As of today, it has officially been a month since SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher announced that the actors’ union—representing 160,000 performers—would be going on strike, following weeks of unsuccessful negotiations with the Alliance Of Motion Picture And Television Producers (an organization that represents the interests of the major studios, TV networks, and streaming platforms). When calling the strike, Drescher explained that this—and the growing support for workers’ rights across the country—is what happens when “employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run.”
During the press conference where Drescher made her statement about the strike, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland also revealed that one of the issues the AMPTP wouldn’t budge on in negotiations was that it wanted to have the right to scan background actors, pay them for working a single day, and then use their likenesses for free forever—a horrifying idea that is even more horrifying when you consider the fact that Disney has apparently already been doing it.
Other things that SAG-AFTRA wanted from the AMPTP were increases to salary minimums to make acting a more viable career for people and a new revenue-sharing system so actors can finally get residuals from streaming shows (which Drescher has said is her main priority in the new contract). Streaming was so new when the last SAG-AFTRA contract was signed that nobody really knew what to do with it, which the streaming companies have since used to their advantage, acting like they’re still little offshoots of the traditional networks that can’t afford to pay writers and actors when in reality their viewership is doing laps around the more established studios.
The writers’ strike passes 100 days
But, of course, the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike was also the start of a historic double strike in Hollywood—the first since 1960—with the Writers Guild Of America recently hitting 100 days on the picket lines in its own campaign to get a fair contract from the AMPTP. In fact, one of the most dramatic developments of the past month came from a meeting where the AMPTP supposedly wanted to talk about resuming negotiations with the writers, but—as explained in a WGA announcement later—what the AMPTP apparently really wanted was for the union to agree to a press blackout so the studios could supposedly leak information to the press and take control of the narrative.
If that was the plan, it hasn’t worked out. Barring some exceptions and righteous anger, the vibe around the double strike has been generally positive, with the real workers of Hollywood coming together to support each other. Even big names in Hollywood like Dwayne Johnson who could financially afford to sit the whole thing out have been putting their money to good use to support striking workers (and other Hollywood workers who are impacted by the strikes). Jack Quaid even took some time while shooting down a casting rumor to remind everyone how they can support struggling actors and writers.
All of the pro-labor talk has also evidently inspired on-set VFX workers to petition for unionization at Marvel Studios, which could lead toward unionization of the entire VFX industry—a famously overworked and underappreciated arm of Hollywood. Bethenny Frankel has also been at the front of a movement to unionize reality TV stars, who are often treated as more disposable than actors and writers at least partially because they’re not protected by a union.
Another story that has popped up is SAG-AFTRA’s decision to issue several “interim agreements” with independent film and television productions that aren’t affiliated with any of the AMPTP studios. This was a fairly controversial move for the union, with Sarah Silverman being a vocal critic who argued that it was defeating the purpose of the strike. SAG-AFTRA later put out a statement explaining that the interim agreements are actually a key part of its strike strategy, both because it will encourage independent productions—which will film either way—to keep using union labor and because productions have to agree to the union’s terms in order to get an interim agreement—which will, in theory, prove to the AMPTP that the union’s terms should be perfectly acceptable.
The WGA may be tiptoeing toward an agreement
The A.V. Club has reached out to the AMPTP for a statement on this month/100 days anniversary, but we haven’t heard back. Still, the studios have had a few things to say about the strikes over the last few weeks, like when Warner Bros. Discovery noted during an earnings report that it has “saved” $100 million this year because of the strikes, and it’s going to keep “saving” money the longer the strikes going on (because it’s not using that money to make anything).
Despite how terrible that came across, the wealthy CEOs of some of the AMPTP companies have at least been making an effort to say the right thing. In that same earnings report, WBD CEO David Zaslav insisted that his company is “in the business of storytelling” and that they can’t do anything “without the writers, directors, editors, producers, actors, the whole below-the-line crew.” Disney’s Bob Iger also recently suggested that he was “personally committed” to finding a way to end the strikes—an apparent reversal of his position from July, when he implied that writers and actors weren’t being “realistic” with their demands.
But just a day after the Emmys were officially delayed all the way to January of next year (since it would’ve been a miserable ceremony without any famous people and potentially without the WGA’s authorization to even show clips from TV shows), there was some movement: Last Thursday, the WGA announced that they would be going back to the negotiating table with the AMPTP, and while the results of those discussions haven’t been made public—the WGA Negotiating Committee noted in a statement that “sometimes more progress can be made in negotiations when they are conducted without a blow-by-blow description of the moves on each side”—it does at least appear to be going better than it was before (and certainly better than when the AMPTP refused to even meet).
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August 14, 2023 at 07:42PM
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A month into a Hollywood double strike, has anything changed? - The A.V. Club
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