SAG-AFTRA and Studios To Continue Negotiating on Wednesday; New Details on Last Week’s A-Lister Call
The negotiating committees for the actors’ guild and the main Hollywood studios, along with their respective leaderships, will resume talks to end the 100+-day strike. Both sides had a two-week break after the CEOs walked out when SAG-AFTRA proposed a model for streaming residuals that was “a bridge too far” for the AMPTP, but resumed their bargaining sessions on Tuesday.
A new story from The Hollywood Reporter broke down earlier this week how the negotiations resumed. We knew that the union’s leadership, including President Fran Drescher and lead negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, met last week with a group of top-tier members of SAG-AFTRA that included George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Emma Stone, Scarlett Johansson, Tyler Perry, and Meryl Streep, among others. Apparently, the meeting was already off to a great start when Drescher asked to take a screenshot of the meeting (the union argues that it was with the intention of “[preserving] the historic moment in the life of the union”, which they like to do); Perry politely declined, asking to get down to business.
This isn’t the first instance of unusual or off-putting behavior on Drescher’s side since the negotiations started. Per LA Times, the union leader “carries a heart-shaped plush toy with a smiley face — a gift from an 11-year-old fan — and props it on the negotiating table, where she sits opposite Iger.” She also often recites Buddhist quotes and apparently asked the negotiators during a particularly tense session to “dial it down”, later sharing a “poignant” conversation she’d had with her 94-year-old father. Drescher, a cancer and sexual assault survivor, told THR in a statement: “I don’t need to emulate male energy to be an effective leader.”
Her partner in the negotiations, Crabtree-Ireland, also said the following: “Sexist tropes being used to diminish women leaders in Hollywood is nothing new, and this is yet another egregious example. Fran is bringing balance and consensus to what can be an antagonistic process.”
But back to the meeting. As previously reported, there were two sticking points and lots of conclusions taken by both sides. George Clooney pitched the idea of removing the $1 million caps on union fees so that high-earning members can actually contribute even more money to the pool. (Note: the SAG-AFTRA annual fees consist of a $231.96 rate plus 1.575% of covered earnings up to $1 million.) This was complimentary to a bottom-up residuals model Ben Affleck devised to ensure the last names on the call sheet would be the first to get the residuals.
Both proposals have been shot down by SAG-AFTRA, as Drescher explained in an Instagram video last week. But that was not even the point — the actors argue that their pitch was not a “magic bullet” or even a possible solution. It was an attempt to think outside the box, which could be necessary now that the “inside the box” ideas haven’t really worked. However, their main takeaway was a lack of confidence in the negotiating committee’s abilities to actually resolve the strike anytime soon. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Drescher even said during a bargaining session with the CEOs “I don’t care if we are here for a year” (this is according to studio-side sources, while being denied by a union source).
After that meeting, Crabtree-Ireland got on a phone call on Saturday, when the strike hit its 100-day anniversary, with Disney CEO Bob Iger, in which the exec expressed the studios’ desire to go back to the room. Then, AMPTP chief negotiator Carol Lombardini had his own call with her union counterpart, which resulted in a joint press release between studios and actors saying negotiations would resume Tuesday.
So what happened on Tuesday? We don’t really know at this point. The studios apparently brought a new offer to the table, which included a new proposal for a residuals model — one that, according to Deadline, “flopped” in the room. Some context here: SAG-AFTRA originally asked for 2% of the streamers’ annual revenue, then they dropped it down to 1%, and later, in a move that made the studios leave the table, they asked for 0.57 cents per subscriber/year. (Isn’t that sort of the same thing as a revenue percent share? It kind of is.) While there are some details missing here, the AMPTP would have offered a “generous model based on compensation” that “stripped their previous revenue sharing asks down to small percentage per subscriber fee”.
The session did not go very well, but it is at least a positive sign that they are talking, and most importantly, that they agreed to resume talks the day after. Whether this will be a situation like with the WGA, where it just took five straight days to actually hammer out a deal, or it will take another few weeks, perhaps with another breaking point, who knows. But for now, the main sticking points remain the streaming residuals, a pay increase that is able to keep up with inflation, and protective measures against AI. While most of the media talk has been centered on the first one, at some point both sides will have to circle back and compromise on the last two.
Dear #SagAftraMembers:
Today, the CEOs came back to the table. We are scheduled to continue talks with them tomorrow.
We will continue to provide updates with you directly. Remember – don’t believe anything you read in the press unless it comes directly from us. pic.twitter.com/WOuxKxC5Fk
— SAG-AFTRA (@sagaftra) October 25, 2023
Stay tuned as the situation continues to develop.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
