging against the hull as it descended. But the weather was fair and the swell was light, so they decided to proceed.

Hirai, Kurokawa, Kobayashi, and more than a dozen other members of the crew assembled on the foredeck. The white-painted prow glared bright in the sun as the branching unit was brought out, a metal tube with two black accordion legs that tapered to slender cables. They had drilled this maneuver before leaving port. Clad in hard hats, the crew gingerly placed it on a metal dolly and strapped it down. Hirai tied yellow webbing between its legs to form a harness and affixed a safety rope. Kurokawa stood by the prow, watching the unit as it was rolled toward him. Kobayashi stood back by the drum engine, watching the cable unspool and worrying what would happen if it snapped, envisioning weeks of splicing plunging to the ocean floor.

The ship’s thrusters hummed and moved the Ocean Link ever so slowly backward. One end of the branching unit lifted off the dolly as it was pulled up onto the bow sheave. To an observer, the ship would look nearly stationary as the current flowed around it. The unit went over the top of the prow and descended, hanging from its harness, until it slipped below the surface and out of sight.

It was August by the time the Ocean Link finished the branching unit repair. Other ships, deeming the crisis at Fukushima stable enough to work, had arrived to help. Hirai sometimes advised them on the area’s tricky currents and rugged bathymetry, but mostly, they stayed out of each other’s way; the last thing you want to do is tangle two grapnels.

The final repair was an easy one. They had to finish the job that had been interrupted by the earthquake nearly five months earlier. They returned to the site where they had made their rushed escape, deployed the submersible, and buried the rest of the cable beneath the sand.

The repair was so close to port that there was no time to celebrate during their return, nor was there much of a mood to do so. The earthquake had caused more than 20 faults, and the Ocean Link had repaired 11 of them. It had taken 154 days of continuous work. They had missed a time of national mourning, school graduations, harvest celebrations, and the slow resumption of normalcy.

After they docked, the crew departed for their homes. Hirai stayed behind to finish writing his final daily report, then made for home as well. As he rode the train back to Yokosuka, he watched his fellow passengers absorbed in their phones. We completed the job, he thought with satisfaction, and they have no idea.
https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/...p-repair-ships





The Life and Death of Hollywood

Film and television writers face an existential threat
Daniel Bessner

In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film.

Smith was looking for a job in television. She had an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and had lived and worked as a playwright in New York City for years—two of her productions garnered positive reviews in the Times. But playwriting had begun to feel like a vanity project: to pay rent, she’d worked as a nanny, a transcriptionist, an administrative assistant, and more. There seemed to be no viable financial future in theater, nor in academia, the other world where she supposed she could make inroads.

For several years, her friends and colleagues had been absconding for Los Angeles, and were finding success. This was the second decade of prestige television: the era of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Girls. TV had become a place for sharp wit, singular voices, people with vision—and they were getting paid. It took a year and a half, but Smith eventually landed a spot as a staff writer on HBO’s The Newsroom, and then as a story editor on Showtime’s The Affair in 2015.

I first spoke with Smith in August of last year, four months into the strike called by the Writers Guild of America against the members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the biggest Hollywood studios. In 2013, she’d begun to develop the idea for what would become Dickinson, a gothic, at times surreal comedy based on the life of the poet, Emily. “I realized you could do one of those visceral, sexy, dangerous half hours but make it a period piece,” she said. “I was never trying to write some middle-of-the-road thing.” She sold the pilot and a plan for at least three seasons to Apple in 2017; she would be the showrunner, and the series had the potential to become one of the flagship offerings of the company’s streaming service, which had not yet launched.

Looking back, Smith sometimes marvels that Dickinson was made at all. “It centers an unapologetic, queer female lead,” she said. “It’s about a poet and features her poetry in every episode—hard-to-understand poetry. It has a high barrier of entry.” But that was the time. Apple, like other streamers, was looking to make a splash. “I mean, they made a show out of I Love Dick,” Smith said, referring to the small-press cult classic by Chris Kraus, adapted into a 2016 series for Amazon Prime Video. “That doesn’t happen because people are using profit as their bottom line.”

In fact, they weren’t. The streaming model was based on bringing in subscribers—grabbing as much of the market as possible—rather than on earning revenue from individual shows. And big swings brought in new viewers. “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” Smith said. “But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.”

Making a show for Apple was not what she’d hoped it would be. What the company wanted from her and the series never felt clear—there was a “radical information asymmetry,” she said, regarding management’s priorities and metrics. After she and her colleagues completed the first season of Dickinson, they waited for the streamer to launch and the show to air. Their requests for a firm timeline and premiere date were ignored. Smith started to worry that Apple might scrap the idea for the streaming platform altogether, in which case the show might never be seen, or might even disappear—she didn’t have a copy of the finished product. It belonged to Apple and lived on the company’s servers.

“It was communicated to me,” Smith said, “that my only choice to keep the show alive was to begin all over again and write a whole new season without a green-light guarantee. So I was expected to take on that risk, when the entities that stood to profit the most from the success of my creative labor, the platform and studio, would not risk a dime.” “It was also on me,” she went on, “to kind of fluff everybody involved in the entire making of the show, from the stars to the line producer to the costume designer, etcetera, to make them believe that we’d be coming back again and prevent them, sometimes unsuccessfully, from taking other jobs.”

Finally, in late 2019, when Smith and her colleagues were two months into production on Season 2, the show premiered as one of the streamer’s four original series. It was an immediate critical success and a sensation on social media. “In Apple TV+’s initial smattering of shows,” wrote the Washington Post, “only ‘Dickinson’ is a delicious surprise.” It received a 2019 Peabody Award; in 2021 it made the New York Times’ list of best programs of the year and won a Rotten Tomatoes prize for Fan Favorite TV Series.

