Age Discrimination - The Settlement

Older live-action writers have been moving an age discrimination through the courts for the last decade. And it's now gotten settled.

A slew of television talent agencies, networks and production studios are making it clear that they do not discriminate against older writers. Nevertheless, they're paying $70 million to settle an age-discrimination lawsuit.

It remains to be seen how much money will flow to the 165 plaintiffs who participated in the class-action suit, and attorneys for both parties involved in the 10-year battle say they are not allowed to talk about Friday's settlement, which is subject to final approval by California Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles.

Sources close to the situation calculate that those who joined the class action early are eligible for amounts ranging from $70,000-$140,000, and in some cases more ...

These things are always sumbitches to litigate. And the talent agencies and studios admit no wrongdoing:

The defendants strongly deny the plaintiffs’ allegations and state that their hiring and/or representation practices fully comply with the law and reflect their commitment to equal employment opportunity. They also note that they all have long-standing anti-discrimination policies and regularly employ or represent substantial numbers of writers over the age of forty ...

Happily, they're still willing to cough up some money to, you know, get rid of the problem. In my experience, it's tough to prove wrongdoing. There is seldom a smoking gun or e-mails pointing to some dark conspiracy against older workers. And the courts (including SCOTUS) are not necessarily keen to rule in favor of lawsuits filed by employees in their fifties and sixties.

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Offense and Defense

The bloggee known as David writes:

But Steve, how do people get assigned (marginalized) to be part of the "hand-drawn staff" ? Especially animators like Nik Ranieri, Brian Ferguson, Ruben Aquino, and James Lopez who have experience doing CG animation on features? Those guys have dual skills to do both CG and Hand-drawn. No one (especially the UNION) wants to broach the subject of age discrimination ? ...

It's not just an issue of young vs. old. There's this iron reality known as studio politics. It's always there, to a greater or lesser degree. It's about people fighting over turf. I encountered this reality at Disney in the seventies and eighties. I've encountered it (as an outside observer) in the 1990s and 2000s.

Nine years ago, Joe Grant (no stranger to studio politics himself) said to me:

All the maneuvering and infighting that went on back at Hyperion? I see the same kind of stuff going on around here now. The people are different and the building is different, but the politics? Pretty much the same." ...

Which brings me back to the question above.

Today I was at CTN's little outdoor expo on San Fernando Road in Burbank, and I ran into a (former) Disney animator who arrived at the Mouse House as a young, starry-eyed recruit in the early nineties, and left a year and a half ago. He's still fairly young, and he related:

"I made the switch from hand-drawn to CG a few years ago. I didn't have much time to learn Maya, but I managed what I could, and got tossed into production pretty fast. And I got my share of scenes, but the young CG animators resented that I could draw better than they could, and I got push back. After the picture finished, I decided the politics were too nasty, and I left." ...

I've talked to other artists who've told me much the same thing. There's a divide between many of the hand-drawn veterans and the CG artists; the CG artists have more leverage and clout than the animators who mainly draw (the studio is, after all, focused on CG animated features); a number of the paper-and-pencil veterans make no bones about the fact they prefer doing hand-drawn features.

So you've got different groups playing offense and defense. CG animators defending their perceived territory. Hand-drawn animators trying to protect their small patch of ground. And up above, studio management looking at grosses and making its decisions based on profits, losses and the current price of Disney stock.

It's always been this way.

In the late fifties, many heads rolled when Sleeping Beauty didn't make its production and marketing costs back. In the seventies, there was simmering resentment by some Feature Animation veterans against the upstarts coming in from the California Institute of the Arts (and points east.) Some of the newbies -- Brad Bird and John Lasseter among them -- got tossed out.

And in the last half of the 1990s, there was fear, resentment and lousy morale when the grosses of hand-drawn features went south and the studio sloughed off long-time staff to go chasing after CGI's magical brass ring.

So, David. All I can tell you is, it's not simply a matter of who has what skills, or who has the most time in as an animator, layout artist, or designer. Age discrimination has only a little to do with it. Mostly it's about who's perceived by management to have the strongest chops.

Those are the folks who have the most leverage with company executives. And those are the folks who will remain Walt Disney Animation Studio employees when the Chief Executive Officer of Diz Co. sends out orders to cull the herd.

It's shitty, but the way it's almost always been.
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The Ageism Thing

The Writers Guild of America has an issue.

