The New Plague

                     Grand Princess cruise ship off the coast of San Francisco 
                                  (photo courtesy of San Francisco Chronicle)


The plague ship docked at noon, after a week of sailing in circles off the coast of San Francisco. With thirty-five hundred passengers and crew on board, two dozen of whom had already tested positive for Covid 19, offloading the Grand Princess was a complicated process. Escorted by medical personal encased in protective gear, the sick were taken to hospitals in ambulances, while healthy but potentially exposed American citizens were taken by bus or plane to quarantine facilities across the country. Foreign nationals were ushered to charter flights and quarantine in their home countries. The laborious process is still underway, after which the ship, with a thousand (hopefully) healthy crew members, will set sail, presumably to remain offshore in their own group quarantine.

It took a massive effort and complicated logistics to pull this off. State and local officials maintain that the situation was handled properly, but given the many mysteries presented by this new contagion, it's unclear how effective these attempts to contain the virus will be. One thing seems clear, though -- the situation will get worse before it gets better. Maybe a lot worse.

We'll find out.

The new plague has had a devastating impact on Hollywood and beyond. As of now, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson are down with the virus contracted while filming a movie in Australia, and by Thursday, forty shows had been shut down. I've heard through the social media grapevine that many more have been indefinitely suspended since then, and it won't be long before the entire film and television industry is dead in the water. State and local governments urge people to "work from home," but that won't fly in our business, were the work is very much a communal, hands-on effort. Unfortunately, the hard driving, zero-sum mode of production in Hollywood has always incentivized sick crew members to work rather than stay home, thanks to the absence of sick pay. Until just a few years ago, if you got so sick that you were unable to make your call, you didn't get paid -- which is why most of us gutted it out and worked sick unless we were nearly on our deathbed.

A limited provision for sick pay was implemented a few years ago, but it's deeply flawed, and woefully unable to deal with our current reality. You need to work for a specific company long enough to accrue sufficient hours to qualify for sick pay in the first place, and even then, the maximum payout is for three eight-hour days. After that, you're on your own.

My own experience with this new sick pay system was not encouraging. On my very last show before retiring, I came down with a feverish crud that was chewing its way through the crew, and it was bad enough to keep me home for four days. When I returned to work, somebody suggested I apply for sick pay, so I looked into it -- and it turned out I'd worked for the same company earlier in the year, and accrued the requisite three days worth of sick pay. We worked very long hours that final week, so I waited until wrap to approach the accountant.

"You're just a daily hire," she snapped. "Fill out a time card for one eight-hour day."

"But I've got twenty-four hours in the bank.  Isn't that the purpose of sick pay -- to keep me from coming to work and getting the rest of my crew sick?"

She leveled a cold glare at me.

"You're a daily hire," she repeated, speaking slowly, as if to a small child. "Turn in a time card for one eight hour day."

Instead, I called my union.

"Don't worry," I was told. "You'll get your money."

"Is there anything I should to do help the process?"

"We'll take care of it."

Thus reassured, I went back to Stage 18 at Paramount and got on with the wrap.  A week passed, and I received my wrap-week check, but there was nothing about sick pay, so I called the union again.

"I thought we took care of that," they said.

"Me too," I replied, "is there anything I can do to help expedite this?"

"We'll fix it."

That's the last I heard from my union or the production company, and needless to say, I never got a penny of sick pay. By then I was deep into uprooting forty years of life in Hollywood, cleaning out my apartment while preparing to move north for retirement, and had neither the time nor energy to fight a system that was clearly fucked up... so I let it go, chalking it up as one last reminder that you don't always get what you want in this town, or even what you've earned.

So it goes.

I hope the sick pay mechanism for crew members has improved since then, but three days is not nearly enough to deal with the current situation, given that a crew member who's been exposed to Covid 19 is subject to a minimum fourteen day quarantine.  Those affected don't show symptoms immediately, which means the entire cast and crew of a show would have to be quarantined, then tested if symptoms emerge, with the stage and sets sanitized before allowing production to continue. Many shows are coming to their seasonal end about now anyway, but the next few weeks are when pilot season usually kicks into high gear, with construction and rigging crews working long hours, day after day, thanks to compressed, inflexible schedules that make no allowances for fatigue, illness, or human frailty.

Will there even be a pilot season this year?

A cruise ship is essentially a floating island, relatively easy to control, but a film studio -- along with every film set -- is a much more porous entity.  If one show on a single soundstage is affected, the rest of the studio will be under the gun, with security guards, janitors, commissary workers, and other studio personnel being exposed. The families of those people, and of cast and crew members, are all affected, so how the hell is Hollywood going to function?

I don't think it can. In the wake of the professional/collegiate sports, and school districts all over California shutting down, Hollywood will soon be dead in the water. How long this will last is a question without an answer right now, but more to the point, many on the crews finishing their long seasons are exhausted, with run-down immune systems, and all the more vulnerable to this virus. People could die. Those who remain healthy may be without work for an extended period of time, but their rent and mortgages still have to be paid, along with utility bills and groceries -- assuming there's anything left on supermarket shelves after the Great Run on Toilet Paper.  Unemployment insurance only goes so far.

The situation is getting worse by the day, and could well metastasize into a full national lockdown. The economic shockwaves are reverberating far beyond Hollywood, but sussing out the national and international repercussions of Covid 19 are way above my pay grade.  Suffice it to say that we're all in for a very bumpy ride over the next few months.

I have no answers, only questions, but am keeping my fingers crossed for every one of you who work in the film and television industry. You've heard the warnings and know the drill, so be careful, stay safe, and remain healthy. Take good care of yourselves.

I wish you -- and the rest of us -- all the best.