The Dark Side of Hollywood: How ‘Black Swan’ sparked a reckoning over exploited labour in Hollywood
When Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller Black Swan was released in 2010, it earned rave reviews. StarringNatalie Portman as a ballerina who descends further and further into hallucinations as she competes with a fellow dancer for the role in an upcoming production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, it was nominated for five Oscars, and Portman won for ‘Best Actress.’
Behind the scenes, however, the production was plagued with controversy. There were questions about the story’s parallels to the 1997 anime film Perfect Blue, Portman’s dance double came forward to cast doubt on how much of the ballet the star had actually performed, and the costume designer was challenged for taking credit for designs that two other fashion designers claimed to have created. However, the biggest controversy took place after the film was released, when two interns sued the film’s producer, Fox Searchlight Pictures, seeking back pay for their work. The lawsuit exposed the widespread reliance on unpaid workers in the industry, and forced Hollywood to course correct.
Eric Glatt was nearing 40 when he was given an unpaid role as an accounting intern on Black Swan. He had already earned a Masters degree in Business and had had a career working for a major insurance company on Wall Street, but he was hoping to begin a new path in the film industry. He quickly discovered that Hollywood was an insular place, and the only way to get a job in the business was to prove that you’d already had one. Starting at the bottom was the only option.
His tasks during the production of Black Swan included preparing documents, handling petty cash, and travelling to the set to obtain signatures on documents. He was also in charge of making spreadsheets to track missing information in employee personnel files (per The New York Times). In other words, he wasn’t just running to Starbucks and ferrying notes between crew members.
The other intern in the lawsuit was Alex Footman. On the face of it, his role was a bit more in keeping with the duties that you might expect for an intern. He was fresh out of film school and was tasked with cleaning the office, filling the coffee pot, and taking lunch orders. His argument, however, was that his role wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of an unpaid internship. The tacit agreement of such positions is that, in exchange for working without compensation, the worker gains experience in the industry they are pursuing. Cleaning and making coffee in the production office, Footman argued, didn’t provide any insight into the film industry. “The only thing I learned on this internship was to be more picky in choosing employment opportunities,” he told The Times.
When Glatt and Footman sued Fox Searchlight, they argued that the company had violated the federal labour department’s criteria for unpaid internships, which included the stipulations that the work benefits the intern more than the company, and that the intern does not displace regular employees.
It took five years for the claimants to reach a settlement with Fox, but in that time, they sparked a sweeping conversation in the industry about its reliance on unpaid workers. In 2015, Viacom, which owned MTV, among other networks, reached a $7.2million settlement with more than 1,000 former interns who claimed that the company had violated minimum wage laws by not paying them or providing them with educational work. A year before, NBCUniversal had reached a $6.4million settlement for similar reasons. That same year, the magazine conglomerate Condé Nast reached a $5.8million settlement.
In 2016, a judge sided with Footman and Glatt, determining that they also qualified as employees. Fox was forced to compensate unpaid interns from as far back as 2005, and Glatt and Footman were awarded $7,500 and $6,000, respectively.
Despite marking a sea change in the industry, unpaid internships are still a cornerstone of the business, even though there are stronger legal parameters that companies must observe. As the UK’s film industry becomes an increasingly important sector of Hollywood, unpaid internships have moved across the Atlantic. Earlier this month, The Guardian appealed to its readership for first-hand experiences of young people working without pay in the creative industries, citing a 2018 statistic that 86% of interns in the country’s creative sector were uncompensated for their labour.