The Writers Guild of America, West ... wants to keep the age of its members hush-hush. According to the film-town blog The Wrap, the Guild is pleading with the Internet Movie Database to stop listing birth dates on its widely consulted website. ...

There's no business like show business for sheer relentless pressure always to be securing the next gig. ... Nothing exacerbates age anxiety like a job hunt. It's bad enough to get pink-slipped. But if you're also over 40, you face the prospect of being considered a wheezy geezer ....

Fifteen years ago, at the height of the last animation boom, older artists securing and keeping jobs was not a huge issue. Newbies were flooding into the industry and finding work. Sixty and seventy-year-olds were coming out of retirement to work on the flock of animated features being made by Turner, Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera to chase after Disney's string of hand-drawn hits. (I talked to a lot of them.)

Now, I get weekly phone calls from story-boarders, designers and t.v. directors in the middle of their fifth decade who are under or unemployed. Some 0f the joblessness is due to bad timing and bad luck. Some of it happens because of our current cultural and business bias: people 18-34 are the key demographic for movie execs, so it's that age group the moguls are most eager to employ (for they hold the secret for hit t.v. shows and movies, as everyone knows.)

But there's another reason. Unlike the business of fifteen or twenty years ago, the cartoon industry isn't expanding like mad and outgrowing its talent pool, which means a strange kind of age discrimination comes into play. Creators of shows are in their thirties, and reach out to their peers to fill key jobs. They, in turn, reach out to people they know. This leaves the twenty-five and thirty-year veterans at the end of the employment line, because the movers and shakers they relied on for work -- other fifty-somethings -- aren't in the drivers' seats any longer. As a long-time board artist told me last week:

"[A forty-six year old director] called me up last month for a two-week boarding job on a movie he's doing. He just phoned one morning and asked 'Are you available for work?' and I said 'You bet I am.' He's one of the few guys in town who doesn't feel he has to use the younger crowd but goes after people he knows and has worked with before. And that he knows can do the job.

"The two weeks ended up being five weeks. Thank God there's still a few people like him around, or I wouldn't have much work in the biz at all."

The sobering part of this tale is, for animation employees the hiring situation is relatively better than it is for workers on the live-action side. That isn't particularly joyful news, but in this day and age, you take comfort and solace wherever you can find them.

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The Ageism Thing

Last week I had breakfast with a storyboard artist of 20-plus years standing; he told me this:

"I 'finished my assignment' on a project a couple of months ago. My exit interview was quick and kind of strained. They thanked me, said they were moving in a different direction, going with 'new blood' with 'fresh ideas and enthusiasm."

"A lot of the new blood I trained. And now they're working for the people I'm not working for, for less money. Which is fine. It was time to move on, and I want to work on my own projects anyway ..."

This gent is talented, and in my biased opinion he won't have a problem going on to new work someplace else. And he shouldn't take it too personally, since being let go in favor of fresher plasma is a grand old Hollywood tradition, and seldom pretty.

For years, actors have feared and loathed it.

[Sharon Stone] admits she was looking forward to becoming a 40 something back in 1998, but ageist attitudes to Hollywood stars left her floored.

"I thought... 'I'm fantastic and sexy and amazing!' (But) it was like, 'You have leprosy.' I couldn't get a dress or a job." ...

Older writers sue over graylisting. Directors of photography die their hair and get facelifts and hope their networks of contacts doesn't dry up.

And how is it for older animation artists? For some, they float from one job after another, year after year. A golden few spend long, lucrative careers at one or two studios, working on high profile hits. But for many, the job market gets tougher and tougher as you acquire more wrinkles and body fat ... particularly in an economic downturn.

Ageism isn't something on which you can always place your index finger. In most studios I stroll through, I can usually find older artists sprinkled here and there. But often in our down-sized industry, the race goes to the young, energetic and less expensive. As an older ex-Pixar artist explained to me a while ago:

"I went up there to the bay area when Pixar was new and wanted experienced board artists who'd worked on features in L.A. But when they'd made a bunch of hits and had kids out of art school banging on their door happy to work for way less money, they told me: "Hey, it's been great, but see ya bye.'"

Hollywood ageism has been with us for decades. While I don't think discrimination against seasoned animation artists is as virulant or as conscious as it is in live action, I do think it's out there. Trying to prove it legally, however, is something else again.

