B. Ruby Rich

From Film Quarterly, Fall 2023, Volume 77, Number 1

This marks my fortieth and final editorial as I step down from my post as editor in chief of this wonderful journal. Ten years ago, I accepted the helm of Film Quarterly with the intention of transforming it into a journal that I wanted to read, a journal that could offer the field of film and media studies an “alternative commons” instead of the usually siloed areas of identities, nationalities, sexualities, racializations, studies, and specializations that fracture it. I looked at the vibrancy of American studies and of visual anthropology, of transnational studies and work from the Global South, at the geopolitics of regions reshaping aesthetic visions, and I wanted more than what the traditional field of cinema studies was accustomed to including. There was a task ahead.

At the same time, I realized that the worlds of both filmmaking and journal publishing were changing; they were on the edge of a precipice, and it was not clear what would survive, or in what form. I titled my debut editorial “Film [sic]” in acknowledgment of one such area of transformation then under way, onto personal screens and digital formats, new production and delivery platforms. Happily, Film Quarterly has survived and flourished.

The culture that has been built at Film Quarterly has attracted a distinguished group of contributors, editors, contributing editors—collaborators from near and far who have worked to establish and maintain its excellence. I could not have dreamed of a better gang of pals with whom to scheme, explore new ideas, break knowledge wide open, and hopefully help form a field where voices are not merely “diverse,” that absurdly insulting term, but more importantly, empowered and advanced and willing to lead. Huge thanks to the extraordinary editorial board who have pushed the journal always to do more and better, and helped make that happen by editing dossiers, Special Focus sessions, the online Quorum column, and convening for public sessions, in person and online. All this was possible only with their collaboration and with a phenomenally dedicated team. Deepest thanks to Rebecca Prime, who after five years as associate editor now takes over as editor in chief for the 2023–24 period, and to Marc Francis, who shifts from assistant editor to associate editor; both began their terms in June and will be fully in charge by the time you read this.

What does it mean to create a journal for a field? For me, it meant the chance of a lifetime to throw open the doors and redefine standards of excellence, in the process offering future generations of students and scholars an archive of analysis opened up to new subject positions, perspectives, and histories. Writing is the means to a conversation with the field, and these editorials have served that purpose for me over a decade of musings and instigations.¹

Now, futurism is always a fool’s game. If in 2013 I stepped into the editorship at a time of massive upheaval, I step down in 2023 in a moment of even greater upheaval—but not the kind I envisioned back then. Today, movie theaters are closing at an ever-accelerating pace in the United States. Public and smaller private universities, some as hard-pressed for funds as their students, may well disappear in the coming decade as the great postwar university boom deflates; in the Bay Area, both Mills College and the San Francisco Art Institute, two institutions for which I had a particular fondness, are already gone, one absorbed by a bigger institution, one headed to bankruptcy and auction.

When you spend your whole life in one field, as I have, it’s remarkable what a comprehensive view you can gain and how powerfully the changes register in your conscience. And if any part of the field holds my heart, it’s the world of film festivals, which I have inhabited fairly consistently for fifty years. Today, film festivals are struggling, as I have detailed before in this space, but now with new monetary challenges that are more visible than ever and impacting both the events and their attendees.² The festival ecosystem is as delicate as it is robust, as much a house of cards as a glamorous carnival; despite extensive research (mostly in European film studies), it’s still hard to pierce the sheen of glamour that overshadows their real economy—one that is dependent on patrons and sponsors, on studios and distributors, but also on local economies and physical spaces. In 2023, every single element of this ecosystem appears to be endangered.

