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September 5, 2023 37 mins

As the writers’ and actors' strike in Hollywood stretches into the fall, many have called this moment “existential.” After negotiations with AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, broke down, SAG-AFTRA and WGA members took to picket lines over dwindling wages and the use of artificial intelligence, which may change the entertainment industry forever. Writer, director, and producer Justine Bateman is one guild member warning of A.I.'s potentially devastating influence. Following her roles in Family Ties and Satisfaction, among many others, Bateman transitioned to working behind the scenes as a filmmaker and author. She earned her Computer Science and Digital Media Management degree from UCLA in 2016, which has become all the more relevant facing the rise of A.I. Bateman speaks with Alec Baldwin about the threat A.I. poses to the entire entertainment industry, how the business has changed since she first started in it, and what drives her creative work.

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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. On July fourteenth, SAG AFTRA,
better known as the Screen Actors Guild, joined the picket lines,
where members of the Writers' Guild of America have been
striking since early May.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
The entire business model has been changed by streaming digital AI.
This is a moment of history, that is a moment
of truth. If we don't stand toall right now, we
are all going to be in trouble. We are all
going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines

(00:44):
and big business. Who gives more about Wall Street than
you and your family.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
That's Actor and Screen Actors Guild President fran Drescher announcing
the SAG strike. This action follows contentious negotiations over contracts
with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, a
collection of film studios, TV networks and streamers like Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, Sony,

(01:12):
and Warner Brothers Discovery. The issues in dispute include everything
from dwindling payments in the age of streaming to the
unsettling reality that artificial intelligence may soon render human writers
and actors unnecessary. Many have called this particular moment existential.
One person who is deeply involved in this issue and

(01:36):
has been ringing the alarm for some time is actor, writer, director,
and producer Justine Bateman. Bateman is perhaps best known for
her work on family ties and Satisfaction, but she also
received her degree in computer science from UCLA in twenty sixteen.
As someone involved in so many aspects of filmmaking, I

(01:59):
wanted to know if Eateman felt that the guilds were
up to the task of ensuring their future amidst the
AI proliferation.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yes, actually, yeah, And I'll tell you why. So if
we go back even further to nineteen eighty, which I
think was the last time SAG was on strike, they
were asking for a piece of all the unions were
a piece of the home video market VCR right tapes.

(02:29):
We didn't even have DVDs yet, and the quote from
AMPTP was we don't even know if there's any money
in that. Well we saw what happened with that. That
became the financial booy for the entire industry having DVD sales.
Then you go to two thousand and seven, two thousand

(02:51):
and eight, when I was on the SAG board of
Directors and on the negotiating committee, and they said to
all the unions, when we were asking for me made
for new media percentages, residuals so forth, they said the
same thing, Well, we don't even know if there's any
money in the Internet.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
It's so unproven.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
It's the wild wild West, which is such a tired
sort of saying. And I think during the WGA strike
back then they released Hulu, which was all of these
ampt a lot of not all of them, but a
lot of these AMPTP companies coming together and creating a
video platform. I mean, you know, these companies don't get

(03:32):
together to do anything, so they must have been extremely
convinced that it was going to be very lucrative and
eliminated a lot of the overhead that's necessary for broadcast
television and theater release. So it's very telling then as
far as AI goes, that when the WGA asked for

(03:53):
protections on that, they didn't even say what they'd said before,
which could have been we don't know that there's any
money in AI. They just said, we're not talking about it,
which says to me they are writing scripts of the
AI already and have been for a while.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
Of course I'm a thousand percent convinced that they have
that machine churning away. And I always remember when they say, well,
we don't know if there's any money in there. We
don't really have any money in that that we know of.
And what they're saying now is, well, we don't have
any money there for you had to depend that little phase,
then we don't have any money for you. For the

(04:30):
actors we've seen over the last many years. And this
is my opinion, it's purely an opinion, an analysis that
what you see now is the complete wall to wall
wigitizing of the creative industries. Men and women who are
captain corporations that want to take all the risk out

(04:52):
of movie making and television production. And of course there's
no such thing as a risk free movie business. Guessing
what an audience might want to watch, and now they've
gotten this down with all their Marvel universe, but guessing
what an audience might want to watch eighteen months from
now is a lot of luck in some art. But
these are corporations that want to have the risk free

(05:14):
entertainment industry, which is just absurd. You're involved in with
the union with SAG when did that begin and why.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
Well, I'm not. I haven't acted for many, many years.
It's not a focus of mine. Just been writing, directing
and producing. So I'm more involved actually in the WGA,
WGA and the DGA now like I'm on the Western
the Director's Western Council at the DGA, and for a
long time just been, you know, a great admirer of
the WGA and the DGA and involved in the WA.

