Chris Pizzello/AP Photo
Fran Drescher, left, president of SAG-AFTRA, and Meredith Stiehm, president of Writers Guild of America West, pose together during a rally by striking writers outside Paramount Pictures studio, May 8, 2023, in Los Angeles.
Earlier this week, Fran Drescher, the president of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), announced that the union’s negotiations with the studios for a new contract were going swimmingly. The union’s members had overwhelmingly voted to authorize their leaders to call a strike when their current contract expired on June 30th unless their concerns were met, but Drescher’s missive indicated that a deal was close at hand and no strike would be necessary.
Yesterday, 300 of the union’s most well-known members—including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Quinta Brunson, Rami Malek, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Brendan Fraser, Neil Patrick Harris, Amy Schumer, Amy Poehler, Glenn Close, John Leguizamo, and Ben Stiller—released a statement urging the union to hold out for far more than its leaders appeared to be willing to accept. Noting the massive growth of streaming (a medium that generally undercompensates those involved in the creative and production processes), the threat of AI, and the new requirement that non-star actors record their own auditions, Streep and Co. declared the current moment to be “an unprecedented inflection point in our industry, and what might be considered a good deal in any other years is simply not enough.”
Since yesterday, more actors, including Charlize Theron and Joaquin Phoenix, have signed on to the statement. The list now includes roughly 1,000 signatories, among whom, somewhat bewilderingly, is Drescher herself. It now appears that the negotiations, which had been set to wrap up tomorrow, will be extended to July 7th.
“With inflation and continued growth in streaming,” the actors’ statement continued,
we need a seismic realignment of our minimum pay and new media residuals, our exclusivity carveouts, and other terms. We also think it’s absolutely vital that the deal restore dignity to the casting process by regulating how self-tapes are used. This is an enormous problem for working class actors. And especially as regards Artificial Intelligence, we do not believe that SAG-AFTRA members can afford to make halfway gains in anticipation that more will be coming in three years, and we think it is absolutely vital that this negotiation protects not just our likenesses, but makes sure we are well compensated when any of our work is used to train AI. We want you to know that we would rather go on strike than compromise on these fundamental points.
If the actors do strike, they’ll join the industry’s writers, who’ve been on the picket lines since May 2nd over many of the same issues. In a broader sense, they’ll join the legions of professional and proto-professional workers (physicians, professors, docents, university teaching assistants, think-tankers et al.) who’ve been joining unions or walking off the job over the past two years. These all are workers whom their employers can’t readily replace; the tens of millions of retail, factory, construction, and other workers who can be replaced are still largely blocked from forming unions by the threats of being fired (generally illegal but also unpunishable) from their employers.
One problem not on the actors’ list is the current ubiquity and market domination of Marvel/DC schlock blockbusters, in which actors are very well paid but also concealed behind superhero costumes and cartoon de-characterizations to the point of indistinguishability. When the film-going audience is dominated by 11-year-old boys grooving on Transformers, the lessons of the Actors Studio won’t carry an actor very far.
The rise of the comic-book epics also suggests that AI might well pose a threat to the studio CEOs themselves. As they all have followed the same path—eliminating genres that involved actual human beings, heeding Wall Street’s demands for kaboom-a-thons that entrance newly-or -pre-pubescent boys the world over—there’s less and less reason for the studios to employ human chief executives with skill sets and preferences of their own, particularly since they’re paid huge bucks that could otherwise go straight to their mega-rich investors. It may be the case—and most certainly would be in a world where the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice—that AI will come for Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, and leave Meryl Streep untouched.
