Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the lead negotiator for SAG-AFTRA, will be a key player as the guild begins talks with the studios again today.
The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists announced Wednesday night that strike negotiations with studios would resume Monday. The guild said several studio executives will attend, much as they did during marathon sessions last week that helped bring the nearly five-month writers strike to an end.
As the WGA leadership and members move forward on the scribes’ tentative agreement with the studios and streamers, the 160,000-strong actors union could be sitting down with the AMPTP within days. Riding the momentum that has hit Hollywood since the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers struck a deal on Sept. 24, SAG-AFTRA leaders have penciled in meetings with the Carol Lombardini-led group by the end of next week.
SAG-AFTRA members voted overwhelmingly Monday to authorize a strike against 10 of the major video game companies. The vote was 98.32% in favor. A total of 34,687 members cast ballots, representing a voting 27.47% of eligible voters. The guild’s last strike against the gaming companies, in 2016-17, lasted 183 days. The guild, meanwhile, has been on strike against the film and TV industry since July 14.
Top TV producer Ryan Murphy is launching the Ryan Murphy Productions Assistance Fund “to support the exceptional casts and committed crews” of the company’s shows who have been impacted by the ongoing writers and actors strikes. The fund is starting with $500,000.
Exclusives
Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman, actors Paul McCrane (ER) and Paul Scheer (The League), among others, will partner with The Union Solidarity Coalition for a live fundraising event next month to benefit TV and film crew members financially affected by the current work stoppage.
Two challengers in the SAG-AFTRA election are urging the union to bring in an outside mediator to help resolve the actors strike, which has gone on for nearly two months. Maya Gilbert-Dunbar, who is running against Fran Drescher for president of the union, argued that guild leadership has been too passive, and needs to show more urgency in restarting talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. “Chain your asses up to the damn door of the Sherman Oaks building to show how serious you are,” Gilbert-Dunbar said. “People’s can’t afford this. Strikes were never meant to last months and months. An effective strike should be short and sweet.”
SAG-AFTRA president says “insatiable appetite for money” at studios contributed to strike in new interview.
WBD’s David Zaslav Says Industry Must Focus And Fight To Resolve Strikes As They Spill Into The Fall
David Zaslav said today that Warner Bros. Discovery had anticipated putting Hollywood strikes in the rear-view mirror this month, but with no end in sight, he added that “we” would “fight” to find a resolution. “I was in L.A. the last two days, and we really have to focus as industry — and we are trying — to get this resolved in a way that is really fair and everyone feels fairly treated,” he told investors at a Goldman Sachs media conference. “In our guidance, we said that this would be resolved in September. And here we are in September. And this is really a very unusual event to have. The last time it happened was 1960. And so what we did is, we just said we are really going to fight to get this resolved.”
The Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA will rally on Thursday at Amazon Studio in Culver City to highlight their push a bill that would provide unemployment insurance to striking workers in California. Striking writers and actors in New York and New Jersey are already eligible to receive unemployment benefits after 14 days on the picket line, but not in California.
Skydance Media CEO David Ellison called the creative process a “community” where “both sides of this disagreement actually need one another to move forward. So, my hope is that we can find a path to compromise so that everybody can get back to work and we can position ourselves for success going forward.”
The tired familiarity of the reality-heavy network schedules is a reminder of the issues that led to the work stoppages.
The financial impact of ongoing actors and writers strikes has a number on it now, or one at least, as Warner Bros. Discovery said today it’s looking at a hit of $300 million to $500 million in adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) for 2023 due to the work stoppages.
In recent days, some in the U.S. have begun to discuss success-based residual metrics that already exist in parts of Europe, most notably with Netflix. The systems are driven by European copyright legislation that ensures “authors” receive what business affairs execs would call “fair and appropriate compensation,” and can broadly be seen as a reward for making a show or film that cuts through globally.
“When our contract expired July 12, we told representatives for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (which includes the major studios and streamers like Amazon, Apple TV, Disney, Fox, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros. Discovery and others) that we were willing to continue negotiating. The response was a hard ‘no,'” writes Sag-Aftra’s chief negotiator.
Blowing through financial reserves, below-the-line union members are concerned about their leverage in upcoming contract talks.
Shares of several big media and entertainment companies tumbled Friday as investors considered the potential fallout from an impasse between cable giant Charter Communications and media titan Walt Disney Co. On Thursday, Disney said it had pulled major networks such as ESPN and ABC from Charter systems after the two companies could not come to terms on a renewal of their carriage license. Charter’s systems reach a little under 15 million subscribers in markets that include New York City and Los Angeles.
The disclosure was revealed in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest employment report.
New York City filming permits declined 53% year over year in August, which marked the first full month of the year during which both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Television and Radio Artists were on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
“I write with deep concern regarding your failure to end the ongoing strike,” Fiona Ma said in letters dated August 30 to Disney chief executive Bob Iger, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish (pictured), Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
It’s understood that these agreements are specific to these three shows, rather than a blanket agreement between the company and the guild.
IAC mogul Barry Diller thinks that the Hollywood studios need to “reorient” their businesses, and fast, or else face potential “catastrophic” consequences. The former studio executive, speaking to journalist Kara Swisher for her podcast, also expressed pessimism about the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, and suggested that the legacy Hollywood studios should split with Netflix and their tech counterparts at the AMPTP.
Amid Hollywood’s summer of strikes, the Directors Guild Foundation is pledging $100,000 in financial assistance to the Motion Picture & Television Fund for crew members affected by strike-related production halts. “Our film crews are our work family. We need to help everyone who’s suffering,” said Todd Holland, Directors Guild Foundation film chair.
Trustees of the SAG-AFTRA Health Plan have unanimously agreed to a one-calendar-quarter extension of health coverage for certain qualified participants who would otherwise lose coverage on Oct. 1, 2023. The extension accounts for jobs that may have been lost in May and June of this year due to the Writers Guild strike. The WGA has been on strike since May 2, SAG-AFTRA since July 14.
Advertisers spent less on broadcast and cable in the 2023-2024 upfront, despite media companies touting overall pricing and volume growth in negotiations.
“We’re ready and waiting for that to happen for us,” NY local chapter president Ezra Knight told The Wrap.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator, said today that “we remain very eager to get back to the table with the AMPTP, as we’ve said every day” since the actors’ strike began 33 days ago. In a virtual press conference with reporters about the guild’s interim agreements, Crabtree-Ireland said, “We have been ready, willing and able to continue bargaining with them and we very much want the AMPTP to come back to the table.”
With TV development and production at a standstill amid strikes by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, Labor Day is taking on additional significance as a threshold for the writers work stoppage to end, in order for the networks to air meaningful seasons of their original live-action scripted series of at least 13 episodes, approaches. Crossing it without a deal or significant progress between AMPTP and WGA by October could delay new 2023-24 series’ launch until fall 2024 and put some sophomore shows — even beyond broadcast — in potential danger.
The Producers Guild, not to be confused with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, noted early on in the strike that it “stands with SAG-AFTRA as its members make the difficult decision to strike against the studios, companies, and streamers that make up the AMPTP.”
SAG-AFTRA launched its interim agreements program that allows independent productions with no direct ties to members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to continue filming. The guild has been adding to the list of projects granting agreements since soon after it went on strike against the AMPTP after failing to agree on a new film and TV contract. Under the terms, members “may work on these productions without being in violation of the strike order,” per the guild.
Actors guild says it is in contact with Frankel’s attorney and seeks to “engage in a new path to union coverage.”
The technology for morphing flesh-and-blood performers into virtual avatars has been improving for years. Now it has become an issue in the actors’ strike.