But Smith was losing steam. “I was only allowed to make the show to the extent that I was willing to take on unbelievable amounts of risk and labor on my own body perpetually, without ceasing, for years,” she said. “And I knew that if I ever stopped, the show would die.” It had seemed to her that Apple didn’t value the series, and she felt at a loss. Smith now knows that Dickinson was the company’s most-watched show in its second and third seasons. But at the time, she had no access to concrete information about its performance. As was the habit among streamers, Apple didn’t share viewership data with its writers. And without that data, Smith had no leverage. In 2020, after three seasons, she told Apple that she was done. “I said, I can’t do it anymore. And Apple said, Okay.”

“Passion can only get you so far,” she told me. But she’d stayed in Hollywood. “I’m an artist,” she said, “and I’m never going to stop creating.” The industry was still the only place one could make a real living as a writer. “When people say, Why stay in TV?” she said, “The answer is, There is nothing else. What do you mean?”

The truth was that the forces that had opened doors for Smith were the same ones that had made her individual work seem not to matter. They were the same forces that had been degrading writers’ working lives for some time, and they were cannibalizing the business of Hollywood itself.

Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.

“The industry is in a deep and existential crisis,” the head of a midsize studio told me in early August.* We were in the lounge of the Soho House in West Hollywood. “It is probably the deepest and most existential crisis it’s ever been in. The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. The top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically.”

Hollywood had become a winner-takes-all economy. As of 2021, CEOs at the majority of the largest companies and conglomerates in the industry drew salaries between two hundred and three thousand times greater than those of median employees. And while writer-producer royalty such as Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy had in recent years signed deals reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and a slightly larger group of A-list writers, such as Smith, had carved out comfortable or middle-class lives, many more were working in bare-bones, short-term writers’ rooms, often between stints in the service industry, without much hope for more steady work. As of early 2023, among those lucky enough to be employed, the median TV writer-producer was making 23 percent less a week, in real dollars, than their peers a decade before. Total earnings for feature-film writers had dropped nearly 20 percent between 2019 and 2021.

Writers had been squeezed by the studios many times in the past, but never this far. And when the WGA went on strike last spring, they were historically unified: more guild members than ever before turned out for the vote to authorize, and 97.9 percent voted in favor. After five months, the writers were said to have won: they gained a new residuals model for streaming, new minimum lengths of employment for TV, and more guaranteed paid work on feature-film screenplays, among other protections.

But the business of Hollywood had undergone a foundational change. The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves. Today’s business side does not have a necessary vested interest in “the business”—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital. The union wins did not begin to address this fundamental problem.

Currently, the machine is sputtering, running on fumes. According to research by Bloomberg, in 2013 the largest companies in film and television were more than $20 billion in the black; by 2022, that number had fallen by roughly half. From 2021 to 2022, revenue growth for the industry dropped by almost 50 percent. At U.S. box offices, by the end of last year, revenue was down 22 percent from 2019. Experts estimate that cable-television revenue has fallen 40 percent since 2015. Streaming has rarely been profitable at all. Until very recently, Netflix was the sole platform to make money; among the other companies with streaming services, only Warner Bros. Discovery’s platforms may have eked out a profit last year. And now the streaming gold rush—the era that made Dickinson—is over. In the spring of 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates after years of nearly free credit, and at roughly the same time, Wall Street began calling in the streamers’ bets. The stock prices of nearly all the major companies with streaming platforms took precipitous falls, and none have rebounded to their prior valuation.

The industry as a whole is now facing a broad contraction. Between August 2022 and the end of last year, employment fell by 26 percent—more than one job gone in every four. Layoffs hit Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Paramount Global, Roku, and others in 2022. In 2023, firings swept through the representation giants United Talent Agency and Creative Artists Agency; Netflix, Paramount Global, and Roku again; plus Hulu, NBCUniversal, and Lionsgate. In early 2024, it was announced that Amazon was cutting hundreds of jobs from its Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios divisions. In February, Paramount Global laid off roughly eight hundred people. It’s unclear which streamers will survive. As James Dolan, the interim executive chair of AMC Networks, told employees in late 2022 as he delivered news of massive layoffs—roughly 1,700 people (20 percent of U.S. staff) would lose their jobs—“the mechanisms for the monetization of content are in disarray.”

Profit will of course find a way; there will always be shit to watch. But without radical intervention, whether by the government or the workers, the industry will become unrecognizable. And the writing trade—the kind where one actually earns a living—will be obliterated.

Greed is not new to Hollywood. The well-off career we associate with twentieth-century screenwriting came about from a combination of worker action and federal regulation. The job was shaped in its early years, beginning in the Twenties, by a cartel of major motion-picture companies that, in 1948, would be found by the Supreme Court to have conspired to fix prices and monopolize the industry. Yet writing for the studios was good, salaried work. Up until the brink of the Depression, the companies were rolling in money. In 1931, average yearly income for a full-time, regularly employed writer was more than $14,000—roughly $273,000 in today’s money—more than three times that of the average American.

But in 1933, both MGM and Paramount Pictures cut screenwriters’ pay by 50 percent, and writers moved to form a union. The Screen Writers Guild was certified in 1938, and its first contract, in 1942, secured a guaranteed baseline pay of $125 a week—the equivalent of roughly $2,500 today—and the power to arbitrate over screenwriting credits, which had previously been at the whim of producers.

