When Europeans steal a country they name themselves after it.
Israelis claim to be "Semites" despite being European
Colonists claim they're "Americans" while reducing real Americans to "Indians"
Boers claim they're "Afrikaners"
Identity theft is a huge part of colonialism.
If Iran's critical infrastructure is attacked, there will be no critical infrastructure left in occupied Palestine, nor in the complicit Arab family dictatorships in the Persian Gulf. That will mean the end of the global economy as we know it.
Indie films are a cheat code for distributors to put all the legal and financial burden on independent producers. Crews get underpaid in exploitive working conditions, occasionally harmed or killed, but none of that affects the studios that cherry pick the survivors.
Theoretically there should be a budget floor to these movies - a line that shouldn't be crossed to ensure safety and fairness - but it's actually applauded when labor is crushed as sticking it to the Man, when ironically the Man is who actually profits. It's celebrated when a filmmaker is able to make their film as close to zero as possible in one of the most hand crafted, labor intensive industries today.
Micro budget indie film market is an unregulated cheat code for studios to make the cheapest product possible, hammering crews, with none of the risk or responsibility.
What we should have are major studios and streamers green lighting more $10 million films. Yes, more $10 million Backrooms, less $750k Obsession. The only reason Obsession wasn't made for $10 million when the script was clearly great is either a failure of imagination from the executive class, or the filmmakers trying to avoid dumb ass notes.
Yes Backrooms was heavily supervised so it's a bit of a triumph of producer supervision, but Obsession could have been made with that budget without Osgood Perkins looking over Curry Barker's shoulder.
Instead of indie filmmaking Hunger Games, the solution to all this is smarter executives making more decently funded smaller films and staying the fuck out of the filmmaker's way.
"Art director making $300 a day is a livable wage."
One thing people don't understand about the film business is it's feast or famine. You may not work for weeks or months so that money has to be saved and amortized.
Then the Obsession crew lives in LA, so they're paying the highest rents, highest gas, highest utilities, highest insurance (to be fair they keep voting for it, but that's another story).
A 14 hour day doesn't account for 1 hour of traffic each way. Indies can routinely go 12-18 hours.
Art department is an especially brutal crew. They are the first to get on set, the last to leave. No set, no shoot.
Then crew heads don't really get paid for their time. Reading the script? Free. Thinking about it? Free. Talking with the director? Free. Creative discussion, creative obsessing, detail planning on weekends. Free free free. The time on the clock is not the time on the job.
$300 a day on an 18 hour day, before gas or any other expenses, is $16 an hour. The off the clock work is double that. So $8 an hour. Now save that to survive the next actor/writer strike.
Is it a livable wage? Sure. In Iowa if you're a mid level stripper. Not a film crew in LA.
A24 movies always have higher rotten tomatoes critic scores than audience scores. I'm constantly left wondering what the hype was all about. They're like a ponzi scheme that actually works.
Hollywood director Steven Spielberg has funded the ADL, Birthright Israel, The Israel Experience, and the Jerusalem Foundation, which builds in the illegal settlements of Sheikh Jarrah, through his charity, the Righteous Persons Foundation.