Pixars Ed Catmull Emerges As Central Figure In The Wage-Fixing Scandal
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Did a quick search if this is already posted, didnt find anything, sry if its a double post. I thought some people might find this an interesting read:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/pixars-ed-catmull-emerges-as-central-figure-in-the-wage-fixing-scandal-101362.html
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/pixars-ed-catmull-emerges-as-central-figure-in-the-wage-fixing-scandal-101362.html
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Edit: I hope this makes it's way into the Wiki page..
he should be renamed to 'dick clark'
i cannot seem to wrap my head around unions and weather they would be beneficial in this industry or not.
Read at your own risk of depression...http://pando.com/tag/techtopus/ (tons of really great articles on the subject here)
Apparently the problem spreads across almost every tech company in the bay area. Apparently our old friend George Lucas is involved too. On top of that
I didn't realize this but... Disney didn't buy star wars, Lucas practically bought Disney. He "gave" them lucasfilm in exchange for becoming the second largest living shareholder in Disney. The first largest is the estate of Steve Jobs.
HA!
I've got some reading to do...
Check out the link I posted. They go pretty deep into the matter from many angles. The emails are very telling.
I'll re-post a few of the emails here for ease of reading.
To which Disneys chairman replied:
link to article:
http://pando.com/2014/07/07/revealed-court-docs-show-role-of-pixar-and-dreamworks-animation-in-silicon-valley-wage-fixing-cartel/
I mean the guy started by ripping off his first business partner Steve Wozniak about the Atari deal. He denied being the father of his daughter for decades. He bought and then killed off Shake, the industry standard compositing software. He was by all accounts pretty much a tyrant at Apple. And the list could go on and on.
So Catmull was probably following orders to a great deal, instructed by Jobs on how to act. And as Pixar has originally been the CG division of ILM, his previous boss was George Lucas himself, the man who has first offered these university researchers the chance to make their dream of a computer animated movie a reality. He really had no choice but to play along.
Now I don't mean to say that this should relieve him from all that he's done; the emails suggest that he was committed to this stuff, and by quite a lot. But he was not the one who came up with the policy itself. Also there's a lot of psychological research on how people will react in these situations and it would take a really strong personality to stand up against it. Lasseter is obviously involved as well, but he was not the boss either so the same may apply to some extent.
So let's not make them the chief culprit here; this was started by Lucas and Jobs and Katzenberg. Their names should be in the thread's title first.
Profit margins on CG work in California are very, very low nowadays and they've been declining for quite a long time. London and Vancouver and Montreal have been introducing serious tax breaks to draw away movie VFX work and studios had to bid for jobs that kept getting bigger and bigger after the contract was signed. If wages were not capped, a LOT more people would have lost their jobs years ago.
On the other hand, box office is actually a fraction of the income from such IPs. The Cars franchise made several times as much money, something like 4-7 billion, on merchandising and theme parks and such. Same goes for Shrek and other Dreamworks movies. So these CG feature studios were actually making a lot of money and I kinda doubt that the people doing the groundwork have seen percentages from that source of income.
Also note that this practice was not kept in the CG/VFX circles either. Jobs has been strongarming other tech companies like Google or Palm, to various levels of success. Palm doesn't even exist anymore.
We all know about the unimaginable pile of cash that Apple's sitting on. Their new futuristic office building space station doesn't even make a dent in it.
The US is called a haven for innovation and enterprises. And it's for a good reason, it really is a huge driving force and will probably remain so for a long time; China cannot compete and even South Korea has far too many limitations. So I'd like to see these companies pay for what they've done mostly because the world just can't afford to lose faith in that. I mean look at Elon Musk as an example and tell me that this guy could have done such things in any other country. We cannot go forward without people like that guy...
Also, Jobs was definitely involved in this. I saw another e-mail where he talked about getting a recruiter fired for trying to recruit from his company. And the recruiter's boss actually fired him on Job's orders. A person in an entirely different company!
The deck is stacked against us. Don't pretend there's no money in it for us, because there is. A shitfuckton of money.
The CG feature studios on the other hand, not so much.