(05:44):
But of course I have a big love for SAG
and because of my relationships with them, they had asked
me to come in to their day with the AMPTP
in these negotiations, the day that dealt with AI and
say a few things and I you know, you can't
talk about what was talked about in there, but I
will say that Duncan Crabtree Ireland, the National Director and

(06:09):
the lead negotiator for SAG, has extremely good handle on
what needs to happen for actors protection and not just
for protection of actors who are working now and who
will work in you know, they have their future work
as well, but to protect the actors from the past.
And this is true too for the DGA and WGA.

(06:31):
And maybe it's something that has to be done through legislation,
but to protect it's our responsibility now. Like these, these
actors and writers and directors in the past, they did
work within the unions to establish rules for us so
that we could make a living at this and have
pensions and healthcare and all of this, and they sacrifice
for that. And I feel like now it's time for

(06:52):
us to in addition to what we need to do
to protect members, now we need to protect their work
because now the technology exists to go back and mess
around with everything. You know, the technology isn't there exactly
to just generate another version of Casablanca, but we're on
the precipice of that, or going back to say some

(07:13):
you know, the mash TV series and making another season
out of what was, you know, just feeding in all
the seasons and making another season, that kind of thing.
And then there's other things like just doing episodes that
are in line with somebody's viewing history and just throwing
together something that is an amalgamation, a distilling of an

(07:36):
amalgamation of all of our past work. And that's what
I find so offensive and heinous. It's not that AI
is now generating new stuff, just it's a new technology,
and it's generating new stuff on its own. It's doing
it only because it's been fed in our old work.

(07:57):
That's what I find so horrible about it.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
Do you think that people who have licensed, you know,
the most handy reference I have as James Earl Jones
licensing his voice to the Star Wars board of directors
there for his voice as Darth Vader to live on
beyond his death. Is that a betrayal of actors? Is
that a betrayal of the union for people to buy
into the AI thing? Do you think not?

Speaker 3 (08:21):
In my opinion. I mean, if they want to do that, fine,
I personally, as a filmmaker, I don't want to have
anything to do with it because it's the polar opposite
direction of where I want to go with my work.
I want to do something like really, really new if
I can, you know, stand on the shoulders of all
the filmmakers that I love, and you know, move the

(08:43):
ball down the field. I mean, look, the last ten
to fifteen years, with some exceptions, all we've been doing
is a regurgitation of the past. I mean, tell me
what pop culture is right now. It is the pop
culture of the twentieth century.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
Period.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
There's nothing new in the last twenty years with some
exccepts as far as a genre goes of music of movies.
I mean, Alec, you can think I could name any
decade in the twentieth century and you could tell me
something that went on in music, something went on and film,
something went on in fine art or dance or whatever,

(09:17):
and it's just not happening anymore because tech and I
love tech, I have a computer science degree, but it
has created this is something you want to avoid in coding,
which is an infinite loop. We just can't the code
can't get out of this loop. It's in what tech
has created. In pop culture and in the arts is
an infinite loop where we just completely we regurgitate, regurgitate,

(09:42):
regurgitate what's happened before us. And the studio has got
on board with that because they're scared financially and trying
to you know, just take ips that everybody's familiar with
so they can skip the marketing period. They need to
get people to understand what their new.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Project is about.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
And now AI is going to automate all of that.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
I mean, I will watch a streaming series, not because
I have any desire to watch that show, but I'm
just curious what's selling? What are people watching most of
the shows I see. The other impact of this, you know,
money at all costs money over creativity is the bloating
of these episodes. Meaning the show is really six episodes,

(10:27):
but they got to do eight because they don't get
into profit till after five. There's so much bloating of
this stuff. Content way was to get to their numbers. Now,
one thing for our audience, I would like to explain
your take, maybe on the distinction as to the three unions,
the WGA, the DGA, and SAG, as to why the
pattern seems to be that the DGA settles almost immediately,

(10:49):
the DGA settles quickly, and I've had people explain to
me their opinion as to why a SAG is kind
of down the middle, and the WGA would probably strike
you know, for a year if they could. They're always
the slowest too. Does that seem like a fair assessment
to you?

