While screenwriters are busy back at work, film and TV actors remain on picket lines, with the longest strike in their history hitting the 100-day mark yesterday after talks broke off with studios.
Hopes were high and leaders of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA ) were cautiously optimistic when they resumed negotiations on October 2 for the first time since the strike began over two months earlier.
The same group of chief executives from the biggest studios had made a major deal just over a week earlier with striking writers, whose leaders celebrated their gains on many issues actors are also fighting for: long-term pay, consistency of employment and control over the use of artificial intelligence.
But the actors’ talks were tepid, with days off between sessions and no reports of progress. Then studios abruptly ended discussions on October 11, saying the actors’ demands were exorbitantly expensive and the two sides were too far apart to continue.
“We only met with them a couple of times, Monday, half a day Wednesday, half a day Friday. That was what they were available for,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher told The Associated Press soon after the talks broke off. “Then this past week, it was Monday and a half a day on Wednesday. And then ‘Bye bye.’ I’ve never really met people that actually don’t understand what negotiations mean. Why are you walking away from the table?”
The reasons, according to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, included a union demand for a fee for each subscriber to streaming services.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, one of the executives in on the bargaining sessions, told investors on an earnings call Wednesday that “This really broke our momentum unfortunately.”
SAG-AFTRA leaders said it was ridiculous to frame this demand as though it were a tax on customers, and said it was the executives themselves who wanted to shift from a model based on a show’s popularity to one based on number of subscribers.
“We made big moves in their direction that have just been ignored and not responded to,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator, told the AP. “We made changes to our AI proposal. We made dramatic changes to what used to be our streaming revenue share proposal,” Crabtree-Ireland said.
The studios said just after the talks broke off that the per-subscriber charge would cost them $800 million annually, a figure SAG-AFTRA said was a vast overestimate.
The actors are in unscripted territory, with no end in sight. Their union has never been on a strike this long, nor been on strike at all since before many of its members were born. Not even its veteran leaders, like Crabtree-Ireland, with the union for 20 years, have found themselves in quite these circumstances.
As they did for months before the talks broke off, members and leaders will rally, picket and speak out publicly until the studios signal a willingness to talk again. No one knows how long that will take. SAG-AFTRA says it is willing to resume at any time, but that it won’t change its demands.
Source: www.jamaicaobserver.com
