SAG-AFTRA will hold a news conference at noon Los Angeles time after its national board voted on whether to make the strike official, joining the ongoing walkout of Hollywood writers for the first time in 63 years.
“Studios and streamers have implemented massive unilateral changes to our industry’s business model, while insisting on freezing our contracts in amber,” SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said in a statement: “Their refusal to meaningfully engage with our core proposals and our members It’s the basic disdain shown that has brought us to this point.The studios and streamers have underestimated the determination of our members, as they are about to fully discover.
Fran Tresher, the union’s president, blasted the Coalition of Motion Picture and Television Producers — a bargaining group representing the major studios — that he publicly hoped could reach a deal a few weeks ago.
“AMPTP’s responses to the union’s most important programs are disrespectful and insulting to the massive contributions we’ve made to this industry,” Drescher said. “Companies have refused to engage meaningfully on some topics, while others have completely stonewalled us. Until they negotiate in good faith, we cannot reach an agreement.
AMPTP blamed the actors’ union for not reaching an agreement.
“Instead of continuing to negotiate, SAG-AFTRA has set us on a course that will deepen the financial crisis of thousands who depend on the industry for a living,” AMPTP spokesman Scott Rowe said in a statement.
The actors’ demands largely mirror those of their counterparts in the Writers Guild of America, whose 11,000 members have been on strike for months. They want restrictions on artificial intelligence technology that can already simulate an actor’s look or a writer’s style, and a new business model for the streaming era, which unions say is turning Hollywood’s creative process into a gig economy.
Production on many shows and movies has already been halted since the WGA went on strike in early May. The collective walkout of the cast is expected to halt almost all remaining shooting.
SAG-AFTRA and the studios have tried for weeks to avoid a second strike, extending the original deadline to June 30 this month and seeking last-minute help from the U.S. government’s Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which dispatched a senior mediator. To participate in the final round of negotiations on Wednesday.
That didn’t work, and Hollywood is now forcing almost all on-air talent off the set. A-list actors etc Meryl Streep, Jamie Lee Curtis, Quinta Brunson and Pedro Pascal previously expressed their desire to strike in an open letter to the leaders of SAG-AFTRA. (Greg D. Raelson, FMCS director of congressional and public affairs, said intermediaries will continue to help.)
A double strike with writers would be almost unprecedented. While both actors and writers have walked off the set multiple times, including the 2007 writers’ strike and the six-month artists’ strike in 2000, this is one of the longest entertainment strikes in history—they’ve been on strike at the same time: in 1960, the Screen Actors Guild was led by Ronald Reagan.
That double walkout ended when the studios agreed to pay actors a percentage of the money earned when the films were licensed to TV — among other transformative conditions.
