Usually when we talk about the media business we are talking about the actions of corporate giants like Disney and Paramount, but in the summer of 2023, it was the actions of the movie and television writers and actors unions that were making the news.
In mid-July, SAG-AFTRA members joined striking screenwriters on the picket lines outside Hollywood studios and streaming companies.
Mandalit del Barco/NPR News
For the first time since 1960 both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) were on strike at the same time against the Hollywood studios shutting down virtually all production and promotion of scripted movies and TV shows.
In the 1960 strike, the Screen Actors Guild was led by Ronald Reagan, who would go on to become the only union president to become president of the United States. According to entertainment news magazine Variety:
In that strike, both the writers and actors were wrestling with compensation issues arising from the dawn of television. Together, they won residuals for TV reruns and for broadcast of films on TV and established the first pension and welfare plan.
A lot changed over the 60 years since the last double strike. This time the unions were dealing with the decline of legacy linear television and the move to streaming and digital video — a transition at least as transformational as the rise of broadcast television in the 1950s and 60s. They were also concerned about how artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to capture actors’ images and voices and turn them into on-screen performances without additional involvement by the actors.
Until the rise of streaming services, actors and writers could count on getting paid when a show or movie was initially created and screened or broadcast. They would then receive residual payments each time a show was aired on broadcast/cable TV as a syndicated rerun. (Think about how you might have watched old episodes of Friends, Seinfeld, or The Office in the afternoon on your local television station or on a cable channel such as TNT or TBS.)
For many writers and actors, there can be long gaps between big, successful projects, and the residuals are what help them pay the bills during those lean times. (Remember, for every high-paid star in Hollywood there are literally dozens of journeyman workers who are just hoping to make ends meet.)
For the 2023 strike, writers and actors had a number of new concerns:
- They were calling for a bigger, better defined share of the income from streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, Paramount Plus and Hulu. Given that’s where most viewing is moving, that’s where the people who work in the industry say they need to be getting more of their income.
- Both writers and actors were worried about how studios might use artificial intelligence computer programs to write scripts or create photorealistic recreations of actors for movies or shows.
- According to film and TV professor Andrew Susskind, TV shows traditionally have lasted 20-24 episodes a season, giving staff writers eight to 10 months of work per season. “And being around for all the episodes, it offers writers the opportunity to grow, because they’re there for script writing, they get to see preproduction, maybe get to see postproduction; so they get to learn production and maybe one day get to be producers or showrunners,” Susskind said.Now shows are more likely to have 10 or fewer episodes, and the writing staff will be smaller with more freelancers being brought in to work on just a single episode. This gives the writers employment of weeks rather than months.
These strikes, of course, delayed or canceled the production of a wide range of projects. The actors’ strike will also meant that the stars could not help promote new movies or shows. The first of these to be hit was the Christopher Nolan summer blockbuster Oppenheimer, where stars Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh were only available for a single red-carpet appearance before the strike sent them to the picket lines.
The studios saw things a bit differently than the unions, stating that the strikes were coming at “the worst time in the world,” according to Disney head Bob Iger. Speaking to CNBC, Iger said:
“There’s a level of expectation that [the unions] have that is just not realistic. And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”
Although studio executives made snarky anonymous claims in the Hollywood press that they would simply wait out the strike “until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” in the end, the studios largely gave in to union demands. In separate contracts, both unions reached agreements for residuals for programming on streaming media, strict controls on how artificial intelligence can be used in producing content, and minimum staffing levels for writers’ rooms.
David Sims, culture writer for The Atlantic, argued that the reason the writers and actors could outlast the studios was that their financial situations were so bad they had nothing to lose by staying out on strike. The media companies, on the other hand, had nothing to put on screens or in theaters. As an example, over the Christmas holidays of 2023 my Dear Wife and I went to a local commercial theater to watch a re-release of Bruce Willis’ 1988 thriller Die Hard, which was showing because there simply weren’t enough new movies to fill the limited number of screens we have in our small, Midwestern town. These delays were particularly rough for the media giants that had been forced just three years earlier to delay large numbers of big movies because of theaters closed for the COVID pandemic.
With both writers and actors back on the job, the question is now what will the working relationship be between producers and creatives in Hollywood? Actor and SAG-AFTRA strike captain Chelsea Schwartz posed the question to NPR, “How do you go from being so angry at these people to being, like ‘and we’re best buds now, working together on set?’ We forgive, but you don’t forget.”