These Hollywood horror stories could inspire the industry’s biggest strike since WWII

The @ia_stories page is an unassuming Instagram account that rarely posts images, mostly white text on a black background, making it especially unforgettable in the visually saturated social media space adjacent to Hollywood. But among its hundreds of posts are some of the juiciest secrets in the business, with most of the identifying details carefully removed.

A few weeks ago we had a department head died of a massive heart attack and we continued to tour, writes one contributor, in a publication dated August 19. Then they added more days, more hours, and more work on weekends. They brought in a bereavement counselor the next day, but didn’t even take a lunch break so no one could visit them.

The moderators of Instagram accounts who spoke to me on condition of anonymity to protect themselves from professional retaliation tell me about one of twelve messages regarding a death on set that they have received in recent months. But more haunting than even this detail are the desperate last lines of the gruesome story. Nothing has been learned, writes the anonymous author. We are consumable.

The account has become an unofficial gathering place for members of the International Theater Employees Alliance, the bargaining body for tens of thousands of union workers in the entertainment industry. (They have the flower-shaped logo you’ve seen in a number of movie credits.) IATSE proper has also embraced the account: writes a spokesperson, while the @ia_stories account is unofficial in the sense that it is not managed by IATSE International, the narrative and experiences shared there demonstrate that there are real long-standing problems in the film and television production industry.

As a crew member, obtaining your union card theoretically offers protection in the workplace against exhausting hours of filming; non-union workers have little recourse against the whims of their employers. But on the volunteer-run @ia_stories page, anonymous crew members share hundreds of stories of unsafe working conditions and exploitation.

Anonymity is very important for the entire account, one of its moderators tells me. Account managers made the decision to remove not only the names of workers, but also companies and producers. Naming names would come back to those people, she said. And anyway, bitching about a specific department or a specific person, that’s not what was happening here.

The stories may not be one hundred percent accurate, she continues. Did it sort of by touch and didn’t independently verify the details of every post. But, she adds, everything I posted was something I can relate to, each of these stories we had could be a friend of mine. Sometimes crew members will read a particularly relevant message and then message the account saying I need to go back and see if I had sent this story.

That’s all, says one moderator wearily, when I ask if there are any producers or production companies that have a particularly bad reputation for the way they treat their teams. Another agrees. It’s not a bad apple problem, she says, good single apples are the outliers.

It is rare for IATSE workers to roam the different trades: costume designers, cameramen and post-production editors may never see each other during working hours, and often they also belong to separate unions. But working conditions became so dire and morale so low that the ever-growing need for content drove workers to long days of filming with brutally short turnaround times that crew members flooded the site. of messages. The number of account subscribers grew so much that founding members had to bring in two more moderators just to keep up with the submissions.

The foment is reminiscent of the fury of 1997 when assistant cameraman Brent Hershman fell asleep at the wheel and fatally crashed his car. He was returning home around 2 a.m. after a call at 6.30 a.m. the morning before on the set of Pleasantville, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. The death of the 35-year-old father of two has pushed a 14-hour work day to become the industry standard.

The effort did not work. In 2014, Longmire Teamster Gary Joe Tuck fell asleep at the wheel after an 18-hour day of filming and died on a New Mexico freeway, Deadline recounted in 2018. But again, in 2018, the last time IATSE negotiated the wide basic agreement with the Alliance of Film and Television Producers (AMPTP), they were unable to guarantee the limits of working days, instead obtaining concessions from producers on the supply of housing or transport after long working days. .

During this time, in the first seven months of 2021, the IATSE received over 50 reports 14-hour workdays, a number he guesses is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Deadline. And while 14-hour shifts can be a goal for crews on set, that’s still six hours longer than the eight-hour shifts most Americans expect. People dream to work 10 hours a day in this industry, a moderator tells me.