As more details emerge about the industry-wide wage theft scheme operated by feature animation studios, artists are beginning to piece together the events of the last couple decades and understand how they were unknowingly manipulated by studio executives.
Not suprisingly, some of the most disturbing stories point back to current Disney Animation/Pixar president and bestselling humor book author Ed Catmull, who is allegedly one of the primary architects of the scheme, according to his own deposition statements from January 2013.
Animation Guild (Local 839 IATSE) business rep Steve Hulett has shared some new details about Catmull’s insidious tactics. According to a conversation that Hulett had this week with a former Disney employee, Catmull told Disney artists they were getting rid of their contracts to give them freedom to find better paying jobs at other feature animation studios. Of course, what artists didn’t know at the time was that Catmull had spent decades rigging the system so that better-paying jobs wouldn’t exist at other studios.