How to Be Relevant in a World Gone Mad

The challenges and opportunities for Film Quarterly at a time like this are many. Both its objects and its practitioners at all levels, from classrooms to studios, are endangered, along with the economy, the cities, the planet—but never has its voice, and yours, been more necessary. On December 13, 2016, a few weeks after Trump was elected as the next president, I organized a panel born of the desperation of the moment: “Film & Media in a Time of Repression: Practices & Aesthetics of Resistance.”³

With Film at Lincoln Center as a partner, the FQ panel took place with great solemnity before an SRO crowd in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater. You can watch it online on FQ’s YouTube page alongside some forty other recordings of panels and zoom conversations.⁴ “Get ready for a shit show,” intones the late great Walter Bernstein from his perch on the panel. I wish he were here now to lead the troops.⁵

Seven years later, it is worth revisiting that moment. Susana de Sousa Dias had flown in from Lisbon expressly to take part, drawing on her work in the archives of the dictatorship there. Ruth Ben-Ghiatt, who now has her own Substack channel, schooled the audience (and fellow panelists) on the strategies of fascism. A range of other panelists called on their own sets of expertise to prognosticate and advise.

As the social order continues to break down under sustained attacks—particularly in Florida and Texas and, alas, Europe—it is worth revisiting that panel and reconsidering how both scholars and filmmakers today can provide the urgently needed tools for reframing daily life and dubious futures. In this context, the words of Hito Steyerl seem particularly apt: “I do not believe that social contradictions can be solved individually. On the other hand, if you give up on trying to articulate them altogether, you end up being depressed and cynical. So you navigate between different impossibilities and keep failing in all directions, obviously. But what’s the alternative?”⁶

With just such Gramscian thoughts rattling around my own brain too, I’ve long railed against film and video’s abdication of its historic role in inspiring audiences to “do the right thing,” per Mr. Spike Lee, or at least to offer ways of thinking through the crises of its age. Film Quarterly’s scope has widened, expanding from film qua film into the digital, into television, serials, DVDs, games, virtual reality (VR), museum installations, and more. The journal has been a forum for Latin American film, for new approaches to black cinema studies in the United States, for a new Asian-American film landscape, for the emergence of a new black Brazilian cinema, and for the complications of staging film festivals in China. There have been dossiers on Chantal Akerman (timed to the first anniversary of her death), on the media effects of the Arab Spring on the tenth anniversary of its ending, and on the importance of Roma in resetting perceptions of Mexican film. And the dossier on New Disability Media made FQ history, not only with its conceptual contributions but also by installing an accessible website readable by screen scrollers.

Walter Bernstein and B. Ruby Rich at Lincoln Center in December 2016. Photo courtesy of Jean-Philippe Voiron.

There has always been space for rethinking the boundaries of documentary too, from the models offered by Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014) throughout his hybrid works to a Special Focus on the “docu-con” documentary in the Trump era and Joshua Oppenheimer’s fact-finding set, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence; from the work of Laura Poitras to the complications of representation in Hong Kong documentaries and the heritage of the Folk/Minjian Memory Project in China. There have consistently been festival reports, interviews with a succession of French women filmmakers and US independent filmmakers, Latin American documentarians, and so much more.

Allow me to pause here to note one controversial aspect of my editorship: the prohibition I imposed on the use of “we” in the pages of the journal, that pronoun beloved of academics that offers a slippery way around subject position and questions of identity. In the pages of a journal such as this, the “we” being addressed perforce changes from essay to essay, interview to interview, book review to book review. I’d get whiplash trying to jump from one zone of address to the next, joining each author in faux community. And so it was that I annoyed hundreds of contributors by editing out their “we” and insisting on a come-to-mama moment: is it you, then, or is it me, your reader? There is simply no such thing as a viable “we” yoking this page to you, dear reader, whoever you may be. I believe it makes for a tougher, more responsible writing to forsake the royal we, and thus held the line through years of objections. Blame the editor!

As to this journal of record in a still-young field, I fervently support its independence of vision, the importance of its voice, and the need for it to remain a vital force in shaping its fields into the future. To that end, it must be said that this success has been due in no small part to the support of the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms Initiative, which came on board in support of this vision early in my tenure and has made possible so much of what FQ has been able to do: major events, webinars, website columns, panels, travel, meetings, its online YouTube channel, a social-media presence, and, let it not be forgotten, the journal’s very status in the field. Thanks to Ford’s JustFilms, Film Quarterly has been able to punch above its weight and make a difference. Huge thanks to Cara Mertes, Chi-hui Yang, and Jon-Sesrie Goff, who have successively contributed JustFilms resources to these efforts. And thanks to their boss, the ever-amazing Darren Walker, who continues to lead so many fields in doing their best in a never-ending, often dispiriting fight for justice.

