Hollywood’s Influential Crew Whisperer Opens Up

In 2021, an Instagram account emerged that harnessed the frustration of crewmembers fed up with the status quo of sprawling hours on film and television sets.

Debuting Aug. 1 of that year, IATSE Stories (@ia_stories) shared anonymous tales of workplace conditions from self-described crewmembers in stark black-and-white. The often-shocking stories shared on the page — ranging from people nodding off at the wheel after long workdays, to one crewmember allegedly laboring for 39 days straight — touched a nerve at a time when crew union IATSE was negotiating rest periods with studios in a new labor contract. The page — which would quickly attract more than 100,000 followers — channeled a fresh brand of Hollywood labor fervor, one that would erupt that year as IATSE members authorized a strike (less than two years before the industry’s actors and writers made history with their work stoppages).

The co-founder of the account was then-27-year-old Brooklyn-based lighting technician Emma Gottlieb (Only Murders in the Building, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie). Her role for the page was brief and intense: She curated and moderated the posts and gave interviews about it for a few months, then quietly ceased her work in November 2021. Gottlieb has since stepped away from full-time on-set jobs and now works for a lighting manufacturer. But as IATSE gears up for its next round of contract negotiations, set for March 4, Gottlieb opens up to The Hollywood Reporter about her time helping to oversee the page when it was a must-read across town and opened eyes to the unglamorous working conditions of so-called “below-the-line” workers.

Crewmembers were reaching a breaking point when IATSE Stories first surfaced in their Instagram feeds in summer 2021. After a production shutdown during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a halting return to work for months after, by the spring and summer, L.A.-area productions alone had rushed back in earnest to fulfill the demand for entertainment that arose when consumers were stuck at home. On July 14, IATSE communicated that “reasonable rest” was a major issue in its ongoing contract talks with studios and streamers. “Reasonable rest demands that the Employers not treat our members like machines that can just work until they are broken and then be replaced,” the union’s Hollywood Locals said at the time.

As IATSE went public with this part of its campaign, Gottlieb wrote about her own experience with long workdays in a July 29 post to her personal Instagram. “An 8-10 hour work day for the film industry isn’t a fantasy, it can be done, it has been done so many times before. It’s time to put our foot down as an industry and demand better,” she wrote. The post blew up, racking up more than 21,000 likes. “It felt very draconian that for five years I worked 60-hour workweeks when it was the 2020s,” Gottlieb says now. “I had a rosier picture of the film industry when I was coming into it and I thought that as an industry that prides itself on its liberalism, that it [wouldn’t] still have 1800s sweatshop hours.”

Soon, other crewmembers with similar experiences began sharing their horror stories with Gottlieb. And on Aug. 1, Gottlieb and a fellow IATSE member co-founded and launched IATSE Stories with a post about a production assistant who allegedly worked a 24-hour shift and nearly fell asleep on the highway home. 

The project was a near-instant sensation. Gottlieb recalls having over 1,000 followers for the page within 24 hours; a few months later, it had over 100,000 followers. The account became prolific, posting 56 stories within its first two days, but Gottlieb still says she only ever posted about 10 percent of the messages sent. Gottlieb and her co-founder both worked on the project, and they brought in more union members to help answer the demand, with all but Gottlieb at the beginning remaining anonymous (art department coordinator Marisa Shipley, who in 2022 became IATSE Local 871’s president, has since gone public with her role as the other co-founder).

“The arrangement that we always had was that if there was going to be somebody acting as the mouthpiece for what was happening, my public identity was already tied to it and I was willing to take that hit,” Gottlieb says.

The stories focused attention on crewmembers’ experiences. There was the crew that allegedly shot in a subway tunnel up until 10 minutes before the subway went “live,” and the poster who said they had tinnitus and permanent hearing loss from listening to their walkie-talkie so frequently. The tales caught the attention of boldfaced names — Neil Gaiman, Bradley Whitford and Adam Conover — who directed social media followers to IATSE Stories’ posts; Samuel L. Jackson once mentioned the account in an Instagram photo.