When the Supreme Court ruling came down, studio power was dealt another blow. The industry’s eight reigning companies were each forced to enter into an agreement with the Department of Justice, collectively known as the Paramount Decrees, which prohibited them from both distributing and exhibiting the films they produced—they could do only one or the other. The companies that owned theater chains gave up their cinemas, taking a significant hit. In the years that followed, the studios, less flush with cash, began to prefer freelance writers to salaried employees.

By the end of the Fifties, when 86 percent of Americans owned a television, writers had piecemeal established limited residual payments but wanted more. The studios—which now made both films and television—claimed that the fast-changing business was too uncertain to increase writers’ cuts, an assertion that, according to the film and media historian Miranda Banks, later executives would repeat with each major technological innovation in distribution, from cable to VHS tapes to DVDs, and finally to streaming. In 1960, the union, now the Writers Guild of America, went on strike, soon followed by the Screen Actors Guild. Both won expanded residuals, increased minimums, pensions, and health benefits. Most writers were now freelancers, but they had established a basis for long and stable careers.

Over the next two decades, the writing profession was further bolstered by a federal government that enforced and expanded antitrust law. In 1970, the Federal Communications Commission instituted the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules—or Fin-Syn—which barred networks from holding ownership stakes in the prime-time and syndicated programs that they aired, effectively prohibiting film studios from owning TV networks and vice versa, and generally increasing competition. In the mid-Seventies, full-time TV staffers were paid a minimum of roughly $30,000 a year, almost twice the median family income in 1976. For high-budget feature-film screenplays, writers made a baseline of about $17,000, or around $95,000 in today’s money.

It wasn’t until the early Eighties, when the Reagan Revolution hit Hollywood, that the guardrails began to fall. In 1983, the Department of Justice allowed HBO, Columbia Pictures, and CBS to merge to form TriStar Pictures, combining cable, film, and broadcast-network interests in direct violation of antitrust law. Executives at other entertainment companies took note and moved to create their own conglomerates. In 1985, the DOJ went a step further, issuing a memo, later discovered by the historian Jennifer Holt, stating that it would no longer enforce the Paramount Decrees, and the studios scooped up theater chains once again. When the Clinton Administration came to power, it carried on what its Republican predecessors had begun. In 1993, the FCC began to formally repeal the Fin-Syn rules, and in 1996, Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, which removed restrictions on the cross-ownership of broadcast networks and cable providers. In 1994, in an unprecedented deal, cable giant Viacom merged with retailer Blockbuster Video, and took over Paramount Pictures. In 1996, Disney merged with Capital Cities/ABC to become the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world. The next year, Time Warner—already the product of two massive corporations, and previously the biggest conglomerate—joined with Turner Broadcasting System and reclaimed the crown. The gates had been opened, and the new monopolization was only just beginning.

At first, deregulation did not seem to harm writers. The mergers and acquisitions opened up synergies across the newly diverse properties within each conglomerate, bringing in, according to the historian of Hollywood Tom Schatz, unprecedented profits. This coincided with a boom in the theatrical business and may have contributed to increasing movie budgets—which skyrocketed during the Eighties and Nineties—and increased pay for screenwriters. In the late Eighties and throughout the Nineties, executives seemed to have more money to spend than ever before. Studios were hungry for original material, and invested more in development. They paid writers to try out concepts, crack stories, and see what worked. Howard A. Rodman, a writer for the recent HBO series The Idol and a former president of the WGA West, had started out in 1987. “In the era that I came up in,” he told me in August, “a studio might develop thirty to forty screenplays to get the one that actually sang.” The norm was what’s known as a multistep deal: studios paid up front for ideas, then scripts, then rewrites. Robin Swicord, writer of the adaptations for 1994’s Little Women and 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, told me: “When you would walk into someone’s office for a meeting, you’d see behind them a wall of screenplays.” She worked with one executive who oversaw 120 scripts in development in one year.

There was a heightened interest in “spec” scripts—unsolicited screenplays—and doors seemed to fly open. The writer John Brancato had vaulted into the A-list in 1991, when he sold the script that would later become The Game, starring Michael Douglas. A year or two later, he told me, he was hired to write a major movie screenplay—what eventually became The Net, starring Sandra Bullock—based on only a vague conversation. Pay ranged from solid to life-changing. In 1994 and 1995, original scripts for high-budget movies brought in a minimum of around $72,000—the equivalent of about $150,000 today.

In television, deregulation had aided the rise of cable, opening up new opportunities for writers. In the mid-Eighties, there had been fewer than fifty cable networks; by the end of the Nineties, there were more than two hundred, and nearly 70 percent of American homes had access. Multiple series from HBO, such as Sex and the City, which first aired in 1998, and The Sopranos, which debuted in 1999, were not only hits but cultural phenomena, and other cable networks dove in to scripted content.

A staff writer on a premium cable show in 1998 working for five months would make at least $2,400 a week—adding up to more than $90,000 in today’s money. Writers above the entry level would receive lump sums of more than $17,000 for authoring complete episodes. They also earned residuals. Broadcast networks often paid writers even more than cable, and writers were usually employed for longer. In September, I spoke with an A-list film and TV writer who worked on a variety of network shows in the late Nineties and early Aughts. “You felt like you hit the majors,” he said. “You were on call twenty-four seven; you worked nights. But the given was that you’re getting paid a gazillion dollars. It was an amazing time to be a television writer.”

Behind the scenes, however, deregulation was already allowing executives to shore up extraordinary power, and a new distance was forming between business interests and the production of film and TV. Writers’ fortunes were set to change.

