The strike that unites actors and screenwriters in Hollywood is historic. The Actors Guild, led by comedian and activist Fran Drescher, the eternal The Nanny, is extremely important not only for Hollywood. The only time the categories came together like this was 60 years ago when they were dealing with the arrival of TV in the entertainment world.

Fran has been at the head of the SAG-AFTRA union since 2021 and she has proven to be a woman with a pulse, like her most famous character. Listen to what she has to say about the Strike discussion, which started on July 14, 2023. Audio is taken from an interview given to MSNBC.

“It’s very serious, and it weighed heavily on us, but at some point, you have to ‘No, we’re not going to take this anymore’. What are we doing? Moving furniture on the Titanic? It’s insane! We are workers and we are standing up”, she warned when the strike was announced.

“We were dealing with a lot of peripheral issues that seemed to be going well and I naively assumed it would stay that way. But as we got closer to the core issues, it felt like we were being obstructed or were getting further and further away from reaching any kind of agreement,” she told MSNBC. “This came as a real disappointment to me. I didn’t expect this and I really feel deeply sad that we’ve reached this point. We did everything we could to avoid a strike, including extending the talks to 12 days, which was an unprecedented amount of time. We thought that we would be able to cut deeper paths and that’s why we felt that if we could extend it a little bit more, maybe we could avoid [the strike]. But really, they [the studios] didn’t come to the table as often, they canceled a lot of meetings, and I thought maybe they were fighting behind closed doors and that they would really come back with something that was meaningful. But I got a surprise, we were tricked maybe into allowing more summer movie promotion before we pounced,” she said.

“Artificial intelligence is a threat to workers around the world. What are we doing here, the eyes of the world are watching. We happen to be able to garner a lot of interest because of the celebrity component of our workforce, but that doesn’t mean what’s happening to us is unique,” she continued. “Because artificial intelligence and the pursuit of greed by big business are systematically eliminating work from their livelihoods. And we’ve seen this happening since the introduction of streaming. AI and digital have taken over our industry and basically, the entire business model has changed, but they [studios and platforms] are still thinking that we’re going to be satisfied with incremental changes to a contract that was signed in 1960 and no longer applies. It’s a completely different ball game,” she explained.

“This has become a growing problem. We don’t settle for a minimal proposition that essentially ends up paying these people less than we earned in 2020 in real money if that’s what we should be satisfied with by 2026. It’s crazy. And those aren’t the only things,” she explains, “For example, the contracts were based on shows like The Nanny, which had great longevity and a long tail of revenue. That was the name of the game and everyone above the line, up and down the ladder, thrived on it, but now, with streaming, that’s not the case anymore. We are in a vacuum. We’re in a box, walled in with no recipe to follow. Nor is it based on what it used to be, which was ad dollars. Now it’s subscription-based. So you don’t even get the amount of episodes that we used to have, which was 28 episodes but today you’re lucky if you get 10. How do you make a living out of that?’, she asks.

And the position of the Studios to remain intransigent to the demands of the screenwriters, claiming that they would only talk when they were starving. Fran is even more incisive.
“Let me just say that for someone to say that shows arrogance,” she begins. “It is utter disrespect and disrespect for a community that contributes so much to the industry in which they thrive. Which is simply unscrupulous. The total disrespect for people who contribute so much and we [actors] are realizing that too. I thought they would come to the table and really want to make a deal, but that wasn’t the case. To be blocked and faced with a kind of resistance that is almost irrational. I mean, it’s not just about the money. There are things like wanting our artists to work one day and be scanned by an AI and then have the person’s digital likeness and can use that over and over again. That means the person I work hard on will be unemployed,” she argues.

“The questions being raised are new , but still, in a way, the fight is the same as always”, says Fran Drescher. And for those who watched The Nanny, who would face it head-on?

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