Hollywood’s screenwriters’ union voted yesterday in their first collective strike in more than six decades, stalling a new contract with studios and broadcast services and shutting down Hollywood and the U.S. entertainment industry. In real danger..
It was the first time two major Hollywood unions had gone on strike at the same time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was president of the Actors Guild.
In an emotional speech when the strike, which began at midnight, was announced, Fran Drescher, president of the Actors Guild, took aim at industry executives.
“The bosses prioritize Wall Street and their own greed, and they forget about the key stakeholders who make the machine work,” Drescher said. It’s ugly. Shame on them. They are on the wrong side of history. Hours earlier, a three-year contract expired and talks broke down between the American Screen Actors Guild of Television and Radio Artists and the Motion Picture and Television Producers Alliance, which represents Disney, Netflix, Amazon and other employers.
Screenwriters who sat outside Netflix’s Hollywood offices immediately after the strike was announced chanted, “Pay your actors.”
“Looks like it’s time to take off the masks and raise the banners,” said Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis in a post on “Instagram” with an image of sad and comic masks.
The first strike for film and television actors since 1980 will overshadow the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards, whose nominations were announced earlier in the day. Guild rules prevent actors from giving any interviews or publicity about the awards, and they may not appear at the ceremony.
Actors Guild of America president Fran Tresher confirmed that in anticipation of the expected end of the strike, studios had negotiated unfairly with the union to buy time off and promote upcoming movies over the summer.
“We’ve been cheated,” said the star of the “Nanny” series, which dates back to the nineties of the last century, indicating that he feels “disappointed” after the announcement of the start of the historic strike in Hollywood.
He explained that representatives of studios and broadcast platforms “were behind the scenes and did not hesitate to cancel meetings with us,” adding that “they probably did so in order to have more time to promote their upcoming films in the summer. .”
The strike will halt the production of series and movies in the US, with the industry already hit by a screenwriters’ strike since May.
Under the strike, the union’s 160,000 members, actors and workers in the film and television industries, refrain from participating in any form of promotion of a work, whether through premieres, festivals or social media platforms.
Thus, it is expected that the promotion of the films will be stopped in the summer.
The union agreed to extend negotiations with the Hollywood studio by 10 days before making the decision to strike, a deadline that expired yesterday evening.
The time slot was used to promote films including “Barbie” and “Mission Impossible,” which benefited from the presence of stars including Tom Cruise, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
“I may have acted naïve, but this was my first time negotiating,” said Drescher, adding that “greed is the root cause of all the misfortunes in the world, and this is the most striking example.”
“I thought we could achieve a convergence of views, and they would see the extent to which this new business model was imposed on the entire industry,” he added of the streaming platforms.
Like screenwriters, actors are demanding better salaries in light of record inflation and guarantees when their work is damaged as a result of resorting to artificial intelligence programs.
In particular, they deplore the low remuneration they receive for each re-broadcast of a film or series, and that these sums are large for the re-broadcast of a television work because it is based on advertisements, while it is very low for re-broadcasting. Running works via streaming sites that do not provide statistics on the number of views.
The second main point of the negotiations is the issue of artificial intelligence, which is increasingly used in Hollywood, for example, Disney uses it to create the opening credits of the “Secret Vision” series.
• 160 thousand members of the union will stop working.
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