Aymar Jean Christian, a Northwestern University associate professor of communication studies who analyzed 115 posts from the page in a 2023 paper found that the three top themes of the tales were threats to physical health, long work days and bad leadership. “What the IATSE Stories account really reveals is that, yes, there’s been all this work, but with that growth of work has been a kind of lowering of standards for the working conditions of the people who make the shows,” says Christian.

Behind the scenes, work on the account itself was taking a toll. Gottlieb said she was spending 10 to 12 hours a day on Instagram, and her co-moderators were putting in significant time, too. The easy camaraderie between the account and its commenters changed, too, once IATSE reached a controversial deal over its new contract on Oct. 16, averting a strike that had been authorized by more than 98 percent of voting members. As the page sounded cautiously optimistic about the deal, many commenters advocated voting “no” to the pact and striking, feeling that the gains needed to be greater. 

Gottlieb — who is a critic of IATSE’s 2021 deal — says that the page was a grassroots operation, not a union-operated one. “The very realistic and practical solutions that we were trying to signal in the IATSE Stories page, like, ‘Hey, maybe we don’t need to work 12 hour days, maybe eight hours is enough to make content,’ people started to think, and I don’t blame them, that that was the official bargaining position,” says Gottlieb — and it wasn’t.

Then, the tone online took a turn for the worse: An IATSE Stories moderator turned off the comments on a post in what the page said was an accident, and the team behind the page appeared to change its tune slightly on the union’s deal and said it agreed “with the consensus of the community” and disliked the tentative agreement. The moderators, essentially, lost the room as some commenters expressed that the account didn’t do right by them by initially appearing to applaud the deal then backtracking. Commenters alternately supported and attacked the page; Gottlieb says that around this time she got death threats. Working on the page “was starting to destroy my mental health and sanity,” she says, and she walked away, even as her peers posted on and off until April 2022. So far, it hasn’t posted anything about the upcoming 2024 IATSE negotiations.

Whether working on the page helped push her in this direction or not — she isn’t sure — after she stopped working on IATSE Stories, Gottlieb never took a job as a full-time shooting crew member again. She took some jobs as an additional electrician, coming on to set for a few days and filling in, and as a rigging electrician, where she could work eight-hour days, before someone from a lighting manufacturer reached out on LinkedIn and she took a role with that company, where she is now.

From her perch adjacent to the industry, Gottlieb has noticed Instagram accounts emerge that are following the IATSE Stories model, telling anonymous first-person tales to advocate for workers in various Hollywood niches, from animation workers to commercial crew members to film festival staffers to production assistants. With some distance now from the on-set grind of Hollywood, Gottlieb is grateful for the legacy of the page. “I’m super, super happy it happened,” she says. She adds, “The actual people who run the cable, hang the lights, turn on the camera really need safe, fair working hours. They need to earn enough money to live. And I think the page did spark something in that regard.” (Ultimately, IATSE’s controversial 2021 deal provided for 10-hour turnaround time between work shifts, a 54-hour weekend rest period for five-day work weeks with some exceptions and higher meal penalties.) She says she’s still active in her union and is an advocate for eight-hour work days, but she does it in smaller forums that are “a lot more effective than a very flashy and sexy Instagram page.”

This year, IATSE is faced with another major round of negotiations that will shape the way crews work in a business landscape where streaming platforms dominate and production may be slowing down from its “Peak TV” height. Gottlieb says she believes IATSE should “go for broke” this year. But she’s not sure if, after two strikes that left many out of work for months, union members will have the same raw, frustrated energy that they did in 2021. So far, she she’s gotten a sense that some are asking what else they can lose if they did strike.

As popular as it became nearly three years ago, Gottlieb doesn’t think the IATSE Stories page should be rebooted this year, believing it “did what it needed to do.” If it was restarted, she wouldn’t be interested in getting involved. Currently, she says she’s enjoying being more associated in the industry with her current employer than a social media account. “We actually had a lunch six months after I got hired and somebody brought up, ‘Oh, Emma, you did that IATSE Stories thing, right?’ And my boss, the person who hired me, was like, ‘What? That was you?’ ”

This story first appeared in the Feb. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.