Details Revealed on Studios’ AI Proposal to SAG-AFTRA
Negotiations on the new three-year contract between the actors’ guild and the Hollywood studios are set to continue on Tuesday, after SAG-AFTRA told the companies that they were not accepting their “last, best, and final offer” (LBF) from Saturday. And despite that, the parties are still talking, so there’s still hope they will find some common ground.
It’s been reported for a few days that one of the main sticking points in the negotiations has been the issue of artificial intelligence and its regulations. Now, new details may have come to light on that. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the offer the studios extended to the guild on Saturday included a clause, which SAG-AFTRA has pushed back on, that would have allowed top-earning actors to have their likeness scanned and get paid for one day’s work, but not be compensated for the re-use of that digital replica. Moreover, studios would be allowed to use the digital replicas of deceased actors without the consent of their estate or the guild.
A union-side source explained it as follows to the trade:
“This is one of the biggest reasons SAG did not accept the ‘last, best and final’ offer from the AMPTP. We could not allow that language to stand. This is massive. Every A-, B-, C-, D- and E-lister — all the higher-paid performers — who think this is a minimum wage strike, they must know they are in this fight. They have to realize that this is about protecting them. This is their strike now when they realize what’s on the line. The people who launched the campaign to take a deal — they’d be f—ked if we took this deal with that in there.
We think it’s not just reasonable but is absolutely vital to the sustainability of the performance industry,” the union-side source says. “They can’t have that loophole to exploit performers. … [The Schedule F AI language in the AMPTP’s proposal] behooves them to have you dead in that they need consent when you’re alive but not when you’re dead.”
This, of course, contradicts what some of the studio-side sources had leaked to the press or even said on the record. Netflix co-CEO told SAG-AFTRA on Saturday “We didn’t just come toward you, we came all the way to you.” After disappearing for a few days, thinking that it was just a matter of putting a nice lace around it and bringing it home, the chief executives behind Disney, Warner Bros. Discover, Paramount Pictures, and Netflix have returned to some of the meetings lately, including the late-night negotiating session on Monday where the guild responded to the LBF.
In particular, Bob Iger and David Zaslav would be especially interested in this being resolved within the next 24 hours, as they both have quarterly earnings calls on Wednesday. Could this be a situation where SAG-AFTRA is just leaking strategic points to keep the attention of some of the top-earning performers who are clamoring for the strike to end? Absolutely. I have no doubt this clause was a part of one of the previous offers, but whether or not it was really included in Saturday’s LBF, we don’t really know unless they go on the record.
So who knows where this will end. The studios have repeatedly made it clear that they are a bit tired of the whole charade and that this should have been resolved by now, as evidenced by media reports saying if a deal wasn’t made last week, they would reschedule the talks for January, and also by the LBF. And yet, despite sources telling Deadline “There’s still some serious daylight between us, at least as of right now,” both sides are still negotiating. Is this a highly unstable situation that could break apart at any moment, or something that just needs a couple of clauses to be removed and we’ll be good to go? Per THR, none of the issues the guild wanted to raise with the studios were money-related, so that’s a good start.
Here’s to a swift resolution to this whole mess.
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.