Speaker 3 (11:04):
You know, I haven't been within the negotiating process of
DGA or WGA, but I will say this, one way
to characterize each one of the unions is to think
about their duties on a set.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
The director is.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
Telling everybody this is how it's going to be, and
the directors come in, they come in for their prep,
and then they do the shoot, and then they have
their post and that's pretty much it. The writer has
had to work with the studios, sometimes for a long
period of time before the director is stepping in, and
there's a lot of beating up of the writers by

(11:44):
the studios sometimes. In fact, in the streaming world, I
know somebody who's a showrunner, and I've heard this from
a couple of showrunners. The note they get most frequently
is it's not second screen enough, meaning the viewer's laptop
or the viewers right, hilarious, Right, the viewer's laptop or
the viewer's phone is primary screen, first screen, and don't

(12:08):
do anything in the show that's going to distract the
viewer because then they might go, oh, wait, what just happened,
and then go turn it off. They want it on
all the time, like visual music, as somebody quoted once.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
So you got that.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
And then the actors on a set are pretty much
showing up. They've prepared their work, but they're like tell
me where to go and where to stand and what
to do, and then you know, I'm going to bring
some emotion into it. So if you think of it
that way, and I don't mean that to be disparaging
in any way whatsoever to any of those positions, but

(12:43):
then it gives you an inkling as to how the
behavior of the negotiating committees is possibly conducted. It's an
interesting way to kind of color it.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
I think, Well, someone said to me that the that
the DGA settles quicker is because they have more overlapping
interests with the producers than the other two unions.

Speaker 4 (13:07):
Do.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
I think the guy that's the head of the DGA
just announced he said we did better that we've ever done,
or he had some very positive comment about what happened.
But my point is this, there's three unions and I
don't know why they can't come together and negotiate together
and really stick together as one business. I mean, I
know that's fanciful. They came to me to run for

(13:30):
president of SAG before Fran ran and they said, going
into this negotiation, we need someone who is as bold,
you know, forceful, whatever, because they were saying this's gonna
be a tough negotiation. It's gonna be one of the
toughest negotiations. And I said, well, I think that the
head of SAG should live in La, just in the
time zone.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Thing.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
I got seven children. You think I'm gonna be on
conference calls till nine or ten o'clock at night in La,
I said, I mean, I live in New York, and
I'm not leaving New York. And after a back and
forth with a small handful of peace, they got it,
and they moved on and they got frien But I
was very tempted. But one thing I kept saying to
them was I said, what do you think is the
likelihood that we can join forces not dilute our independence,

(14:14):
our sovereignty, our specific missions. But why can't we negotiate
these contracts together? And they just thought that that was
a very quixotic idea, that that was just impossible. Do
you agree that's impossible?

Speaker 3 (14:29):
No, I mean I am in agreement with you. I mean,
we're not even competitive with each other, Like the writers
are not competing against the directors, are not competing against
the actors and so forth for jobs, And yet all
the studios are competing with each other, in direct competition
with each other. So if they can get together as

(14:50):
a group and negotiate against us, then I agree we
should be able to band together and negotiate against them.
I would hope for that too. I don't know all
the reasons why it doesn't occur, but I will say
that I believe on the AI front, that's a topic
that we all have in common, and whatever gains one

(15:12):
one union gets will benefit the other. And whatever gains
one union makes on the legislative end with the government
will be a gain for everyone else in the business.
But what you said earlier about you know, having their
eye firmly on the money, I mean it's always been
a component of the business, of course. But when the streamers,

