 Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman, DavidFeldmanshow.com. Please friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, on today's program, Fear and Reprisal in Hollywood. The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you. You sad pathetic humps. Comedian and actor Tom Arnold has come forward to say he has the infamous videotape of Donald Trump using the N-word on the set of The Apprentice. He hasn't released it yet and nobody else who has worked on The Apprentice is willing to come forward to release that tape. Why is that? Why if this tape exists will nobody come forward and release it? For more on this we are joined by David Dayan, right? Yes, that's correct. David Dayan, he's a contributor to The Intercept and also writes for Salon, The Fiscal Times, The New Republic. His new book, Chain of Title, about three ordinary Americans who uncover Wall Street's foreclosure fraud was released in May of 2016. Thank you for joining us. David, there is allegedly a tape of Donald Trump using the N-word, calling his son a retard. It hasn't been released yet. Actually not even sure it would hurt him at this point. I think his supporters would be upset if there weren't a tape of him using the N-word or the C-word. Mark Burnett claims that it's not in his purview to release the tapes they're owned by somebody else, I believe, right? Well, they're partially owned by Trump, I think, is the claim that he has some rights over the use of material. Why is nobody coming forward in Hollywood shows? It's an interesting question and I come to this with some priors because prior to being a journalist, I worked in this industry. I was an editor and producer on television shows for many, many years. My impression of the industry is that there is a climate of fear that revolves around it. If you read some of these stories about why nobody came forward, the pervasive kind of justification is that people feared reprisals. And they didn't just fear a reprisal on the lines of, hey, you leak this material and we're going to fire you from the show. It's that you leak this material and your career is over, that you would never be able to get another job. And you have to understand the business of this kind of industry, reality, television, nonfiction, nonunion, television, it's all freelance assignments. Usually they last three months or less. And you sort of go from job to job and your relationships with people in a position to hire are really what carry you through. And so it's not just an idle threat to say, if you do this thing that I don't want you to do, you're never going to work again. And that's illegal. Under California law, blackballing of that type violates California labor law. However, it's difficult to police and difficult to enforce. And in this industry, it's very easy to do. You know, you have people on these short term assignments, you're always sort of looking for the next job. And so there's a lot of power transferred to the management over the labor. There's very little opportunity to sort of band together for whatever reason. There's just an imbalance of the power relationship. And Mark Burnett and every reality show, I use that to their advantage. Who is Mark? Who is Mark Burnett? So Mark Burnett is probably the most successful reality producer out there, beginning in 2001 with Survivor, and then also did the Apprentice and the number of other reality programs. He now works for NGM. Mark Burnett's productions used to be an independent company. And I believe they were bought by MGM. And is he a friend of unions? Does he have a history of being a signatory to say the writer's guild? Not not that I know of. I mean, reality editors on Survivor actually did recently get organized. But that's kind of the exception that proves the rule. Did they get organized? Did they get organized with the I know that they were trying to know the editors guild? They did through the editors. Originally they wanted to do it through the writer's guild. That's right. I was actually part of that push, that reality storytellers were trying to be organized through the writer's guild. This was in 2005, 2006. And it failed miserably. There was a lot of reason in the industry why they wanted to keep this nonfiction, unscripted television where you write the script after you shoot the footage instead of before. They wanted to keep that non-union. And number one, it was a bulwark for them to get better contracts with the union types on the scripted shows. Because if you have this ability to transfer over to non-union reality programming, once there's a strike or something, it's sort of a ready-made set of scabs that you can bring in. Right. You're a writer, but you're also a videotape editor, correct? Yeah, I was an editor, yeah, for many years here. And you were editing video for reality shows and somewhere along the line, somebody discovered that editing video is the same thing as writing, which I don't necessarily think our listeners would understand. Why is editing video a lot like writing a script in television? Well, both are forms of storytelling. In the case of these non-fiction shows, it's certainly the case that, you know, I've been in rooms where they've dropped 20 tapes on me and they've said, we'll make something out of this, you know, come up with a narrative for this scene. That is no different than writing down at a typewriter, sitting down at a typewriter with a piece of paper and writing up a story. The real difference in that kind of television is that you're writing the script after you do the shoot rather than before you do the shoot. So I have written lines of dialogue that have been then read while by the individuals in the program. I have written lines of voiceover. I have, you know, done all of the things that you would do to tie together a script only, only we're doing it in this allegedly non-fiction kind of format. We're talking with David Dayan. He's a contributor to The Intercept and he's written a really important story over at The Intercept on the apprentice and why employees are fearing a professional reprisal over leaking that tape that may or may not exist of Donald Trump using the N word. Reality television, was there originally a thirst for reality television or did it, did it come before us for other reasons? Well, that's a really interesting question. There was a writer strike in I believe 1987, 88, that some of the ways in which networks, particularly Fox, weathered that strike was by putting on this content that did not have writers in it. And that's things like cops and America's most wanted. These are sort of seen as the ur text for reality television. And as they moved forward over that next decade, other networks picked up on this idea that okay, here's a way to protect us, protect our programming in the event of a strike. We put on these shows that aren't union. And that sort of reaches Apex at the beginning of the year 2000 and after that. And