100 days in, why no deal to end actors’ strike?
LOS ANGELES — While screenwriters are busy back at work, film and TV actors remain on picket lines, with the longest strike in their history set to hit 100 days on Saturday after talks broke off with studios. Here’s a look at where things stand, how their stretched-out standoff compares to past strikes, and what happens next.
Hopes were high and leaders of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists were cautiously optimistic when they resumed negotiations on Oct. 2 for the first time since the strike began 2½ 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 them on Oct. 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 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 studios said the SAGAFTRA proposals would cost them an untenable $800 million annually. The union said that number was a 60% overestimate.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, one of the executives at the bargaining sessions, said that at the session that spurred the studios to walk away, the union had asked for a “a subscriber levy unrelated to viewing or success” on every subscriber to streaming services.
“This really broke our momentum unfortunately,” Sarandos told investors on a Netflix earnings call Wednesday.
SAG-AFTRA leaders said it was ridiculous to frame this demand as 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,” said Duncan Crabtree- Ireland, SAGAFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator. “We made changes to our AI proposal. We made dramatic changes to what used to be our streaming revenue share proposal.”
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.
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. SAGAFTRA says it is willing to resume at any time, but that won’t change its demands.
“I think that they think that we’re going to cower,” Drescher said. “But that’s never going to happen because this is a crossroads and we must stay on course.”
The studio alliance said in a statement after the talks broke off that they had made generous-but-rejected offers in every disputed area.
The writers did have their own false start with studios that may give some reason for optimism. Their union attempted to restart negotiations with studios in midAugust, more than three months into their strike. Those talks went nowhere, breaking off after a few days. A month later, the studio alliance came calling again. Those talks took off, with most of their demands being met after five marathon days that resulted in a tentative deal that its members would vote to approve almost unanimously.
Hollywood actors strikes have been less frequent and shorter than those by writers. The Screen Actors Guild has gone on strike against film and TV studios only three times in its history.
A 1980 strike would be the actors’ longest for film and television until this year. That time, they were seeking payment for their work appearing on home video cassettes and cable TV, along with significant hikes in minimum compensation for roles. A tentative deal was reached with significant gains but major compromises in both areas. Union leadership declared the strike over after 67 days, but many members were unhappy. It was nearly a month before leaders could rally enough votes to ratify the deal.