Certainly, now in the autumn of 2023, the communitarian space established in the pages and web presences of Film Quarterly are needed more than ever.

The Summer of the CEO Villains

In June, along came the unexpected crisis at Turner Classic Movies (TCM).⁷ Its dismantling at the hands of instant archvillain Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav—who decimated its ranks and fired beloved hosts, programmers, and program heads in a brutal cost-cutting move (cable, of course, has been losing its cornucopia of money with the advent of streaming)—was a shock to legions of loyal fans.⁸ The staff was even kicked out of their offices of twenty years. Zaslav was booed in May at the Boston University commencement, where he was the invited speaker and recipient of an honorary degree. The larger public outcry was extreme, involving some of the biggest names in the “business,” as they call it: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson took a meeting with Zaslav.⁹ Programming head Charles Tabesh was subsequently rehired.

But it’s unclear what is going to happen beyond a press release for damage control, given that the fortunes of cable channels don’t seem likely to change any time soon. As Michael Hiltzik, business columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote: “The turmoil at TCM points to more than a single company’s effort to squeeze as much profit as possible from a single asset. It reflects the impulse by the corporate stewards of America’s immense film history to view that culture strictly in commercial terms.”¹⁰

Then summer arrived, and with it the strike by the WGA followed by the strike by SAG-AFTRA (my union, as it happens, from my stint as a television commentator), the first time both unions have struck at once since 1960, when Ronald Reagan, then a Democrat and president of SAG, led actors to their best deal in years, finally catching up with the havoc that television had dealt to the film industry. Today, streaming and AI have taken television’s place as the new menace.

SAG president Fran Drescher on the picket lines.

These conjoined strikes are heartfelt and fierce. They signal a response to massive changes in the industry: the takeover by streamers, joined now by studios, who seek to shred the hard-won union contracts that have been a stabilizing force in the industry, all at a time of precarity in a world barely out of the COVID years. Against this concerted effort to change terms in ways that would impact salaries and work conditions and eliminate residuals, as well as open the door for AI to replace humans in writers’ rooms and on-screen, the reluctant-to-strike actors union voted overwhelmingly to do just that: to strike.¹¹ The widely publicized figure of Fran Drescher delivering a fiery union speech is, in the short term at least, absolutely the inspiration and courage that’s needed. Convinced of being “on the right side of history,” she explicitly linked this strike and its causes to the fate of working people and unions throughout the country and to the plight of actors and writers everywhere.

With an outcome impossible to predict, I know that the future of an entire art form and industry and of labor conditions all hinge on what it will be. Pointing to the moguls in charge of this industry, Drescher had harsh words for their greed. Photographs and reports of their gathering at the “summer camp for billionaires,” a retreat funded by the investment bank Allen & Company in Sun Valley, Idaho, ratcheted up the outrage.¹² When Walt Disney CEO Bob Igor petulantly complained that the actors and writers were “just not realistic” in their demands and accused them of “very disruptive and dangerous” behavior in calling their strikes—though he’s projected to earn $27 million as CEO for 2023—well, the gloves were off.¹³

Ironically, apart from shutting down “Hollywood” (a moniker that includes New York and Georgia and everywhere films are now routinely shot, as well as Netflix and Amazon and everywhere they are financed and streamed in their global virtual studios), the strike will have a big impact on the fall festivals—if it lasts that long. In July, punditry was focused on red-carpet malaise. What will happen to Venice, Telluride (though it has no red carpet), Toronto, the New York Film Festival, without the stars to draw the crowds? Key the hand-wringing here. Well, in the best-case scenario, the festivals could return fully to cinephilia in its purer form: a love of cinema shared with audiences, cleansed of the fever of buying, selling, awards predictions, and selfies, and, also, perhaps documentaries could be granted more slots than usual. And let’s hope that, festivals aside, there will be enough movie theaters left in the United States to play all these films by the time they are released into the world. (I write these words on the eve of Barbie and Oppenheimer openings, the rather unlikely summertime harbingers of theatrical success and survival. Buy a ticket, save a theater!)