By the early Aughts, six enormous conglomerates—Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Sony, Time Warner, and Viacom—controlled every major movie studio and broadcast network, and a substantial portion of the profitable cable businesses. The conglomerates were raking in more than 85 percent of all film revenue and producing more than 80 percent of American prime-time television. As these entities grew, business operations became much more complex, and the sleight of hand known as Hollywood accounting—obfuscating exactly how much is spent and earned, exactly how much is due to be paid out—became much easier for the studios.

Writers were beginning to feel the squeeze. They suspected that they were being shorted on royalties and residuals, and on their share of profits from the home-video market. At the same time, what was then called New Media—content on the web and for mobile devices—which wasn’t covered under the union contract, was starting to eat into their overall cut. In November 2007, the WGA went on strike. But writers were still making a fairly comfortable living, and others in the industry were not as supportive as they would come to be in 2023. “There was a sense of, ‘Why are you motherfuckers putting all the dry cleaners and caterers out of work?’ ” Rodman told me. “ ‘This is a picket line of millionaires against billionaires.’ ” The strike was ultimately undercut by dissent within the guild. The WGA agreed to an AMPTP offer that established the right to bargain over New Media and granted writers residuals for material rebroadcast online, but with no increase for DVDs.

When the strike was over, it was February 2008. The United States was three months into what would later be understood as the Great Recession. In an effort to stimulate the economy, the Federal Reserve had begun cutting interest rates in September, and over the following eighteen months it provided financial institutions with more than $7.7 trillion in capital. In late 2008, the Fed reduced the interest rate to almost zero. With piles of cash and cheap credit in hand, asset-management companies and private-equity firms set out for the frontiers of various U.S. industries. Over the next decade, three asset-management companies—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—would take over American business, becoming the largest shareholders of 88 percent of the S&P 500, the roughly five hundred biggest public U.S. companies. Private-equity firms—distinguished by their intent to sell the properties they acquire—would eventually be the backing for at least 7 percent of American jobs.

To these speculators, Hollywood looked like a gold mine: the studios and entertainment corporations were ripe with redundancies and inefficiencies to be axed—costs to be cut, parts to be sold, profits to be diverted to shareholders, executives, and new, often unrelated ventures. And thanks to the deregulation of the preceding decades, the industry was wide open. Financial institutions could snatch up or take over large portions of companies in any area of the business; they could even acquire or substantially invest in groups in competition with one another—and they did, creating types of soft monopoly. Bets were even placed against the traditional industry as a whole, in the form of investments in Netflix, which promised to disrupt and dominate at-home viewing. Today the Big Three asset-management firms hold the largest stakes in most rival companies in media and entertainment. As of the end of last year, Vanguard, for example, owned the largest stake in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery. It holds a substantial share of Amazon and Paramount Global. By 2010, private-equity companies had acquired MGM, Miramax, and AMC Theatres, and had scooped up portions of Hulu and DreamWorks. Private equity now has its hands in Univision, Lionsgate, Skydance, and more.

The flood of cash from Wall Street compounded the monopolization under way, accelerating mergers and acquisitions, and transforming already massive entities into behemoths. Between 2009 and 2019, Disney, for example, purchased Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox. Comcast purchased NBCUniversal, DreamWorks Animation, and Sky. And the financial firms set about extracting and multiplying short-term profits. Andrew deWaard, a scholar of the political economy of media, has found that the use of dividends, stock buybacks, and corporate venture capital, all of which siphon revenue away from reinvestment in a business and its workforce, exploded in entertainment companies between 2008 and 2023. Comcast, for instance, which through its subsidiaries owns more than ten TV networks and studios, paid out more than $3.2 billion in dividends and stock buybacks in 2008. In 2022, that number topped $18 billion.

The studios, now beholden to much larger companies and financial institutions, became subject to oversight focused on short-term horizons. This summer, I spoke with the head of a film and TV studio purchased by a private-equity firm in recent years. “It used to be there were these big, crusty, old legacy companies that had a longer-term view,” he said, “that could absorb losses, and could take risks. But now everything is driven by quarterly results. The only thing that matters is the next board meeting. You don’t make any decisions that have long-term benefits. You’re always just thinking about, ‘How do I meet my numbers?’ ” Efficiency and risk avoidance began to run the game.

In the years following the recession, there was, as Howard Rodman put it, “a slow erosion” in feature-film writers’ ability to earn a living. To the new bosses, the quantity of money that studios had been spending on developing screenplays—many of which would never be made—was obvious fat to be cut, and in the late Aughts, executives increasingly began offering one-step deals, guaranteeing only one round of pay for one round of work. Writers, hoping to make it past Go, began doing much more labor—multiple steps of development—for what was ostensibly one step of the process. In separate interviews, Dana Stevens, writer of The Woman King, and Robin Swicord described the change using exactly the same words: “Free work was encoded.” So was safe material. In an effort to anticipate what a studio would green-light, writers incorporated feedback from producers and junior executives, constructing what became known as producer’s drafts. As Rodman explained it: “Your producer says to you, ‘I love your script. It’s a great first draft. But I know what the studio wants. This isn’t it. So I need you to just make this protagonist more likable, and blah, blah, blah.’ And you do it.”

At the same time, the fees that writers could charge for their work were being pushed down. Talent agents, who had previously advocated for their writers to make as much money as possible, were now employed by much larger companies that derived their revenue from a variety of other sources and controlled the market for writer representation. By 2019, the major Hollywood agencies had been consolidated into an oligopoly of four companies that controlled more than 75 percent of WGA writers’ earnings. And in the 2010s, high finance reached the agencies: by 2014, private equity had acquired Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, and the latter had purchased IMG. Meeting benchmarks legible to the new bosses—deals actually made, projects off the ground—pushed agents to function more like producers, and writers began hearing that their asking prices were too high.

Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they’d found their best bet in “IP”: preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is “sort of a hedge.” There’s some knowledge of the consumer’s interest, he said. “There’s a sort of dry run for the story.” Screenwriter Zack Stentz, who co-wrote the 2011 movies Thor and X-Men: First Class, told me, “It’s a way to take risk out of the equation as much as possible.”

Brancato, who himself found work on Catwoman and two movies in the Terminator franchise in the early Aughts, told me that by the middle of the decade, no one wanted original scripts. IP had proved extremely valuable on the international market—increasingly important as domestic box-office growth stagnated over the course of the Aughts and 2010s—and it began to make up a greater and greater share of studio output. According to the media historian Shawna Kidman, franchise movies had accounted for around 25 percent of all studios’ wide-release features in 2000; in 2017 they made up more than 64 percent.

The shift to IP further tipped the scales of power. Multiple writers I spoke with said that selecting preexisting characters and cinematic worlds gave executives a type of psychic edge, allowing them to claim a degree of creative credit. And as IP took over, the perceived authority of writers diminished. Julie Bush, a writer-producer for the Apple TV+ limited series Manhunt, told me, “Executives get to feel like the author of the work, even though they have a screenwriter, like me, basically create a story out of whole cloth.” At the same time, the biggest IP success story, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by far the highest-earning franchise of all time, pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story. “Working on these big franchises is a little bit like being a stonemason on a medieval cathedral,” Stentz told me. “I can point toward this little corner, or this arch, and say, That was me.” Within this system, writers have sometimes been withheld basic information, such as the arc of a project. Joanna Robinson, co-author of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, told me that the writers for WandaVision, a Marvel show for Disney+, had to craft almost the entirety of the series’ single season without knowing where their work was ultimately supposed to arrive: the ending remained undetermined, because executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show. Marvel also began to use so many writers for each project that it became difficult to determine who was responsible for a given idea. Multiple writers who worked on Guardians of the Galaxy, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, and Thor: Ragnarok have forced WGA arbitration with the company to recoup the credits and earnings that they believe they’re due.

Marvel’s practices have been widely emulated, especially for franchise productions. “Every other studio with big tentpole movies has tried to imitate the Marvel model,” Stentz told me, including “throwing waves of writers at the same project.” “In some cases,” he said, “they’ve gone even further, by convening entire writers’ rooms”—a standard practice only in television. Both the Avatar sequels (one of which is not yet out) and Terminator: Dark Fate were developed this way, he said.

“When there’s high-profile IP involved,” Brancato told me, “writers tend to be treated as disposable.” “Everybody’s feeling fucked over,” he said. “The general sense is that you’re an absolutely fungible widget, and they don’t any longer take you seriously. It’s so broken. I mean, really, it is fucking broken.”

The post-recession flood of cash and credit played out very differently in the world of television: for years, creative workers considered it an incredible boon. It opened the industry to new writers, new subjects, and powered an era that actually seemed defined by risk-taking.

Netflix had convinced Wall Street that its value could be measured by subscriber growth, rather than short-term profit, and the streamers that came soon after it adopted the same model. The streaming ecosystem was built on a wager: high subscriber numbers would translate to large market shares, and eventually, profit. Under this strategy, an enormous amount of money could be spent on shows that might or might not work: more shows meant more opportunities to catch new subscribers. Producers and writers for streamers were able to put ratings aside, which at first seemed to be a luxury. Netflix paid writers large fees up front, and guaranteed that an entire season of a show would be produced. By the mid-2010s, the sheer quantity of series across the new platforms—what’s known as “Peak TV”—opened opportunities for unusually offbeat projects (see BoJack Horseman, a cartoon for adults about an equine has-been sitcom star), and substantially more shows created by women and writers of color. In 2009, across cable, broadcast, and streaming, 189 original scripted shows aired or released new episodes; in 2016, that number was 496. In 2022, it was 849.

The need for writers was enormous. But thanks in part to the cultural success of the new era, supply soon overshot demand. For those who beat out the competition, the work became much less steady than it had been in the pre-streaming era. According to insiders, in the past, writers for a series had usually been employed for around eight months, crafting long seasons and staying on board through a show’s production. Junior writers often went to the sets where their shows were made and learned how to take a story from the page to the screen—how to talk to actors, how to stay within budget, how to take a studio’s notes—setting them up to become showrunners. Now, in an innovation called mini-rooms, reportedly first ventured by cable channels such as AMC and Starz, fewer writers were employed for each series and for much shorter periods—usually eight to ten weeks but as little as four. The weekly pay still put most other work to shame: between 2020 and 2023, a staff writer in a ten-week mini-room made at least $5,000 a week. But getting staffed for multiple rooms in a year was a challenge at best. Residual payments—which at the time did not account for a show’s success among viewers—were often tiny. One writer, who ran a show for Apple TV+ in 2020 and 2021, told me that his residuals were “near zero.” Justin Boyd, who around the same time wrote for both Netflix and AMC, said that his network residuals were roughly double what they were for the streaming platform.

Writers in the new mini-room system were often dismissed before their series went to production, which meant that they rarely got the opportunity to go to set and weren’t getting the skills they needed to advance. Showrunners were left responsible for all writing-related tasks when these rooms shut down. “It broke a lot of showrunners,” the A-list film and TV writer told me. “Physically, mentally, financially. It also ruined a lot of shows.”