(15:34):
these tech companies decided to get into the tech platform
business and needed stuff to put on their shelves, and
their stuff was our work, which they refer to as content,
which I find chili so dismissive. Yeah, and so offensive
and so dismissive and so confused about the work that

(15:58):
we do. When they came onto the scene as tech companies,
they were seen by Wall Street as tech companies, and
they followed the tech company pattern of success quote unquote,
which is ramp it up, scale it as much as
you can, and then get out sell it for a
billion dollars, three billion dollars whatever you can do. Well,

(16:21):
now they're not quite doing that, and they've also saturated
the market to some extent of you know, how far
they can scale. And that's when we had this Netflix
correction on Wall Street. That's when, because that was Wall
Street going as a wait a minute, you guys have
fairly saturated the market, at least domestically, and so we

(16:43):
can't look at you as a tech company anymore because
you're not doing that scaling anymore. So we're just going
to look at you as a media company, and a
media company has to show profit.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
WGA, DGA and SAG member Justine Bateman. If you want
to hear more from bold female directors working to change
their industry, check out our episode with Sarah Polly.

Speaker 4 (17:08):
I think that I hugely benefited from this very unusual
experience i'd had, which is that I'd worked with a
few female filmmakers as a young actor, which was a
really big deal then, like to have worked with Catherine Bigelow,
to have worked with Isabel Quichet, to have these models,
and as soon as I expressed the slightest interest in directing,
they were just like, Okay, you're a dog with a bone.

(17:30):
Don't let the bone go. Everyone's going to try to
take away from me. I remember Katherine Bigelow is like this,
everyone will try to take the bone away from you.
Hold on to the bone.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
To hear more of Talier Schlanger's conversation with Sarah Polly,
go to Here's Thething dot Org. After the break, Justine
Bateman shares her vision of the potentially frightening future for
actors now that AI is getting stronger every day. I'm

(18:04):
Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. After
decades of work in television and film, Justine Bateman pivoted
from acting to writing and directing her own films, including Violet,
starring Olivia Munn and Justin Throw. As someone who has
worked tirelessly on both sides of the camera, I was

(18:26):
curious how she found the business has changed in her lifetime.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
I'll tell you what's really sad for me. So as
a filmmaker, I'm taking meetings as a director and a
writer with development executives and the development executives that I've
met that are some of these studios who you talked
to them. And one of the things really telling for
me is I asked him what's your favorite film? And
sometimes I'll give an answer and I'll go like, oh,
this person knows what's going on. I talk a little

(18:53):
bit more with them, and then I just go, hey,
what kind of films do you want to make? And
they're like, hey, listen, I would love to do And
maybe this is blowing smoke up my ass, but I'd
love to do this film that you just pitched me.
That kind of thing is exactly the type of thing
I want to do. But I can't because I've been
tasked to make six genre films for fill in the

(19:16):
blank Streamer and I'm like, oh, that sucks. Like that's
what you're bound to do now, even though you love
film and you sound like a real development executive. They're like, yeah,
that's what I have to do. So if you have
any action film and you just hear the life coming
out of their voice when they say this, So if

(19:36):
you have any action films or horror or you know,
not there's anything wrong with action or horror and stuff,
but like that's not what they want to be doing.
And those kinds of films are fine, but not when
they're ninety percent of what's out there. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
But you can see also that their judgment cuts both ways,
meaning they either try to hedge their bets and bring
people in who are not very creative, very innovative, unique,
what have you, and they bring them in and we
we just see the same shit all the time. They
give some people all the money in the world and
maybe they shouldn't have and they don't give you know,

(20:11):
and this is what they hate, this is what they
want to take out of the business.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
Talking about Seinfeld and how much money he made because
he created this show and stuff. I just want to
remind people that, first of all, it takes years, years
to get a financial success like that, and once you
get it, you may not.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Get another one.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
There are some unicorns out there that have I mean,
you look at like Harrison Ford. I mean, I don't
know what his compensation was, but the idea that he
was in three massive like massive cultural impact films, that's
very unusual. Okay, So it takes years. So if you

(20:54):
amortize this money out, like for me, my film Violet
took me a year and a half. Hu every single
day for a year and a half to get the
money together to do that film, and that was a
low budget film. When you look like what I was
paid for it, if I were to like spread that
out over all the time it took me to get
that film made, it's probably ten cents an hour. And

