BREAKING NEWS: WGA and SAG-AFTRA — that’s the Writers Guild and Actors Guild — are striking against the AMPTP (Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers), plus streamers like Amazon Video, Apple TV+, Netflix and Hulu. Got it?

OK, here’s what it looks like in plain English.

The majority of actors in Screen Actors Guild are flipping burgers, selling cars or real estate.

I sold books. Nothing has changed.

Once upon a time long ago, I was a part-time film actor. It wasn’t what I started out to be. I just wanted to go on the stage, and that meant theater.

I dreamed as a boy of being a professional actor, winning a Tony, and touring the world with a fetching damsel.

I did have a fetching damsel, She, who was in a play with an actor who became a movie star. But it was me, a skinny boy from nowhere, she fell in love with.

She had graduated from the American Academy and joined me in a long career of stage work, and we were happy. And still are.

But Hollywood called, and it was just the beginning. After a 28-year stint of large and small parts in Hollywood, I got picked up by the Los Angeles Times as a freelance writer. My friend, the gracious Ray Bradbury, said that writing was where I belonged. He was right.

In those 28 years, I spent a lot of hot days walking the streets on strike with a sign. There was always a strike going on, as there is now.

Strikes were fun then. It was where you met girls. “What’re you doing after the strike?” was the standard pick-up line.

From time to time, I was a comedian. Comics and comedians are what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. called a “granfalloon,” a group of people who outwardly choose to have a shared identity, but whose mutual association is meaningless.

None of us who stood in the street outside of comedy clubs waiting for our five or 15 minutes, tops, on stage even knew, at first, that there was a union for “granfalloons” called AGVA, the American Guild of Variety Artists, a guild that you had to join if you hoped to play the pro clubs in LA and New York.

Most of us were there just to catch the eyes of television producers, who had people who scouted all the comedy clubs, so that we could get a series and meet girls.

We hoped to join the ranks of television comics and then move into films. Nobody wanted to stand in parking lots outside of clubs until they died — we wanted to be famous now.

It’s 2023. Actors are on the streets again, making demands they won’t get. They’ll get a few eventually, but only a few.

A year for a struggling actor is 10 years long.

After a while, Joe and Jeannie will lose their house and get a cheaper car. You have to have a car.

Eventually they’ll take their kids out of the pricey Catholic or Jewish schools and put them in the schools where the good drugs live.

Then one day the hopefuls will “cave” and take the best of what’s offered. End of story.

Robert Towne, who wrote the movie “Chinatown,” described Hollywood like Chinatown.

“It’s not just a place on the map of Los Angeles, but a condition of total awareness almost indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming you’re in paradise and waking up in the dark … that’s Chinatown.”

And that’s Hollywood today.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

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