The price of entry for working in Hollywood had been high for a long time: unpaid internships, low-paid assistant jobs. But now the path beyond the entry level was increasingly unclear. Jason Grote, who was a staff writer on Mad Men and who came to TV from playwriting, told me, “It became like a hobby for people, or something more like theater—you had your other day jobs or you had a trust fund.” Brenden Gallagher, a TV writer a decade in, said, “There are periods of time where I work at the Apple Store. I’ve worked doing data entry, I’ve worked doing research, I’ve worked doing copywriting.” Since he’d started in the business in 2014, in his mid-twenties, he’d never had more than eight months at a time when he didn’t need a source of income from outside the industry.

In the end, the precarity created by this new regime seems to have had a disastrous effect on efforts to diversify writers’ rooms. “There was this feeling,” the head of the midsize studio told me that day at Soho House, “during the last ten years or so, of, ‘Oh, we need to get more people of color in writers’ rooms.’ ” But what you get now, he said, is the black or Latino person who went to Harvard. “They’re getting the shot, but you don’t actually see a widening of the aperture to include people who grew up poor, maybe went to a state school or not even, and are just really talented. That has not happened at all.” To the extent that this was better than no change, he said, “Writers’ rooms are more diverse just in time for there not to be any writers’ rooms anymore.”

By the end of the 2010s, it was clear that something had to give or the industry would be facing a dearth of trained talent. “The Sopranos does not exist without David Chase having worked in television for almost thirty years,” Blake Masters, a writer-producer and creator of the Showtime series Brotherhood, told me. “Because The Sopranos really could not be written by somebody unless they understood everything about television, and hated all of it.” Grote said much the same thing: “Prestige TV wasn’t new blood coming into Hollywood as much as it was a lot of veterans that were never able to tell these types of stories, who were suddenly able to cut through.”

Netflix, the other streamers, and the networks weren’t just destabilizing the careers of individual writers: they were stealing from the industry’s future. But things were once again worse than they seemed. The streamers, which would soon employ about half of TV-series writers, were thoroughly speculative ventures, and they were set to expand and contract with the whims of the market.

In April 2022, Netflix told investors that it had lost two hundred thousand subscribers in the first quarter of the year. It expected to lose two million users in the next three months. Within days, its stock price fell by 35 percent. By September, it was down 60 percent. By November, the share price of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of Max, had dropped by 61 percent; Paramount, by 49; Disney, by 44; and Comcast, by 38. Meanwhile, tensions between writers and executives were rising, and by the time the WGA’s board of directors was preparing for its triennial negotiations with the AMPTP, in the spring of 2023, they knew they were in for a fight.

The strike was called on May Day. In July, the actors guild, SAG-AFTRA, also struck, turning up the pressure on the AMPTP, and in late September, the studios and writers made a deal. In October, just days after the new contract was ratified, I spoke with Adam Conover, writer, creator, and star of truTV’s Adam Ruins Everything and a member of the 2023 WGA negotiating committee. The AMPTP had been shortsighted, he told me, locked in an old view of their labor force. “They didn’t realize that they did their job too well,” he said. “Workers actually got pushed out, actually got their wages cut.” The studios’ own systems had already forced many writers to take second and third jobs; the workers were not anywhere near as dependent on industry pay as they had been in the past. And they were furious. Compared with the stoppage in 2007 and 2008, one producer told me, “this felt more like scorched earth.” Many writers I talked to during the strike spoke of the executives with a mix of anger and disbelief. Boyd told me, “They cannot do what we do. And they hate us for it.” “I don’t think the studios had any reckoning,” Rodman said, “of the solidarity and militancy that their own greed created in the people who create their wealth.”

In the end, that solidarity succeeded in establishing a new streaming-residuals model—based on numbers of views—minimum staffing requirements and lengths of employment for TV writers’ rooms, and at least two rounds of guaranteed work for feature screenplays. The union had also forced streamers to release some viewership data, and had established that AI could not be given writing credit for anything: a human author would have to be involved and paid, regardless of AI output.

But as the dust has settled, it has become clear that there are several significant problems with the new agreement. The writers’-room staffing rules kick in only if a showrunner decides to bring on help at the start of a deal; otherwise, they can write a season on their own. It would often benefit them to go the latter route—budgets, after all, are shrinking—and studios would likely prefer this. One writer told me that by the start of 2024, he’d already seen showrunners use the loophole. As for the data-sharing agreement, a closer look reveals it to be, as deWaard put it, “very limited, and very fragile.” The studios will share viewership information with a limited number of WGA administrators for high-budget shows. The guild can then release that information only in a summary form, which, in the words of the contract, aggregates the data “on an overall industry level.” The guild cannot share any information at all on the performance of individual shows. A WGA representative told me that there would be no secondary process for writers to obtain that data.

The threshold for receiving the viewership-based streaming residuals is also incredibly high: a show must be viewed by at least 20 percent of a platform’s domestic subscribers “in the first 90 days of release, or in the first 90 days in any subsequent exhibition year.” As Bloomberg reported in November, fewer than 5 percent of the original shows that streamed on Netflix in 2022 would have met this benchmark. “I am not impressed,” the A-list writer told me in January. Entry-level TV staffing, where more and more writers are getting stuck, “is still a subsistence-level job,” he said. “It’s a job for rich kids.”

Conover said that the most important facts were that guild leadership had kept members unified and that a new streaming-residuals structure was now in place; they could fight to raise the rates during the next round of negotiations, in 2026. “Once something is a number on a piece of paper,” he said, “you can do a lot with it.” The majority of writers I spoke with this winter said that it was too soon to tell what the impact of the new contract would be. A group almost as large said that the agreement did not address the fundamental problems in the business.