(21:16):
the other thing is when you look at how much
money like anybody makes, like off a TV show or
something like this, I want to remind everybody how reticent
studios and networks are to part with money. And if
they're parting with that much money, then you need to
think about how much more money they made off of

(21:37):
that show. And they're giving Seinfeld a small amount of that,
so that's where a lot of the money is going.
And then you're talking about actors and paying paying you know,
one big actor and then screwing the rest of the cast,
which I think is not right. But think about going forward.
I mean, a lot of the movie stars now are

(21:59):
decidedly older, right, and they all became movie stars pretty
much in their twenties, right. What I can't think of
a clutch of movie stars that have been created now
in their twenties that compares to say, fifty years ago
or even thirty years It's different now, so even they

(22:22):
were even kind of winding that down, you know where
pretty soon it's just going to be, like you said.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
The interchangeability is a real goal of theirs. I mean
because once someone said to me once that was really
behind AI beyond money was or linked to money, I
should say, beyond having to entice a star to do
a script. You decide what, you decide the movie you
want to do, you cast it, you make it. You
just fashion the whole thing like you're baking a cake.

(22:50):
And the other thing they said to me was that,
you know, the computer doesn't have to go to rehab.
The computer doesn't lock themselves in their trailer because she
broke up with her boyfriend. The computer doesn't punch the
director in the face, and some altercation over some perceived indignity,
all the behavior that now the studios and networks have

(23:12):
found a way to profit from, you know, exposing the
wartz and the missteps of stars. Years ago, and I
do mean a million light years ago, the press flax
for the studios did everything in their power to keep
Llela Parsons and had a Hopper and Walter Winchell and
all them kind of calmed down the star is gay

(23:34):
and he's married. The woman had a baby out of wedlock,
she has a black boyfriend. All that crazy crap that
they were getting attacked for. He's an alcoholic, he's in rehaber,
what have you. All the things that they would protect
you from, they tried to protect you in order to
keep your star gleaming. Now you go to work at

(23:54):
Warner Brothers and you walk down one hallway to do
a movie. You walk down another hallway to do a
TV show, and around the corner is TMZ that they own,
who's trying every way they can. They're making every effort
to destroy your reputation in your career.

Speaker 3 (24:09):
Well, another way that they would destroy it is if
SAG doesn't get the protections they're seeking. You know, if
you or this is something that an actor could do
just voluntarily, like you were talking about the actor allowing
his voice to be cloned, you could get yourself scanned,
like if anyone's seen this twenty thirteen film called The
Congress where Robin Wright plays an actress who's down on

(24:32):
her luck, you know, was a big star, and she
allows herself to be digitally scanned, and in exchange, she
has to promise to never act again, because she'll dilute
the value of the scan if she herself acts. Oh
my god, and then you know, regrets her decision. This
is at And you look at that and you go like, oh,
oppression that is. But that's actually based on a nineteen
seventy three book by Stanislaw lemb And this is I

(24:55):
mean this guy. I hadn't read him yet, you know,
I mean read the Philip Dick and Ray Bradbury and
all that. But this guy, Stanislaw lem if anyone wants
to read, he's so on it about AI back in
the seventies. It's amazing. But so if you did that right,
Let's say somebody had a scan of you, Alec, and
then your agencies, which, by the way, the talent big
talent agencies have divisions at their agencies that are encouraging

(25:19):
actors to get scanned, because then yes, you don't have
all those things you said, but you also don't have
an actor who's too tired or has a family obligation
or is already booked. Yeah, so imagine yourself if yeah,
and if your agent had a scan of you, he
could potentially triple and quadruple book you so that you're

(25:41):
doing three or four films at the same time. Of
course it's not you.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
Writer director Justine Bateman. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell
a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing
on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Come back. Justine Bateman shares her thoughts on the life
cycle of fame. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to

(26:19):
Here's the Thing, the multi hyphenit. Justine Bateman recently added
author to her resume. In twenty twenty one, she released
a book on women and aging called Face One Square
Foot of Skin, and before that, in twenty eighteen, she
published Fame, The Hijacking of Reality. I wanted to know