it actually helped avert a writer strike in 2001 because there was enough of this programming on the air for the writers to get nervous that they wouldn't have the same leverage. There was a strike in 2007. Initially, reality storytellers were put into that saying that they had to be dealt with somehow. That was taken off the table at the last minute and the 2007 writer strike was settled with decent terms for writers, but leaving that sort of reality group behind. And so it's always this sort of extra appendage that makes the terms a little more favorable to management. Hollywood, as you said earlier, is notorious for disobeying state labor laws. Under Governor under Governor Jerry Brown, have they enforced any of the labor laws on the books when it comes to marketing? What I see most in these kinds of programings is what would be called wage theft. What is wage theft? Wage theft is when you are not providing your employees with the kind of wages that they should get under a normal system of labor law. Now that could be denying them over time. That could be violating laws surrounding various breaks or things like that. I mean, I've been in situations where I've walked in on my first day of work and been told to sign all 12 weeks of my time cards before the fact. And not knowing whether I would work late one day or whether I would have to work a weekend or whatever it is, those would be signed and put off right at the beginning. And that's not uncommon. So basically you have people who work in this industry who are working, you know, they can work 12-hour days, 14-hour days, 16-hour days, and not getting paid for that extra time that they're spending at work. And if you're working for, say, Mark Burnett, and then you report him to, who would you report? OSHA, California Department of Labor? Yeah, the California Department of Labor, Labor Commission. There have been some somewhat high profile cases. You're never reporting Fox or Mark Burnett? No, because you work, well, you're working for a production company. By and large, you're working for a production company. You are not working directly for the network where that product appears. And this creates a layer of sort of plausible deniability on the part of that large corporation that runs the network, which is probably a giant conglomerate. They aren't doing the direct payout in terms of these productions. It's smaller production companies who have working relationships with those networks who sell the show to the network. And you're dealing with these smaller companies. And some of them have had their problems and had to give back wages and do these kinds of things. But by and large, it's not something that is very rigorously enforced. It's interesting. The Telecommunications Act, I think it was 96 or 97, allowed the networks and the cable channels to own television shows. And what happened after about 20 years of this is the networks now own all the television shows used to have independent production companies who would sell to the networks. Now that interestingly, it's not necessarily the shows that they air on their networks that they own. You know, ABC will do a show for NBC. And NBC will do a show that airs on Fox. And Fox will do a show that airs on CBS. It's even more insidious than if they were all just doing their own show. Right. But there are a limited number of companies that own these television shows, except when you want to get paid. Then there are all these little companies. Yes. Then they all set up dummy companies that are you know, nominally independent. So unions, why are unions important? One of the things, especially in Hollywood, one of the things that you're taught in Hollywood, you're indoctrinated and your first job in Hollywood is you can be replaced. If you're an actor, if you're a writer, if you're working craft services, the message that is sent to you all the time is that you can be replaced. And you can be replaced. Everybody, including Donald Trump on The Apprentice, can be replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who also can be replaced. Everybody in Hollywood can be replaced. That's why we need unions, right? Right. I mean, the fact is that, you know, there's a fun stuff that at any one time, one in three people in Hollywood are out of work. There is so much competition for employment here that that makes it a very difficult environment for people who are replaceable, as you say. That's even magnified more in this reality business where you have the short-term assignments where you have to line up three or four or six different jobs over the course of a year just to make your normal pay that you would expect to maintain your standard of living. So unions are important to fill in those gaps. First of all, these are all freelance jobs. They don't come with any benefits. They don't come with any health insurance. They don't come with any pension. And that's one way unions can get involved. The second way is through helping with grievances and, you know, certain types of firing that would be illegal. Unions can come in and help stand up for workers when they're being exploited or when they're running in the trail. You know, you say that it's not very well enforced this idea of wage theft. Well, under a union environment, you know, they are the enforcement sort of a private enforcement making sure that their workers get what they deserve. So there are a lot of ways in which unions are incredibly important in the workplace and Hollywood was, you know, really grew up as a union town, you know, after a very long and tumultuous period where it was resisted by the studios. By and large, there was guilds for writers and crew and directors and actors and basically everything that goes into a production. When this nonfiction, unscripted craze came forward, it was seen sort of as a kind of a quasi union busting device. And that has carried forward. And now you have a situation where you have these employees mostly younger 20s, 30s coming up in the industry and really put in a very vulnerable position where they they can't afford to speak out if they want to in the case of this particular thing with Trump. They can't afford to go against the grain of whatever it is their employers want them to do, whether that's work an extra hour at night or work a weekend or go to some location on their very hazardous conditions, very brutal shoots that, you know, on survivor and these kinds of things. There is a lot of power transferred to those, the producers and the executives of these companies. They lured it over the individual employees and they create a culture where they can't really react or respond. What is the role that ageism plays in all this? I have my own theory about this, but why do you think these companies only want to hire young, inexperienced people? Because they have no real history of solidarity on the job. They don't understand what it means. Right. It's very insidious and it's, you know, ingenious in an evil way. What they'll do is they'll say to a 24 year old who would be willing to do whatever this work is for free, for free. And they're trying to get established in the industry and you're willing to take more crap when you're trying to get established in the industry. And, you know, they play that to their advantage. And the way they crack the solidarity is they divide and conquer by complimenting you. You're the best. You are so fantastic. You are amazing. And you begin to think you really are amazing and they can't do this without you. And they say, we really need you to, you know, to finish this up. You know, I've been in places where- So excuse me for one second. Excuse me for one second. We really need you. You are so key to this project. So then you immediately distance yourself from your coworkers because you think you're more important and better than they are until you ask for one thing to be paid or just to be paid on time. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah. I mean, I've been in places where I'm told, look, you got to go home yesterday at six. So you've got to stay until nine tonight or whatever. Yeah. I mean, once you get into that position where you're seen as, you know, as you said, as special or necessary to the production, they can play those games and they can sort of take you outside of the normal bounds of employment of the employer-employee relationship and take advantage of it. Nobody's special. That's the message. And I feel bad for the millennials. My kids are millennials and a lot of them were raised to believe that they were special and they're really- They've been in a lot of trouble. Yeah. Nobody's special. Nobody's special. Before you go, very quickly, we're going to miss President Obama, especially because of who's replacing him and who's going to be heading the labor department, somebody who is against the minimum wage. In your article for the Intercept, you say that President Obama really didn't create great union jobs. Well, you know, the number one goal of the labor movement in 2008 under Obama's election was to get this thing passed called the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made it much easier to set up a union election in a workplace. Sometimes it's called card check. It allows if a majority of workers sign cards saying they want to be represented by this union, then they get the union. And this would have been the biggest advance for labor law since before Taft-Hartley and the Truman administration. And Obama talked about that on the campaign trail, but when it came down to it, he couldn't or didn't muster the votes for that particular piece of legislation. And you look at Obamacare and this, the so-called Cadillac tax, this idea that you would tax high-end insurance plans, these are plans, many of them, that unions negotiated in lieu of wages. They got really, really good healthcare for their contract. And they gave up what they could have gotten in wages to take this healthcare. And now under Obamacare it was being taxed. Now eventually the Cadillac tax got reversed over Obama's wishes or at least delayed, I believe. So the union-Obama relationship has been a little bit fraught now. On the other side of that, the National Labor Relations Board of Pointees that the president put on were all quite good and have put forward a lot of rulings that if they were allowed to continue under the next few years would be extremely helpful to labor, particularly one around franchisees, which it says that if McDonald's has a thousand franchisees out in the country and the franchisees do something that is illegal under labor law, that McDonald's can be held accountable for that because McDonald's, by virtue of their franchise rules, essentially controls the labor practices of those franchises. So that's, I mean, it's like everything in the Obamacare, it's a little bit mixed. You write that 94% of the 10 million jobs created in the Obama era were temporary part-time. Well, that's definitely true. Yeah. Before you go, you're the author of Chain of Title. It's about Wall Street's foreclosure fraud. It came out in May. Tell me very quickly about it, please. So the story is about three individuals in South Florida who were instrumental in uncovering this this mass secret that millions of foreclosure documents that were used to kick people out of their homes were fraudulent. They were falsely created because the industry kind of lost track of who owned mortgages when they did this thing called securitization, where they packaged up loans and sold them all over the country. They broke all these property records laws. And to cover that up, they falsified millions of documents used in courts to kick people out of their homes. And the three people that really were instrumental in figuring this out were not in politics. They were not in law enforcement. They had no institutional knowledge about mortgages or real estate. They had no history of activism. They were a used car salesman, a cancer nurse, and a lawyer who specialized in insurance cases. And all three of them were foreclosure victims in South Florida. And in becoming foreclosure victims, they committed what I call a revolutionary act. They actually read their own documents when they were given the summons. And when they read them, they found the regularities. And then they decided to do something bigger than themselves. And they got sort of obsessed. And they looked through the public records, and they found all these patterns. And then they found each other in the comment sections of websites. And they made a pact saying, we're going to expose this to the world, to the nation. And they started their own websites, and they started to protest. And within a year, at the end of 2010, the leading mortgage companies in America all stopped foreclosing on people because they can't do it anymore legally having been exposed in large part by these three people over these false documents and what was called robo-signing and all these illegal practices. And that's the first two-thirds of the book. And it's a very inspiring book. And then if you close it, you don't understand the last third that I had to write, which is about how Wall Street and Washington sort of got together to make sure there were limited consequences for any of this. But that's the story and came out in May, as you say, and it's been getting a really good response. And be excited to get anyone's feedback on it. It's called Chain of Title, and you can buy it at a local bookstore or through Amazon, which we won't talk about. David Dayan is a contributor to The Intercept. He also writes for Salon, The Fiscal Times, The New Republic, and his book is entitled Chain of Title. Thank you so much for being with us. Absolutely. Thanks. That's our show. Thanks for listening to The David Feldman Show. Please friend us on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter. Have a happy New Year.