This Wednesday, September 27, Hollywood writers, who have been on strike for 148 days, will return to work after the sector reached an agreement with the main audiovisual companies. The Los Angeles film industry must now come to an agreement with the actors’ union, which has also been on strike since July.
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The Writers Guild of America (WGA) union strike ended. A strike that the union had declared on May 2 and that kept the Hollywood writers and screenwriters sector without activity, paralyzing the entire audiovisual industry and causing a direct impact on the California economy.
As reported by the union, last Sunday they had reached a tentative agreement with the studios, which gave rise to the sustained claim in which they asked to improve the minimum wage, increase residual fees in streaming productions and guarantee that artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be used to replace a writer.
The leadership of the WGA voted in favor of ending the strike after almost five months of paralysis of activity and protests that took place, mainly, at the doors of the studios.
Although the 11,500 members of the union have not yet held the vote to approve the agreement, this Wednesday everyone returns to their jobs and the industry little by little begins to resume its activity.
“They literally can’t make a dollar without us, they bent, then they broke and they gave us what we deserve. We won,” writer Adam Conover, a member of the union’s negotiating committee, posted on the X platform (formerly Twitter).
For his part, Bill Maher, host of HBO’s ‘Real Time’, said on social media that he would return with new episodes starting Friday: “My writers and ‘Real Time’ are back!” he wrote he.
Upon return to activity, many interview cycles will be able to return to the air and companies will stop broadcasting their repetitions, just as the writing of programs, series and movies can resume. However, the filming of movies and series will not resume, as the actors remain on strike without an agreement to be finalized.
After this result, optimism is growing among the actors guild (SAG-AFTRA, for its acronym in English), which brings together some 160,000 workers who hope to resolve their differences with the studios soon, in claims that were on the same page as the screenwriters. .
At SAG-AFTRA they assure that negotiators have not held talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents Walt Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery and other studios, since they declared a state of strike on the 14th. of July. But entertainment industry executives expressed hope that negotiations would resume next week.
Losses of up to $5 billion
The paralysis of the Hollywood film industry has a strong impact on the local economy, since not only entertainment companies recorded large losses, but also numerous suppliers of products and services recorded red numbers in their accounts due to lack of income. .
Florists, clothing suppliers, food services and other sectors suffered the consequences of these almost five months without activity in the sector.
It is estimated that the losses could be around $5 billion, according to the sum of the surveys carried out by the different sectors involved, which were accessed by agencies such as EFE and Reuters.
The industry would return to normal after an eventual agreement with the actors
The entertainment sector and the hundreds of affected suppliers are eagerly waiting for the conflict with the actors’ union to be resolved, the last link for the cameras to turn on again.
The agreement with the scriptwriters lays the foundation for the actors to reach a solution. “I’ve heard it’s an exceptional deal… historically, any deal they give to one union, the next union uses as a model for their own deal,” said writer and actor Mel Shimkovitz.
SAG-AFTRA is also demanding salary improvements and adding a request to limit self-recorded auditions used in casting, which according to the union are more expensive than in-person readings.
Actors are also seeking more freedom to work during increasingly longer breaks between TV show seasons, among other points.
Dancers, singers, supporting actors and specialists also add to the claims.
If the actors reach an agreement in the coming days, until it is ratified, it could take a month, so the recording of new seasons of shows such as ‘Billions’, ‘Stranger Things’ and ‘Abbott Elementary’ will continue without a release date. premiere.
With Reuters, EFE and AFP
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