(26:41):
what drew her to explore that complex topic in print.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
Well, when I wrote Fame, which is about the life
cycle of fame, and some famous people don't experience this
complete life cycle, which is it begins, it grows, it
levels off, and this starts to descend and then goes away.
So I've experienced that entire life cycle. Somebody like Brad Pitt,
you know, he's at the leveling off. Everybody just knows

(27:06):
he's famous and will probably never experience the back end
like like I have and others have. So I thought
that was very interesting and it was very interesting to
process the back end of that life cycle. And then
I started wondering. I started thinking about that intangible fame
thing like when somebody if Brad Pitt walks into the room,

(27:28):
everything in the room, everything that was happening in that room,
all the attitudes of conversations people were having. Say in
a room in a restaurant, say stops and people sit differently.
Something wasts itself through the room and changes people's behaviors.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
So that's how that started.

Speaker 3 (27:46):
I wanted to look at that, and then what it
wound up being was a real look at that life
cycle from the inside, my experiences with it, and then
my theories and sociological established sociological theories on why people
behave the way they do, two famous people at different
points in that life cycle.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Now with you, with you, was it something that you
you know, you're in the water and the current is
pulling you away from a mainstream career. You were obviously
one of the stars of a huge hit show. We
were actually on the at the Hampton's film festival where
I program a summer documentary series. We almost said Michael
come and do his doc and he was going to
do a Q and A with us, but he pulled

(28:25):
out because I guess he hasn't really been feeling that
great lately. We were going to do his the Michael J.
Fox documentary out there. But in your case, I wonder
when you're famous and you're on a successful show. And
I'm not saying this to be kind. That was a
funny show. Everybody know that was a really well written
and clever show. Did it kind of ebb and you're
floating away like the rip currents are pulling you away

(28:47):
from groovytown because you didn't care. You didn't you didn't
mind that you did. You put up a fight and
you wanted to stay prominent in the business and it
didn't work out, or you didn't give a shit, no, no,
something like that.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
It was more it was more of a kind of
a life experience. And this is what to go into
in the book. What I talk about in the book
is that we all have our reality right who we're
married to, or who our parents are, what city we
live in, or what gender we are, or what language
we speak, what job we have, all these things, what

(29:23):
time we are in, right, And if any one of
those things were to change. For a lot of people,
it can be a traumatic sometimes, right, like somebody you
love dies or you have to you get relocated your
job to another country, so you have to adjust your
reality to that, because you have a lot of things

(29:44):
attached to these components of our reality justifiably, and we
attach our sometimes our self worth, you know, if it
has to do with jobs or something, or identity, maybe
who we're married to and things like that. So for
a very very small amount of people, fame is one
of those components. And when it first starts happening, and
I know you can relate to this, you're like, this

(30:06):
is this this weird thing that's happening around me, blah
blah blah. But then it becomes so constant You're like, Okay,
I'm just going to absorb this. I'm going to receive this.
This is part of who I am now. And it's
not somebody saying that's right, don't you know who I am?
And I'm going to get these tables at these restaurants.
It's not that that is what's happening. You make a

(30:30):
reservation at a restaurant. You say your name and they go, oh,
miss Babeman. Of course, yes, I'm sorry. Yeah, I know
I said there weren't any tables. But when you're very famous,
like people enjoyed your work. There's nothing nefarious about it.
People enjoyed your work, and they genuinely want to in
their way, if they run a restaurant, whatever it is,
they want to sort of give back to you, like, oh,

(30:52):
I loved your show or your film or your music
or whatever, and please come in be min. We'd love
to buy you a bottle of wine.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Whatever.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
It's this nice kind of exchange. Okay, Now that happens
so consistently that you just accepted as part of your reality.
It's just happening all around you all the time. And
if that goes on for many many years, like it
did for me and for many others, when that starts shifting,
it is akin to those big life changes I said

(31:23):
that for you know, in anybody's it starts pulling away
and anything you had attached to it, that you had
reasonably attached to it, your identity, yourself worth, all these
different things. When that starts pulling away, it starts I
always picture, like you know that film Man called Horse.

