The film industry was paralyzed this Thursday in the United States due to the strike that more than 160,000 Hollywood actors began to demand better wages and protection against the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the business. The strike is added to the one started in May by some 11,500 scriptwriters. It is the first time since 1960 that both unions stop together and put the sector on the brink of collapse.
The pressure measure against the big studios was decided in a unanimous vote by the national board of the Screen Actors Union – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-Aftra), after its leaders recommended a strike after negotiations failed. for four weeks with the Alliance of Film and Television Producers (AMPTP), representative of the main Hollywood studios and broadcasters, including Amazon, Apple, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony or Warner Discovery.
In addition to salary increases in their agreement, the interpreters demand from the industry a new distribution of "residual" profits for image rights in contracts with streaming platforms and a regulation of Artificial Intelligence that restricts its use to protect employment .
The actors are also calling for a rethinking of self-recorded auditions, promoted in the pandemic and which have caused a drastic cut in live casting sessions.
“You have to make at least $26,000 a year to get health insurance, and there are a lot of people who only cross that threshold through their residual payments,” actor Matt Damon said Wednesday. “Money is being made and it needs to be allocated in a way that cares for the people who are now on the sidelines,” he added.
In the most substantial, it is about avoiding the bankruptcy of the interpreters who now live on the threshold of precariousness and avoiding the extinction of the so-called “middle class” of actors.
The strike that the writers began on May 3 has forced the studios to replace their late-night television talk shows, a key piece of information and entertainment in the US, until boredom. That, in addition to having interrupted most of the production of the autumn television season and of not a few high-budget films.
Now, the double strike of actors and screenwriters leads to the closure of the rest of the Hollywood productions. After the crisis caused by the pandemic, the sector could suffer a collapse from which it would take time to recover, unless the parties reached an agreement in a reasonable time.
At the moment, the positions seem too far apart. At the press conference where the heads of the actors' union announced the strike, its president, the actress and filmmaker Fran Drescher, known for her leading role in the comedy The Nanny, stated that "what is happening to us is happening in all fields of employment" in the United States. And it's because, she explained, "employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential taxpayers who run the machine."
"It's incredible how they treat us! I'm ashamed of them! They are on the wrong side of history!" Drescher exclaimed. And he assured that they, the interpreters, are "the victims" of this conflict. And the big studios , whose managers "charge millions of dollars and still complain about losses" in their companies, "have left us no other choice," he said.
Disney boss Bob Iger acknowledged that the actors' strike will have a "very damaging effect on the entire industry."