There is no magic-bullet remedy for age discrimination. The best defenses I know for avoiding underemployment as you get older is working hard, staying at the top of your game, and being better than the competition ... even when there is silver in your hair.

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Dangerous Fifties

I had lunch today with a Wise Old Animator, and we got to discussing the state of animation professionals who find themselves Suddenly Fifty ... and facing fewer employment opportunities.

"[Blank} has been working as a director for a long time, but he's doing a lot more teaching now. He's gotten out-maneuvered by a younger guy who was more aggressive, and he's lost some big jobs. And over at Disney, management just brought in an outside story development guy to work on new projects.  A bunch of the long-timers are unhappy about it, think they should have had the job ..."

In Tinseltown (as in life) the changing of the guard never ends or slows down. Year by year, new talent charges into the movie industry, grabs the bottom rungs and starts pulling themselves up hand over hand.   And those folks clinging to the ladder at higher elevations? They peer nervously down, wondering where their careers will be going.  So it's understandable that this often happens:

Workers filed nearly 30 percent more age discrimination charges last year than in 2007. "That is a huge increase, and it will continue going up," testified Cathy Ventrell-Monsees, president of the nonprofit group Workplace Fairness, at a public hearing at EEOC headquarters in Washington ...

Rising unemployment has left older workers vulnerable to layoffs, because they are often stereotyped by employers as costing more money and being less adaptable to change ... "People who would not dream of making sexually provocative statements or using a racial epithet will think nothing of calling someone 'grandpa' or an 'old mutt' or 'old bag,' " ...

Lots of artists with whom I came into the business have seen their cartoon work dry up and are now moving on to teaching ... to graphic arts ... to cashier jobs at Trader Joe's and Vons. They aren't less capable as artists, but they are animators, board artists and designers who have lost their support network. The men and women who knew and hired them are retired or dead, and the younger execs have turned their eyes to their own peer group of twenty-seven-year-olds.

It isn't that too many of the Boomers' gray cells have died, it's that too many young artists now nip at their heels ... and have their own, fresher and more plugged-in group of friends to help them find the next job.

After observing the cartoon carnival for a lot of years, I've come to understand that you can never have too much training and knowledge, or too much talent. But you can have a misplaced sense of security and a bank account that's too small. My best advice (again) is: never stop building your support network, never stop improving your work skills, and never cease putting money away for a rainy day.

Because you never know when the downpour might begin.

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Moebius, RIP

As reported by our fine trade papers:

The legendary French artist Moebius, whose real name was Jean Giraud, died at age 73, according to the BBC.

Giraud's career spanned more than fifty years. His most famous creation was the Western anti-hero Blueberry, which first appeared in 1963 in France. Blueberry was a loner who traveled the post-Civil War American West after being framed for a murder he did not commit. The character started out as a racist but came to oppose discrimination of all kinds.

To American comics fans he is probably best known for a two-part Silver Surfer mini-series he scripted with Stan Lee, which won an Eisner Award ... in 1989. ...

Thirty years ago Moebius had a large hand in creating the animated feature Les Maîtres du temps, released in English as Time Masters.

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Biases

The Reporter tells us:

The American Civil Liberties Union is calling on people in Hollywood, via an email on Thursday, to sign a petition urging the government to investigate and monitor the industry's "biased hiring practices."

The ACLU is also hoping that key industry organizations will join them in circulating information about the petition, which is posted online.

"By signing it, industry professionals will tell three government civil rights agencies (1) that gender bias against women directors in film and television is real and has gone on for far too long and (2) investigation and oversight from civil rights enforcement agencies to foster reform of the industry’s biased hiring practices would be a welcome step." ...

"We believe that the failure to hire women directors and give them a fair opportunity to succeed in the field is a civil rights issue. This is why the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and the ACLU of Southern California have a campaign demanding that our government launch an investigation into the systemic failure to hire women directors at all levels of the film and TV industry ​in violation of state and federal civil rights laws."

Age and sex discrimination are not new issues in the Town of Tinsel. A dozen years ago, a rep of the Cinematographers Guild told me how directors of photography died their hair and got face-lifts to remain employable. These folks, unsurprisingly, were men.

But the lack of women in key artistic positions? That issue was covered here Monday. Apologists will say that women just don't want creative jobs, but it's hard to square that with more women working in key artistic positions during the teens and twenties of the last century than in 2015.

There might be some rhyme to it. But it's hard to discern any coherent reasons.

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