What Would Lew Do About These Endless Hollywood Strikes? Casey Wasserman Has Ideas
deadline.comBack when Casey Wasserman’s bespectacled grandfather Lew Wasserman was Hollywood’s top power broker, he was known to step in to clear up labor stalemates with a sense of fairness and the authority to get cooler heads to prevail.
His grandson, whose music/sports powerhouse firm just acquired Brillstein Entertainment Partners, learned a lot from his famed grandfather, and believes he’d have a plan to solve the current AMPTP battle with WGA and SAG-AFTRA, and that he would not have let it get this far, with thousands not getting a paycheck for over five months.
Hopefully the resumption of talks this week will bring the kind of resolve Wasserman describes, even if there is so much mistrust between the sides that there is no leader whose word carried the weight that Wasserman’s did back in the day. “The first thing he would do is point out the fact that it’s hard to solve problems if you’re not talking to each other,” Wasserman told Deadline. “He was a successful leader in the industry when it came to labor, because he was a respected leader on behalf of the studios and a trusted counterparty on behalf of labor.
Those conditions allowed him then to spend the time, put in the effort to get transactions done. It’s hard to have leaders and respect when you can’t even sit in a room and talk to each other.
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