Speaker 1 (31:41):
You patured Harris up.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
There and he had those, so anybody hasn't seen it.
He has to go through this sort of virtual yeah,
and he there's this big pole in the center of
where everybody's standing, and it has ropes attached to the
top of it with hooks at the end of it,
and he has to hook these into skin on his chest.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
Yeah, into his pectrol muscles.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
And pull away from it. Now. So I always.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Picture one of the most grotesque scenes in the movie.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
She really is.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
Can't believe you're referencing, man.

Speaker 3 (32:11):
Aame is moving away from you if you had anything
attached to it, and there's many things that you didn't
even realize you attached to it. It starts pulling away
like that, and it's painful. So I in the book
is say like I had to recognize what was attached
to it, and I had to unhook it before it
ripped my chest apart, so to speak.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
Right, my last question for you, I mean, you've had
such a varied and fascinating life in terms of being
a big TV star and then going through all these
different aspects of your life directing and going back to school,
writing books and so forth. For you do you miss acting?

Speaker 3 (32:52):
You know, it's interesting, Alec. It wasn't really up to me.
Acting was really good to me for a long time,
and it really was something It never crossed my mind
before it actually occurred. I never grew up thinking I
was going to be an actor. I just sort of
fell into it, and I was gifted at it. It
was I fell into my vocation. And then I got

(33:14):
to a point where my life just turned a corner.
And funny enough, it was the last strike around two
thousand and seven, and I knew, oh my god, this
is what I was born for. To the writing. And
I'd already been writing scripts but just like keeping them
on my computer, not knowing what to do with them.
And I'd wanted to direct since I was nineteen, but

(33:34):
the timing never felt right. So I started writing and
producing it and in the digital space, and I was
off to the races. And from that point there was
a period where inexplicably for five years, I mean I
understand it, I understood it after, but for five years
I would have all kinds of auditions and I worked
all the time up until that point. For five years,

(33:55):
I did not get one job off an audition, and
that was really really confusing, talk about having your reality
tossed upside down. But at the same time, I was
writing all these proposals and these scripts and everything for brands,
and doing all this work in the digital space and
speaking on panels and all this, and I knew that
the writing and directing that was where I was supposed

(34:17):
to go. But I'd always acted, so how could that
door have just been slammed shut? And it was very confusing,
and it was very upsetting because that kind of, you know,
tore my reality a little bit like that. But I realized,
like that had to happen. My life had to do that,

(34:41):
or God, your destiny, whatever somebody wants to call it,
it had to happen, or I would not have been
committed one hundred percent in the direction I had to go,
which was writing and directing and producing films, writing books,
and you know, going to school and getting computer science degree.
I would have just continued to just do you know,
beyond TV shows or whatever it was. Because I am,

(35:04):
at the risk of sounding absolutely arrogant. I was a
great actor, and I at that point where I couldn't
get a workout of any of those auditions, I was
doing the best acting I had ever done, so it
wasn't up to me. And I love what I'm doing now.
I mean I feel like everything I've done before my writing, directing,

(35:26):
and producing career began was prep for now.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
Well. I'm not saying this to be kind, but I mean,
you're so bright. I wonder if the world of acting
today as it exists today would be a complete waste
of your resources in your time. But I want to
thank you because I've watched you online with this AI thing,
and you're a great voice for this. You've got such
great experience in the business and with the union and

(35:52):
so forth, and I do hope that we have a
way to I mean, I don't like these contentious words
because people used to talk about breaking unions, but I
hope we have an ability to break the producers. They've
got to understand that the way this business works, as
many people don't realize, is a director makes a movie.
He might make a movie every year and a half
for two years, so we have to have an income

(36:13):
that the last two years. Yes, my great thanks to
you and to you.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
I think you're an incredible artist and have so admired
and enjoyed your work. I hope someday that I get
to be a director on one of your films.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
I'm available, my very best to you, and thank you,
thank you, thank you, My thanks to Justine Bateman. This
episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin.

(36:54):
Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Oldwin. Here's the Thing is brought
to you by iHeart Radio.
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Host

Alec Baldwin

Alec Baldwin

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