In Memoriam

So many significant figures have been lost to the world in recent months.

One of the most famous and notorious figures in the history of the New American Cinema, Kenneth Anger is as famed for his extraordinarily original films that pioneered an art form as for the stories he told (especially in his long-censored book, Hollywood Babylon) and the company he kept: bikers, rent boys, Satanists. I met him in Chicago at the Film Center in the early 1970s when he was having one of his periodic revivals: he had moved back to New York and was on the exhibition circuit. What do I remember? That he cleaned his 16mm prints meticulously using a powder puff, a particular brand that he insisted on, and that he regaled us for hours at dinner with stories of searching London shops for a leather shoe that could fit the devil’s hoof (he was a follower of Aleister Crowley and spoke at length about Lucifer). He was a cinematic genius who conjured new worlds into being, but also fell victim to his own obsessions.

Ellen Hovde was a major force in cinema-verité documentary, most famously for editing that beloved classic of its early years, Grey Gardens, by Albert and David Maysles. It took a very long time for critics and audiences to realize that the process of documentary filmmaking in the 1960–70s was such that reams and reams of footage would be shot, relying on a quaint belief that the film would be “found” on the editing table. So it was that Hovde “found” Grey Gardens, and numerous other documentaries, only much later and retroactively receiving the codirector acknowledgment with which she was credited in many of the obituaries. (She later made a series of documentaries for television with Muffie Meyer.) Her mark on the evolution of 16mm documentary is indisputable: she and a few of her compatriots truly invented the form, even if their contributions were not acknowledged for many years after.

Glenda Jackson was such a unique figure in her combination of acting genius on both stage and screen and political acumen (as a Labor MP) but most especially for her role in charting a new kind of woman, a new way to be female in a moment when the entire culture was undergoing seismic shifts in gender roles and all else. Her performances in Ken Russell’s Women in Love in 1969 (for which she won an Oscar) and in John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday in 1971 were revelatory. She embodied a new modern woman who could be sensual and empowered, smart and sassy, who could love without sacrificing her own agency, to devastating effect. In 1985, Jackson was on Broadway starring in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. The great Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg went to the Nederlander Theater to meet her, hoping to convince her to star in her next film. Film critic Carrie Rickey (my source for this story) accompanied Bemberg to facilitate the introduction. Jackson received them politely, but declined to accept a copy of the script and was clearly not interested. Thus it came to be that Julie Christie starred in Miss Julie and that Jackson, only six years later, starred in Parliament.

A central figure in film studies for decades, Ana M. López influenced the thinking about Latin American films more powerfully than almost anyone else. From her base at Tulane University, she mentored, educated, and encouraged generations of scholars who inevitably became her friends as well as contributors to the books she edited and the journal she headed, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. A collection of her writings, Ana M. López: Essays, edited by Laura Podalsky and Dolores Tierney, was published by SUNY Press in spring 2023. Outpourings of grief from past students and legions of colleagues testified to the high regard and deep affection that she inspired.

As a Cuban American, and eventually director of Tulane’s Cuban Studies Institute in 2000, she was a privileged interpreter across cultures and boundaries. The last time I saw her, in fact, was at a symposium in Havana in 2018 on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Titón), the great Cuban filmmaker. After the panels, the entire group was transported to a construction site in Havana Vieja to view the building of a future Gutiérrez Alea center, a tribute to his legacy. My last image of Ana is there: a dynamic woman in a hard hat, excitedly exploring an archive to be, traversing the dirt to imagine a future.

RIP Jane Birkin (1946–2023) Actress, singer, director

RIP Derek Malcolm (1932–2023) Film critic extraordinaire, journalist

RIP Ray Price (1948–2023) Distributor, exhibitor, a force for good in art cinema

Jane Birkin, Derek Malcolm, and Ray Price all died as this issue headed to press. They were instrumental beyond words, one of a kind in three different spheres, memorable as hell. Malcolm shaped me as a critic, Birkin shaped me as a woman, and Price shaped the field. I don’t like the escalation of deaths this past year, this bone-deep sense of loss: a great generation is departing, leaving behind great works and words and deeds, but little consolation.