Brenden Gallagher, who echoed Conover’s belief that the union was well-positioned to gain more in 2026, put it this way: “My view is that there was a lot of wishful thinking about achieving this new middle class, based around, to paraphrase 30 Rock, making it 1997 again through science or magic. Will there be as big a working television-writer cohort that is making six figures a year consistently living in Los Angeles as there was from 1992 to 2021? No. That’s never going to come back.”

Since the end of the strike, the industry has continued to contract. “It’s a great shaking-out point,” the A-list writer told me. “A lot of people who are very smart are willing to say, ‘I don’t know what it is going to be in a year, but it ain’t going to be this.’ ” Barry Schwartz, a film and TV writer in the industry for almost two decades, told me that post-strike, mid-career writers are making “extremely conservative choices.” “People aren’t speccing,” he said—submitting uncontracted scripts—“and if they are, it’s not original stuff. People are chasing IP or waiting on an assignment.” And younger writers, he said, are keeping their heads down.

As for what types of TV and movies can get made by those who stick around, Kelvin Yu, creator and showrunner of the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, told me: “I think that there will be an industry move to the middle in terms of safer, four-quadrant TV.” (In L.A., a “four-quadrant” project is one that aims to appeal to all demographics.) “I think a lot of people,” he said, “who were disenfranchised or marginalized—their drink tickets are up.” Indeed, multiple writers and executives told me that following the strike, studio choices have skewed even more conservative than before. “It seems like buyers are much less adventurous,” one writer said. “Buyers are looking for Friends.”

There’s no reason to believe that this type of caution will pay off. The supposed sure shot of IP is currently misfiring: in 2023, Disney’s The Marvels fell more than $64 million short of breaking even, and its Indiana Jones sequel drastically underperformed. The Flash, for Warner Bros. Discovery, lost millions, and the company’s Shazam! Fury of the Gods flopped. (In the case of Barbie—the loudest exception—the writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, were given extraordinary free rein.) As Zack Stentz put it, “Hollywood is based on giving audiences what they might not know. Any attempt to drive risk out of that process is sooner or later doomed to failure.” His words played off an old adage by the screenwriter William Goldman. “Nobody knows anything,” he wrote. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for certain what’s going to work.” But investments in the alchemy of the creative process do not perform well in quarterly reports.

The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools, as deWaard has suggested; it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television. It could establish a universal basic income for artists and writers.

None of this is likely to happen. The entertainment and finance industries spend enormous sums lobbying both parties to maintain deregulation and prioritize the private sector. Writers will have to fight the studios again, but for more sweeping reforms. One change in particular has the potential to flip the power structure of the industry on its head: writers could demand to own complete copyright for the stories they create. They currently have something called “separated rights,” which allow a writer to use a script and its characters for limited purposes. But if they were to retain complete copyright, they would have vastly more leverage. Nearly every writer I spoke with seemed to believe that this would present a conflict with the way the union functions. This point is complicated and debatable, but Shawna Kidman and the legal expert Catherine Fisk—both preeminent scholars of copyright and media—told me that the greater challenge is Hollywood’s structure. The business is currently built around studio ownership. While Kidman found the idea of writer ownership infeasible, Fisk said it was possible, though it would be extremely difficult. Pushing for copyright would essentially mean going to war with the studios. But if things continue on their current path, writers may have to weigh such hazards against the prospect of the end of their profession. Or, they could leave it all behind.
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/...aniel-bessner/





Americans’ New TV Habit: Subscribe. Watch. Cancel. Repeat.

Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.
John Koblin

Early last year, Josh Meisel and his wife wanted to watch a new buzzy Peacock drama, “Poker Face,” starring Natasha Lyonne.

But Mr. Meisel, a scientist who lives outside Boston, did not subscribe to Peacock. He paid for half a dozen other streaming services and was reluctant to sign up for another. So he and his wife made a pact. If they weren’t watching “Poker Face” anymore after two weeks, they would cancel Peacock.

Sure enough, they lost interest and canceled. And then he realized: Why stop there?

In the weeks that followed, Mr. Meisel, who is 39, cut loose Max, Apple TV+ and Hulu. He eventually resubscribed to Hulu and Apple TV+ when there were shows the couple wanted to watch — Hulu for “The Bear,” Apple TV+ for “Slow Horses” — but canceled both again after they finished watching a new season.

And he is hardly alone.

Americans are getting increasingly impulsive about hitting the cancellation button on their streaming services. More than 29 million — about a quarter of domestic paying streaming subscribers — have canceled three or more services over the last two years, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. And the numbers are rising fast.

The data suggests a sharp shift in consumer behavior — far from the cable era, when viewers largely stuck with a single provider, as well as the early days of the so-called streaming wars, when people kept adding services without culling or jumping around.

Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.

“In three years, this went from a very niche behavior to an absolute mainstream part of the market,” said Jonathan Carson, the chief executive of Antenna.

The change gives consumers far more flexibility, but the implications could be significant for the major media companies, especially if this behavior becomes even more common.

Traditional media companies like Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal and Disney are trying to navigate the extremely bumpy road from the cable bundle (which was enormously profitable) to streaming (which is not). NBCUniversal’s Peacock, for one, lost $2.8 billion last year.

As a result, the companies slashed investments in shows — the number of scripted shows in the United States in 2023 suffered its steepest decline in at least 15 years — and are raising prices to their streaming services. (Disney+ and Hulu both raised the price of their commercial-free tiers by $3 a month last year, for instance.)

Less loyal subscribers could introduce a whole new level of complexity to their business. Last year, these “serial churners,” as Antenna calls them, accounted for roughly 40 percent of all new subscriptions and cancellations, Mr. Carson said.

The companies “clearly can’t ignore them because it’s such a big, active part of the market,” he said.

