July 14, 2023. Actors and Screenwriters on Strike in Hollywood. What it means?

Of course, no projects in progress or to start with, move forward, but what about what was already done?

It will air or be shown, but it will not have interviews, red carpets, posts on social networks, or participation in awards or film festivals. Zip. Nada. Social Blackout while the strike is in effect.

For Fran Drescher (our eternal The Nanny), president of the Actors Union, this is a stand against greed. And yes, she points to dual streaming and artificial intelligence as antagonists, which have made (for writers and actors) the traditional and secular business model irrelevant. After all, contracts have not been updated to reflect technological advances.

“If we don’t stand up now, we are all in danger. You can’t change the business model as much as you have and not expect the contract to change as well,” she said.

On the other side of the table, representing executives and studios, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers argues that they are offering historic terms and significant increases in a “groundbreaking” proposal to protect (the actors) from the use of Artificial Intelligence. “Regrettably, the Union has chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry,” they retort.

History is ironic. A little over 60 years ago, the two categories came together to revise terms and conditions in the face of the “television threat”. At that time, they defined the rules for dividing waste for reruns and film screenings, among other gains that are still present today. The fight may even seem to be the same, but it is more complex than going up against two technological fronts. The question is about transparency (streaming refuses to share visualization data so that it is the metric to define the division of royalties for good performance, for example), reviewing the values provided for in the contract with windows that no longer exist or are impacted by the platforms and, above all, the possibility of AI replacing everyone: actors, screenwriters, technicians and who knows who else.

Therefore, those like me who are already feeling the ‘absence’ of news, should prepare for another dry season. Only a few productions that managed to keep running because they had closed scripts were running and even then, only those outside the United States are still recording, like House of the Dragon. The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power managed to close its second season before the strike, but it may still be released on schedule. But the recordings of Gladiator 2, even in Morocco, were interrupted by having unionized American actors in the cast.

If on our side it will be empty, the pockets of the studios will also be affected by the stoppage, affecting the results in the second half of the year. The group’s demands include percentage increases in minimum wage levels over 35 years, “substantial increases” in contribution limits to pensions and health plans, and a 76% increase in foreign residuals paid for big-budget streaming shows, among other benefits, as well as rules to limit the use of AI. Remember the episode Joan Is Terrible from Black Mirror? In the real world, actors fear that their digital images will be used without their permission or adequate compensation, as we saw in the Netflix series. But what the studios claim is that at this post-pandemic moment, where they still haven’t made a profit after the billions of dollars invested, it’s too early to talk about redistribution. Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, and others lost hundreds of millions of dollars in streaming in the last quarter, laying off thousands of employees, not least because even as online consumption has increased, this movement has eroded the television ad revenue, which sustains the business. Not forgetting that ticket sales have been downgraded to zero in the pandemic and are struggling to go up, even with the opening of cinemas.

Among the main demands are:

• Readjustment of salaries to reflect the increase in inflation,
• Readjustment of residuals to balance the new redistribution scenario
• The use of “mini rooms”, is the practice of using a small core of fixed writers and temporarily hiring others to deliver the script
• Protection and compensation for writers affected by the new shorter-term contract model,
• Establish minimum fees to be applied to writers of comedy variety shows made for new media
• Restrict the use of snippets that don’t pay the writers.
• Update contract terms for actors also affected by reduced seasons and longer hiatuses
  offset
• Fair play the actors by using their AI-created likenesses
• Ensuring that AI cannot be used to create unpaid content from a writer’s original work.
• Prevent studios from being able to train AI to create new performances from an actor’s existing work.
• Change process to self-recorded tests. During the pandemic, instead of participating in a personal interview, actors began to record excerpts themselves at home and some invest in lighting, scenery, and costumes, which is why the Union fears that a new pattern is emerging that will make the category assume the costs that are the responsibility of the studios

The last writers’ strike, in 2007, lasted 100 days. The actors stopped for three months in 1980. The impasse that experts call existentialist is much more complex. History is written as we read and write. Long live the revolution!

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