In This Issue

Amy Herzog takes up the question of documentary’s relationship to reenactment in her consideration of two new works, Elisabeth Subrin’s Maria Schneider, 1983 (and The Listening Takes, the installation drawn from the same materials at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery) and Pratibha Parmar’s My Name Is Andrea, both released in 2022, at the Cannes and Tribeca film festivals, respectively. Both films, one short and one a feature, deal with questions of feminism and sexuality in starkly different terms. Examining them at length, Herzog argues for the efficacy of both collective rage and radical listening.

Samantha Sheppard marks the tenth anniversary of an influential organization, the New Negress Film Society, in an essay tracing this history and the impact it has had on its members and audiences. A collective dedicated to the creation of what bell hooks termed a “location of radical openness and possibility,” the NNFS has had “reverberating effects” on the presence of Black women in the film world. Citing its example as a “present-future” of praxis, Sheppard charts its evolution and claims its ongoing importance.

September 11 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973, when General Pinochet and his fascist buddies overthrew the elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende. To mark the occasion, José Miguel Palacios and Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto here contribute a Special Focus, “Chilean Film and Media: Fifty Years Later (1973/2023),” a collection of three essays on the direction of Chilean cinema today and the place of memory in audiovisual creations.

José Miguel Palacios, in “Beyond Memory: An Introduction,” the opening essay of this section, traces the evolution of Chilean cinema since initial cinematic responses to the definitive 1973 moment. He intends the phrase “beyond memory” to provoke as well as “to suggest that the traditional critical discourses of trauma and mourning, as well as the spectral representation of history, are no longer sufficient.” Palacios moves from parsing Patricio Guzmán’s body of work to considering the less direct, more ambiguous films of a new generation responding to the political imperatives of today’s Chile.

Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, in her “Bodies that Persist: The Seismic Legacy of Chilean Documentary Resistance,” proposes a dual focus for considering Chilean documentaries. She considers how “Chilean documentary oscillates between an emphasis on the bodies of the direct victims of state-sanctioned violence and an emphasis on the bodies of the films themselves as haptic images,” then finds evidence in a powerful collection of recent work.

Carolina Urrutia and Iván Pinto, in their essay “Wallmapu in Contemporary Chilean Cinema: Struggles over Indigenous Land,” translated from the Spanish by Carl Fischer and Lucy Engle for this issue, contend that, precisely because “Chilean cinema has developed alongside the political changes of the past decade . . . its aesthetic is one of discordance or disjuncture (desajuste).” Beginning there, they shift to examining Indigenous films that reposition the spectator within a new universe of grievance and political power.

This issue’s interview is by Josslyn Luckett, who undertakes a truly voluminous oeuvre through her encounter with Sam Pollard, whose career as director and editor has spanned generations; she concludes that he is a man “halfway between itinerant preacher and wandering bluesman.” Conversing with him at the time that his The Drum Also Waltzes was being finished, Luckett traces the evolution of black film and documentary through Pollard’s career—and through the give-and-take of their conversation.

FQ’s columnists have a particularly diverse set of concerns in this issue. Laurie Ouellette visits the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition on video art, “Signals,” and thinks about the implications for today’s technological landscape as well as for the art world that finally has incorporated the projected image into its galleries. Manuel Betancourt—who will be taking a break from this space to launch his new book, The Male Gazed—here contributes one last essay on the question of maximalist cinema and what it means to sit through multiple hours of a film, pondering why that seems so daunting to folks who willingly binge hours and hours of new series. He parses in particular the work of Laura Citarella in Trenque Lauquen. Rebecca Wanzo explores the question of labor in AI through the ages, searching back in time before the arrival of the tech bros to find both optimism and pessimism about workers’ lives in films dating back to the silent era.

My report on this year’s Cannes film festival coincides with the likely release of many of its films into the fall festival season, so consider these months-ago reflections on the films that I was able to see as a timely guide instead to current theatrical releases. Not mentioned in my report but worth noting here was the Chevalier ceremony, presided over by Thierry Frémaux himself, that presented the coveted awards for service to French cinema to Telluride’s Julie Huntsinger, Criterion’s Peter Becker, and critic turned Amazon Studios exec Scott Foundas. A champagne toast for all.

