The union that represents film and television actors said Friday that its The national board of directors had voted with 86 percent support to send a tentative contract with the studios to members for ratification.
The ratification process will begin on Tuesday and end the first week of December. However, actors can return to work immediately.
Members are expected to approve the contract, which Fran Drescher, the union president, estimates to be worth more than $1 billion over three years. She highlighted the “extraordinary scope” of the deal, noting that it included protections around the use of artificial intelligence, a higher minimum wage, better health care funding, studio concessions on self-taped auditions, upgraded hair and makeup services on sets, and a requirement for intimacy coordinators for sex scenes, among other gains.
“They had to give in,” Ms. Drescher said at a news conference during a nearly 30-minute monologue that touched on Veterans Day, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula costume, his parents, the Roman Empire, stubbornness in studies, Buddhism, Frederick Douglass and his dog.
The SAG-AFTRA union, which represents tens of thousands of actors, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the studios, reached a tentative agreement Wednesday. This followed a bitter standoff that contributed to a near-complete shutdown of production in the entertainment industry. At 118 days, it is the longest film and television strike in the union’s 90-year history.
The tentative agreement was also historic, according to the studio alliance, which said it reflected “the largest contract-to-contract wins in the union’s history.”
The actors’ strike, combined with the writers’ strike that began in May and ended in September, devastated the entertainment economy. Hundreds of thousands of crew members have been left idle, with some losing their homes and turning to food banks for groceries. Some small businesses that service studios – costume dry cleaners, prop warehouses, catering companies – may never recover.
The two strikes caused about $10 billion in losses nationally, according to Todd Holmes, associate professor of entertainment media management at California State University, Northridge. While the major studios are based in Los Angeles, they also use sound complexes in Georgia, New York, New Jersey and New Mexico.
Kevin Klowden, chief global strategist at the Milken Institute, an economic think tank, was more conservative in his estimate, putting the losses at more than $6 billion. He added that it “might take some time” to know the true size.
On Friday, the SAG-AFTRA board of directors, which includes Sharon Stone, Sean Astin and Rosie O’Donnell, released a summary of the contents of the tentative contract. Although it did not get everything it asked for, the union made significant progress.
The final sticking point involved “synthetic knockoffs,” or the use of artificial intelligence to create an entirely fabricated character by merging recognizable features of real actors. The union obtained consent and guarantees of compensation.
“You could imagine prompting a generative AI system trained on the performances of a set of actors to create a digital artist, for example, who has the smile of Julia Roberts,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, executive director of SAG-AFTRA, in an interview. . “Prior to this agreement, there was no contractual or legal basis to require or prohibit consent. “Now there will be.”
But this strike has never concerned the stars. Stars like Jennifer Lawrence and Brad Pitt negotiate their own contracts (or, more accurately, their agents). The contract in principle covers the minimums, i.e. which actors who have no influence are paid.
SAG-AFTRA had demanded an 11 percent increase in the minimum wage during the first year of the contract. The studios had insisted they could offer no more than 5 percent, the same as recently granted (and accepted) by the writers’ and directors’ unions. Ultimately, the union managed to secure a 7 percent raise in the first year.
“This is really important because it sends a very clear signal to other unions,” Mr Crabtree-Ireland said. “To my knowledge, no one has ever been able to break the pattern before, because AMPTP always set a number and everyone stuck to it. »
SAG-AFTRA failed on one point. He had entered into negotiations demanding a percentage of revenue from streaming services. It had proposed a 2 percent share, which was later reduced to 1 percent, before moving to a per-subscriber fee. Ms. Drescher had made the request a priority, but companies like Netflix balked, calling it “a bridge too far.”
Instead, the studio alliance proposed a new residual (a sort of royalty) for streaming programs based on performance metrics, which the union, after making some adjustments, agreed to accept. It’s similar to what the Writers Guild of America got in its negotiations: Cast members on streaming shows that attract at least 20% of subscribers will get a bonus.
However, unlike the Writers Guild, SAG-AFTRA also convinced the studio alliance to agree to a system in which 25% of the bonus money will be put into a fund that will be distributed to the cast of lesser streaming shows. successful.
“I felt like it was a win or a loss?” » said Ms. Drescher. “But we get the money. We have opened a new source of income. “What matters is that we got into another pocket.”
