Hollywood flooded by united actors and writers in solidarity march.
Thousands of Striking Writers and Actors March Through Hollywood
LOS ANGELES—Thousands of striking writers and actors staged a solidarity march through Hollywood on Sept. 13, culminating in a boisterous rally outside Paramount studios as the dual labor stoppages continue to halt movie and TV production.
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike since early May. The Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) actors’ union joined the writers on the picket lines in July. There have been some negotiations between the WGA and Hollywood studios in recent weeks, but still no indication a resolution is at hand. There has not been any word of talks between the studios and SAG-AFTRA.
On Wednesday morning, thousands of striking writers and actors gathered outside Netflix headquarters in Hollywood, then marched to Paramount studios on Melrose Avenue. Once there, a massive rally was held, featuring speeches and music performances—and forcing closures of streets surrounding the studio.
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SAG-AFTRA billed the event as a solidarity march to send a message to studios that actors and writers are standing firm in their push for fair contracts.
“Your strength and your solidarity and your resolve is going to get us to the other side of this, and history is in the making right now,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher told the crowd. “I know that this strike is not easy, in fact, it’s hard. It’s very hard. And with the passing of time its going to even get harder, but the reason why we had the largest strike authorization in our union history is because we stand at an inflection point.”
She concluded by saying, “Hang in and do not give up, because this is the moment that’s going to change the future.”
Last week, WGA negotiators sent a message to union members suggesting they could more easily reach new contracts with individual Hollywood studios if they broke ranks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which leads labor talks for the industry.
In a message to WGA members, the union’s negotiating team noted that traditional studios have “disparate business models and interests” compared to streaming companies such as Netflix. But since studios and streamers are both relying on the AMPTP to lead the negotiations, it “allows hard liners to dictate the course of action for all the companies.”
“The AMPTP purports to represent all of these disparate corporate interests, but in practice administers a system that favors inflexibility over compromise, and sacrifices the interests of individual companies in reaching a deal. That regression to the hardest line has produced the first simultaneous strikes since 1960,” negotiators wrote, referring to the companion strike by SAG-AFTRA.
WGA negotiators said they have had conversations with individual executives from traditional studios who have expressed a willingness to negotiate terms and even meet some union demands. But since the AMPTP also represents streamers, which are competitors to studios, and negotiates on behalf of all the companies together, there has been no interest by the alliance to budge on some union proposals.
“So, while the intransigence of the AMPTP structure is impeding progress, these behind-the-scenes conversations demonstrate there is a fair deal to be made that addresses our issues,” according to the WGA negotiating team. “We have made it clear that we will negotiate with one or more of the major studios, outside the confines of the AMPTP, to establish the new WGA deal.”
However, the suggestion was dismissed by the AMPTP.
“The AMPTP member companies are aligned and are negotiating together to reach a resolution,” a statement from the alliance said. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
“Every member company of the AMPTP wants a fair deal for writers and actors and an end to the strikes, which are affecting not only our writer and actor colleagues, but also thousands of others across the industry. That is why the AMPTP has repeatedly put forward offers that address major priorities of the WGA, including a last round of offers on Aug. 17th and 18th.”
WGA negotiators have acknowledged there have been movements by the studios on their position regarding protections against the use of artificial intelligence, “but we are not yet where we need to be. As one example, they continue to refuse to regulate the use of our work to train [Artificial Intelligence] to write new content for a motion picture.”
Union officials also said the latest AMPTP offer included some salary boosts, “but only for a statistically tiny category of screenwriters, excluding all but the first writers of original screenplays.”
The offer also included a guarantee of minimum writing staff size for television, “but the loopholes, limitations, and omissions in their modest proposal … make them effectively toothless,” according to the union. The studios also agreed to “allow six WGA staff to study limited streaming viewership data for the next three years,” but a viewership-based compensation package would have to wait until the next contract negotiations in three years, according to the union.
The AMPTP responded by accusing the WGA of remaining “entrenched in its original position, except for a single modest chan
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