The conversations between actors of hollywood and studios ended in heated discord Wednesday night, quashing any hopes that the three-month strike by performers will come to an end in the near future.
The studios announced they had suspended contract negotiations, saying the gap between the two sides was too wide to make it worth continuing, despite an offer they said was as good as the one that recently ended the writers’ strike. The actors union denounced the “intimidation tactics” of its opponents and claimed that they were severely distorting its bids.
“We made great strides in their direction that have simply been ignored and gone unanswered,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director and chief negotiator for the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, told The Associated Press. Press on a picket line in Los Angeles on Thursday. “We won’t find a solution to this if they just walk away and don’t talk to us.”
On October 2, for the first time since the strike began on July 14, SAG-AFTRA had resumed negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios, streaming services and production companies in strike talks. When negotiations resumed with the writers last month, their strike ended five days later, but similar progress was not made with the actors union.
The studios abandoned talks after seeing the actors’ most recent proposal on Wednesday.
“It is clear that the gap between the AMPTP and SAG-AFTRA is too big, and the talks are no longer taking us in a productive direction,” AMPTP said in a statement.
The proposal of SAG-AFTRA It would cost companies an additional $800 million a year and create “an unsustainable economic burden,” the statement said.
In a letter to members sent early Thursday, SAG-AFTRA He said that figure was overestimated by 60%.
“We went into those rooms with our own open minds and the goal of establishing a dialogue with those CEOs. We were so glad they were there because here are the final decision makers who have the power to say yes,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “We gave them a full set of counterproposals yesterday. We made changes to our AI proposal. We made drastic changes to what used to be our streaming revenue sharing proposition. “We completely removed her from revenue sharing at her insistence.”
The union said its negotiators were “deeply disappointed” that the studios had broken off talks.
“We have negotiated with them in good faith,” the letter said, “despite the fact that last week they submitted an offer that was, surprisingly, less valuable than what they proposed before the strike began.”
The actors have been on strike over issues including pay increases for broadcast programming and control over the use of their artificial intelligence-generated images. The AMPTP insisted that its offers had been as generous as the agreements that ended the writers’ strike and led to a new contract with the directors’ guild earlier this year.
But the union’s letter to actors said the companies “refuse to protect performers from being replaced by AI, refuse to raise their salaries to keep up with inflation, and refuse to share a small part of the immense income that THEIR work generates for them.”
“There is a long list of psychological manipulations in the way this is being communicated by them,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “This is not how you treat someone with respect in negotiations. “They are pressure and harassment tactics.”
Actors and writers showed up to demonstrate outside the offices of Netflix Thursday. They were accompanied by Crabtree-Ireland and other members of the negotiation committee of SAG-AFTRAwho shared words of encouragement and resistance with their fellow union members.
“We are all united,” said Cisco Reyes, a member since 1999, outside Netflix. “Our negotiators are not settling for less.”
The people in the demonstrations still held out hope of winning and reaching a future agreement with the AMPTP.
“There is a little anger, there is a little frustration, but there is a lot of hope here at the rally,” actor Romel De Silva, a member since 2012, said Thursday outside Paramount Studios. “It’s important for us to be here every day and show them that we’re not backing down.”
From the beginning, the actors’ conversations lacked the momentum that fueled marathon night and weekend sessions in the writers’ strike and ended that work stoppage. Actors and studios had taken several days off after the resumption, and there were no reports of significant progress despite direct involvement from studio heads, including disney and Netflixas had happened in the writers’ strike.
However, the writers had their own false start in the negotiations. A month before the successful talks, the initial attempt to restart them ended after just a few days.
Members of the Writers Guild of America voted almost unanimously to ratify his new contract on Monday. Writers Guild leaders highlighted their agreement as achieving most of what they had sought when they went on strike nearly five months earlier. They declared their strike over and sent the writers back to work on September 26.
Some members of the Writers Guild of America returned to the protests Thursday in solidarity with the actors, including Tommy Pico, a member since 2020, who recalled the actors’ support when the writers first went on strike. Pico stated that the AMPTP could end the strike “at this time.”
“They absolutely have the capacity, they have the means, they have the opportunity and they are not doing it,” Pico said. “I feel like it’s a demonstration of power.”
Late night talk shows have returned to the air and other programs, including “Saturday night Live“, will soon follow. But without actors, production of scripted shows and movies will remain on hold indefinitely.
“Any differences we have will only be resolved by talking to each other,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “We are ready. We are at the table. All they have to do is come back.”
Via: AP News
Editor’s note: I thought this was going to be resolved a few weeks after the writers’ strike ended, at most. But now the outlook looks tough. What is going to happen? Are we just going to have animated shows until this is fixed? Wait, voice actors are needed. Demons! Time to cancel streaming for 2024 guys, there’s not going to be anything.
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