In the “Page Views” section, Bruno Guaraná speaks with D. Andy Rice about his book Political Camerawork: Documentary and the Lasting Impact of Reenacting Historical Trauma. Looking particularly at the intersection of film studies and performance studies through the lens of historical reenactments, Guaraná finds Rice’s process both intriguing and problematic because of the accommodations required. Yet the challenges posed to documentary as a result of Rice’s study are not easily dismissed.

A superb round-up of book reviews completes this issue, with Juan Camilo Velásquez on Mauro Resmini’s Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68, Douglas Long on David Bordwell’s Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder, Jing Wang on Jason McGrath’s Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age, Ann Zhang on Olivia Landry’s A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive, Daniela Crespo-Miró on Jossiana Arroyo’s Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster, and Roberto Filippello on Laliv Melamed’s Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence. Read and enjoy.

Notes

The archive of editorials is available at https://filmquarterly.org/category/editorials/.
Anne Thompson, “Telluride and Sundance Are Essential Film Festivals, but Only If You Can Afford Them,” Indiewire, July 7, 2023, http://www.indiewire.com/news/festivals/telluride-film-festival-too-expensive-sundance-1234879328/.
Thanks to Regina Longo, then FQ’s associate editor, for her help in organizing this event.
Access to the panel is available through the Film Quarterly website or through the YouTube page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B8vTtN0-iU.
See Howard A. Rodman, “Remembering Walter Bernstein,” Film Quarterly 74, no. 4 (Summer 2021): 43–47.
Philip Oltermann, “The Interview: Post-Internet Artist Hito Steyerl on Refusing Honours, Buying Her Work Back—And Fighting Big Tech,” The Guardian, June 13, 2023, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jun/13/post-internet-artist-hito-steyerl-refusing-honours-big-tech?.
Drew Magary, “David Zaslav Kills Everything He Touches, Including GQ,” SF Gate, July 5, 2023, http://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/david-zaslav-gq-article-18186324.php?.
David Bianculli, “If You Love Film, You Should Be Worried about What’s Going On at Turner Classic Movies,” NPR, June 22, 2023, http://www.npr.org/2023/06/28/1184544944/tcm-turner-classic-movies-david-zaslav.
Kim Masters, “After Filmmaker Outcry over TCM Cuts, Warner Bros. Reverses Course (Sort Of),” Hollywood Reporter, June 28, 2023, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/zaslav-reverses-tcm-changes-1235525256/.
Michael Hiltzik, “How Profit-Driven Turmoil at Turner Classic Movies Placed a Vast Cultural Heritage at Risk,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2023, http://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-06-29/how-profit-driven-turmoil-at-turner-classic-movies-placed-a-vast-cultural-heritage-at-risk.
It was during the Reagan-led strike that actors won residuals, meaning that they are paid every time an episode or program is re-aired, providing a version of royalties that have provided a significant economic cushion. With the streamers, though, there is no such thing: productions are always “on” and therefore the economic model needs restructuring so that compensation is equitable. Thus the strike.
See Natalie Korach, “Hollywood Moguls Bask in Sun Valley Luxury While the Industry Shuts Down,” The Wrap, July 14, 2023, http://www.thewrap.com/sun-valley-moguls-sag-strike-criticism-photos/. The article includes the incriminating photo posted by Jason Blum of him out “hunting” with Brian Grazer, and Warner Bros./Discover CEO David Zaslav,
Ellise Shafer, “Disney CEO Bob Iger Says Writers and Actors Are Not Being ‘Realistic’ with Strikes: ‘It’s Very Disturbing to Me’,” Variety, July 13, 2023, https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/bob-iger-writers-actors-strike-disney-ceo-1235669169/. See also Stephen Battaglio, “Disney CEO Bob Iger Calls Actors and Writers Not ‘Realistic’ in Contract Demands,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2023, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-07-13/disney-bob-iger-says-actors-strike-writers-strike-unrealistic.