Oh no doubt, VFX is struggling, but pixar and dreamworks are making BANK.
Life if Pi took 120 million to create. It made over 500 million worldwide. So please tell me. How are profit margins low? Meanwhile R&H goes out of business. Lets not pretend that there isn't any money. People need to start asking where all the money is going.
It's very well documented where the money goes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/how-hollywood-accounting-can-make-a-450-million-movie-unprofitable/245134/
The whole thing is really a big mess right now. The tax breaks in Canada will run out sooner or later and the movie studios will start to look for another place - and some country will accommodate them. I'm on the CG Pro mailing list and this is a big topic all the time. The other shoe is going to drop pretty soon, one way or the other; and this mess is certainly play a part in it.
That's the point though, profit margins are artificially low for vfx studios. This needs to stop! I've been keeping up with it every since R&H went out of business too (as a retaliative newcomer to the industry I wish people had told me before I paid a ton of money to go to college to learn 3d). It's a terrible situation for everyone involved.
My heart really goes out to all the people who do this amazing work and then get the shaft. I really hope the industry stabilizes soon.
My wife and I are constantly worried that this industry is going to collapse. It's not a very good situation to be in for any of us.
I would like to see all the companies implicated be fined the entirety of the suppressed wages.
Plus interest.
Would it destroy a lot of them? Maybe. Would I cry? Nope. Don't break the damn law if the punishment is that nasty.
Maybe I should be a freelance illustrator.
the thing to bear in mind here is that Disney is an umbrella term used to cover the entire company. that includes their parks, merchandise, movie studio, and more which are all separate entities.
it's absolutely possible, in fact i almost guarantee that the movie studio shows a loss on its revenue report for any given movie, while "the big D" manages to show a huge profit.
Welcome to capitalism! a lot of people are under the mistaken (by design) idea that just because they live in a capitalist state, that they are capitalists.
None of us are, we are the workforce that are owned by capitalists. We are capital, and we are used/abused as such.
it is no surprise Pixar ain't rose garden and candy land,
it is, however, still disappointing to see Catmull is behind all this.
No, we do not have capitalism and haven't for decades. We have corporatism, one of the pillars of fascism.
Wall Street hides behind the term capitalism because American society historically respects that term and tends not to chase them down as a result. Socialists (currently, the DNC) misconstrue the awful parts of what we have as "capitalism" in order to discredit actual capitalism, because they prefer an entirely different model (centrally planned economics).
Anybody in America talking about capitalism who is involved with a business larger than a lemonade stand is badly misinformed or being deliberately dishonest.
Aside from being "out in the open" about it, isn't this essentially the same thing?
Yeah no. Exchange & accumulation of commodities produced through wage labour via privately owned means of production = capitalism. There are obviously flavors du jour.
This is shameful, outrageous.
everything is going to shit, its worse than in the dark ages
I knew Disney was crooked since I was 14 this just proves that pixar is the same.
Disney inspired woodland fellows, with the elitism need to realize this?
This has far reaching effects far past the cartel itself. Why does a smaller animation studio have to pay well if Pixar is paying their people like garbage?
Though i will say this, the fact that the wages were kept artificially low as opposed to it being a natural state of being low is better as it means that wages do indeed have a natural equilibrium sitting higher. (not saying this is a good thing AT all btw, just it's good that the pay average should be higher than it is. )
QFT
On the bright side, at least the cat..er grumpy cat, is now out of the bag.
Just because you want to work at a great studio doesn't mean you want to be treated like crap. Also just because people might still want to work there doesn't mean it's ok to artificially lower the wages.
I would turn it down. It's still a job and I don't let prestige factor into my decisions.
I thought we were talking about the VFX industry? People leave the VFX industry for games in order to get more stability!
That seems extremely low considering:
California cost of living
Pixar is supposed to be top tier talent
The Ungodly amount of money their films make
lots of mentions of Mandatory overtime in the reviews
I can see the allure of wanting to work there, because they make such great films ( or have made), but to barely scrimp by so you can have the privilege of working for them is bullshit.
This is precisely the problem.