George Clooney
Charley Gallay/Getty Images for TCM
SAG-AFTRA A-Lister George Clooney met with his union’s leaders Tuesday to better understand how collective bargaining failed on Oct. 11.
Clooney spoke with union national director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland and president Fran Drescher via Zoom about why the studios suspended talks the previous week. Deadline, which first reported the news, also reported that union colleagues Scarlett Johansson, Emma Stone, Ben Affleck and Tyler Perry were present at the meeting.
A SAG-AFTRA spokesman said Tuesday: “We meet with members of all profiles every day and will not comment on these private conversations.” Representatives for Clooney did not respond to requests for comment.
On October 11, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers announced that the studios were pausing discussions because “the gap between AMPTP and SAG-AFTRA is too great and the discussions are no longer moving us in a productive direction.” The Studio Side particularly highlighted the union’s recent revenue sharing proposal, which in its current form aims to create a new pool of money for artists whose work appears on streaming services. The union would do this by charging these services a fixed amount per subscriber. The AMPTP argued that the union is asking studios to spend more than $800 million a year, calling this latest demand an “unbearable economic burden.” (The union disputed that figure, saying the companies had “exaggerated it by 60 percent.”)
A day later, Crabtree-Ireland told THR that the companies’ decision to walk away from the table surprised him, as the day of negotiations beforehand had been fairly standard and, in his opinion, SAG-AFTRA’s revised proposal was “a huge, huge concession.”
The sides also do not yet agree on some other important issues in the SAG-AFTRA negotiations, for example regarding the regulations on the use of AI and the increase in the minimum wage. On the former, SAG-AFTRA has argued that the studios’ current proposal allows employers to obtain an artist’s consent for the one-time use of AI on a franchise project and use it for the rest of the franchise. And the union continues to push for higher wage increases than those offered by the Writers Guild of America and Directors Guild of America – 5 percent in the first year and 4 and 3.5 percent in subsequent contract years – which the AMPTP would like to also apply to performers ,
Meanwhile, the ongoing actors’ strike, which has paralyzed most domestic union production, is nearing its 100th day. In the final weeks of the recent WGA strike, prominent showrunners including Kenya Barris (Black-ish), Noah Hawley (Fargo) and Courtney Kemp (Power) asked guild leaders questions about the impasse in negotiations with studios. Ultimately, WGA negotiating committee co-chair Chris Keyser spoke with studio heads Bob Iger, David Zaslav, Ted Sarandos and Donna Langley, and the executives agreed to participate in negotiations for as long as necessary to complete the deal.
Langley made a similar promise during an appearance at the Bloomberg Screentime event on October 11, just hours before the AMPTP announced that the studios were halting talks with SAG-AFTRA. “We have spent time with the actors and we want to spend as much time as necessary until we can find a solution and get the industry back on its feet and back to work, as has been our goal since day one. ” She said. – additional reporting by Rebecca Keegan