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A historic double strike that will effectively cripple Hollywood appears imminent after a union representing almost all television and film actors failed to secure a new deal with major studios by midnight Wednesday.
The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) announced overnight that after weeks of negotiations with companies including Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Warner Bros., its negotiating committee voted unanimously to end the strike by its 160,000 members to recommend. decay.
SAG-AFTRA will hold a press conference at 12:00 p.m. local time in Los Angeles after the National Board of Directors voted on whether to make the strike official, joining an ongoing strike by Hollywood writers for the first time in 63 years.
“Studios and streamers have made massive unilateral changes to our industry’s business model while insisting on keeping our deals in limbo,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national managing director of SAG-AFTRA, said in a statement, adding, “Yours A refusal to meaningfully engage with our key proposals and a general disrespect for our members has brought us to this point. Studios and streamers have underestimated the determination of our members, as you are about to fully discover.”
Union leader Fran Drescher also criticized the Alliance of Film and TV Producers – the bargaining group representing major studios with which she had publicly hoped to reach an agreement a few weeks earlier.
“AMPTP’s reactions to the union’s key proposals have been offensive and disrespectful of our tremendous contributions to this industry,” Drescher said. “Companies have refused to get involved in some areas in a meaningful way, while others have completely blocked us. Unless they negotiate in good faith, we cannot reach an agreement.”
AMPTP officials could not be reached immediately for a reply.
The actors’ demands largely mirror those of their peers at the Writers Guild of America, whose 11,000 members have been on strike for months. They want restrictions on artificial intelligence technology that can already simulate an artist’s likeness or an author’s style, and a transformative new business model for the streaming era that the unions say will turn Hollywood’s creative process into a gig economy.
Since the WGA strike at the beginning of May, the production of many series and films has already come to a standstill. A joint strike by the actors is expected to halt almost all remaining filming.
SAG-AFTRA and the studios spent weeks trying to avoid a second strike by extending an original June 30 deadline to this month and seeking last-minute help from the US government’s Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which hired a senior mediator sent to take part in the final round of talks on Wednesday.
It was unsuccessful, and Hollywood is now preparing for nearly all on-air talent to leave the set. A-list actor such as Meryl Streep, Jamie Lee Curtis, Quinta Brunson and Pedro Pascal had earlier declared their willingness to strike in an open letter to SAG-AFTRA executives.
A double whammy with writers would be almost unprecedented. Although actors and writers have walked off the set multiple times — including the writers’ strike in 2007 and a six-month artists’ strike in 2000 that was one of the longest entertainment strikes in history — they have only demonstrated once at a time: in 1960, when the screen The Actors Guild was headed by Ronald Reagan.
That double strike ended when the studios – among other transformative terms – agreed to pay actors a percentage of the money they made from licensing films for television.
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