One option for slowing the churn, executives think, is to bring back some element of the cable bundle by selling streaming services together. Executives believe consumers would be less inclined to cancel a package that offered services from multiple companies.

Disney has found success by bundling Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ into one package. It also joined several other companies, including Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, in announcing a sports streaming service scheduled to start this fall.

The services are also trying to keep subscribers hooked with “coming soon” features prominently displayed in their apps. Disney+ recently advertised a coming documentary series from National Geographic (“Secrets of the Octopus”), and Apple TV+ is teasing “Dark Matter,” a science-fiction series that comes out in May in its app.

This year, when Peacock was days away from showing the first streaming-only National Football League playoff game, it promoted a special offer to deter new subscribers from canceling: Sign up for a full year at $30, half the normal price. (And according to Antenna’s research, people who signed up for Peacock on the weekend of the game did not cancel en masse the next month; the cancellation rates were close to average.)

Though the nomadic subscribers tend to skew slightly younger, and have a slightly lower income, “this is an activity that all types of Americans are engaging in,” Mr. Carson said.

Kailyn Castro, a 32-year-old who works at a tech company and lives in Brooklyn, started piling up streaming subscriptions during the pandemic. She had lots of downtime, she said, and kept “hearing about what everybody else was watching, and I wanted to be able to watch those things as well.”

But over the last year or so, as the pandemic faded, Ms. Castro found herself back to a busy social and professional life, and began cutting most of them.

“I feel like the world was really back last year,” she said. “People were just outside more, interacting with humans more.”

Price sensitivity is also a factor. Americans with a streaming subscription are spending an average of $61 a month for four services, an increase from $48 a year ago, according to a new study by Deloitte. The increase was due to higher prices, not additional services. Nearly half the people surveyed said they would cancel their favorite streaming service if monthly prices went up another $5, the study said.

Alicia Bianchi, a 38-year old lawyer in Michigan, said she had been culling streamers over the last year, including Hulu, Paramount and Peacock, and would probably let go of Max once she was finished watching “The Regime,” the Kate Winslet HBO limited series that premiered last month. She said she was being “very mindful of spending,” more so than she was a few years ago, before inflation rose sharply.

“I’m able to turn them off so easily now, it’s like why spend the money on something that I’m not using?” she said.

Ms. Bianchi, who has two young children, will not cancel Netflix, however. “I don’t ever mess with my Netflix subscription,” she said. Netflix’s cancellation rate is much lower than those of its peers, according to Antenna.

Likewise, Mr. Meisel, the scientist who canceled several streaming services after giving up on “Poker Face,” said the Netflix subscription — as well as Amazon Prime and Disney+ — was off limits. (He also has two young children.)

He’s otherwise enjoying his newfound flexibility around the other services. After canceling Peacock, he brought it back for a short period.

Now, with a pared-down streaming subscription list, there’s a weight off his shoulders, Mr. Meisel said.

“I don’t like this new system where you have to have a million different subscriptions to watch what you want to watch,” he said. “I’m happy to cancel to punish the companies who are making me do this.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/b...n-jumping.html





Amazon Prime Video's Disappearing Act could Point to a Future Without the Service
Cesar Cadenas

Something strange is going on with Amazon Prime Video. A report from news site Cord Busters originally claimed that the tech giant quietly pulled the plug on the service in the United Kingdom. If you head over to Amazon Prime’s UK page, you’ll notice that Prime Video isn’t among the list of plans near the bottom. All you see are Prime Monthly and Prime Annuals. The same thing is happening on the American website. Scroll down to the “Choose Your Plan” section and it’s not there.

As it turns out, Prime Video continues to exist although it’s being obscured. If you go down to the bottom of the UK website, you’ll find Prime Video listed among the other subscription plans with a direct link to sign up. This isn’t the case with the US page, however. There isn't a clear indicator of Prime Video’s availability in the States; not a cornered-off section or even a small hint. Luckily, the subscription’s signup page is still live if you know where to look or if you have a link. The cost of the subscription hasn’t changed. It’s still $8.99/£5.99 a month.

On the Amazon mobile app, it’s featured more prominently. Prime Video is tucked away in the settings menu behind a single expandable tab and it’s still available for download from app stores. All seems good, right? Not exactly, as on mobile, we couldn’t purchase Prime Video by itself. Instead, we were being pushed to buy the regular Amazon Prime plan at $14.99 a month. There was no option for the cheaper service.

Amounting problems

We don't know what to make of this. On one hand, it may be the start of a new effort to drive up more revenue. By hiding or possibly even ending the service, the platform could be forcing people to purchase the more expensive Amazon Prime if they want to watch shows like Fallout. It's entirely possible. Back in late January 29, Prime Video introduced an ad-supported plan as the new base service which understandably annoyed a lot of people. They had to cough up an extra $2.99/£2.99 a month to get rid of commercials.

However, the sudden disappearance of Prime Video could be the cause of recent bugs. Recently, people have begun to notice weird problems with the service. Second episodes for certain shows are coming out before the first, audio for entire languages is missing, and translation errors are just some of the issues viewers have run into.

We're leaning towards the glitches as the source of Prime Video's disappearance. Amazon has reportedly disputed Cord Busters' claim in a statement to Engadget saying Prime Video is "still available in the US as a standalone... subscription." Hopefully, this will remain the case. It’s currently one of the cheaper streaming options out there as compared to the other major services. The whole situation could be a bug or bad code wreaking havoc. But something tells us there's more to this story.

If you’re looking for something to watch over the weekend, check out TechRadar’s latest roundup of the seven newest movies and shows on Netflix, Prime Video, and Max.
https://www.techradar.com/streaming/...ut-the-service
















Until next week,

- js.



















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