“What are we doing, moving around furniture on the Titanic?,” SAG-AFTRA leader and former star of The Nanny Fran Drescher asked a packed conference room of reporters on July 13, 2023. Her union of 160,000 performers had just announced it was going on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. It was joining the Writers Guild of America, whose 11,500 members were already engaged in their own work stoppage, in the first double strike by the two unions since 1960. “The jig is up, AMPTP,” she added. “We stand tall. You have to wake up and smell the coffee.”
A little over a year later, Hollywood is still feeling a little bit like the Titanic. During the strike, as creatives contended that they were increasingly being devalued in the streaming era, employment of L.A. entertainment workers reportedly dropped 17 percent. Then, as workers emerged from the labor battle with sapped savings accounts, the business was simultaneously being reshaped by major companies continuing to aggressively cut costs. Production in the U.S. in the last six months is down 37 percent compared to the same period in 2022. (2023’s numbers are skewed by the strikes.) In the wake of the labor battle, scribes have spoken publicly about a dearth of opportunities, while some actors and writers have talked about not being able to meet their union health insurance thresholds.
It seemed that workers — the very ones who walked off the job in hope of a better future in the business — couldn’t catch a break. Do they still believe that the results of the 2023 fight were worth the sacrifice? And how have their hard-fought new union contracts affected their lives so far?
On the anniversary of the start of the double strike, The Hollywood Reporter asked rank-and-file SAG-AFTRA and WGA members, as well as executives and agents, those questions. The responses were decidedly mixed on whether the results of the work stoppage were justified.
David Slack (Magnum P.I.), a former WGA West board member and captain, is one member in the “worth it” camp. He believes the guild was “absolutely right to go on strike,” saying the AI protections were especially impactful. What he regrets is that “the people we work for are so greedy that we occasionally have to walk back and forth in front of their offices for months at a time.” On the other hand, one working screenwriter and former showrunner who declined to provide their name disagreed. He called the WGA strike “one of the great self-inflicted wounds in union history,” adding that the work stoppage allowed companies time to reflect and make deep financial cuts all at once, rather than by tapering slowly over time.
As for SAG-AFTRA, actor Thomas Ochoa (iCarly, The Neighborhood) believes “the strike was worth it based on where we were in the early part of the negotiation,” when SAG-AFTRA and major entertainment firms were far apart on key issues. He feels that SAG-AFTRA benefited culturally in the summer of 2023 by showing that “when we lock arms like that, we can jump further ahead.”
Outside the cocoon of the union, certain agents and executives make the argument that the strikes dealt a harsh blow to the business at a time when it was already in a delicate state amid consolidation and Wall Street’s increased focus on profitability for streaming platforms. One television exec notes they currently have more than 200 writers being submitted for three slots on a single show. “We are in a worse place as an industry due to the strikes,” says the executive. An agency partner adds that a contraction in the entertainment business was already coming pre-strikes, but the strikes “probably accelerated it.”
Scenes from the strike: Supporters of SAG-AFTRA picketed in front of the Netflix offices along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles on Oct. 18, 2023.
But union leaders maintain that the gains made in the 2023 contract deals were necessary to combat persistent downward pressure on wages and working conditions. WGA West president Meredith Stiehm says it “needed to be done.” She explains, “We were at an existential point in how bad things have gotten over the decades, so I would do it again.” SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Irelandhas a similar take. “Given the same circumstances and given the inability of the companies to make a deal with us that we considered fair without a strike, then yes, absolutely I would do it again,” he says. “And I think that the outcome that we achieved was absolutely necessary.”
It’s still too early to judge the overall effects of the WGA’s and SAG-AFTRA’s 2023 contracts, whose full impact and protections will be felt over the course of years. And yet certain key provisions have already been the subject of debate. One of the WGA’s more controversial battles in 2023 — to institute minimum writers room sizes — remains divisive. Prior to the strike, “mini rooms” (small writers rooms typically convened before a company commits to a project) were seen by the guild as problematic, sometimes paying less than a traditional room, offering fewer weeks of employment and not necessarily retaining writers if the project was greenlit. After the union secured a minimum of three writer-producers in development rooms and at least three to six total writers once a show is greenlit, and also premium pay, one narrative currently circulating amongst writers is that studios pulled the plug on small rooms altogether, killing jobs.
“The deal we got didn’t equal writers getting more for [their work in] mini rooms. It meant companies just won’t have mini rooms anymore,” says one veteran TV writer. (At least one studio executive backs this up, saying the additional cost means their company won’t do them anymore. Meanwhile, the agency partner claims more writers are attempting to write all episodes of their shows solo.) The WGA West typically includes employment data in its annual financial reports, and 2024’s has not yet been shared with members. When asked if it could share how the number of mini-room jobs pre-contract compared to the number post-contract, the WGA West declined to comment.
But for Zoe Marshall, an Elsbeth writer and WGA West board member, the new restrictions on these rooms led to a positive working experience. Marshall just finished working in a pre-greenlight development room for a Legally Blonde spinoff at Amazon that she says “followed the spirit of the 2023 MBA truly to a T,” including, she says, offering minimums of nearly two times the previous rate. Marshall adds, “I feel really proud of what the Guild was able to do in terms of the reconfiguration of pre-greenlight development rooms.” Carnival Row and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim has heard the debate around whether the minimum staffing language killed mini-room jobs. He asks, “What’s our goal here? Is it quantity of jobs or quality of jobs? I would argue that mini rooms were very good for quantity of jobs, but lousy for quality of jobs.”
SAG-AFTRA actors, meanwhile, are grappling with one of their union’s signature 2023 contract gains: a bonus to reward performers for successful made-for-streaming titles. Seventy-five percent of the proceeds from the bonus will be distributed to the artists on those shows, while 25 percent has been earmarked to go to a larger pool of performers that has yet to be specified. (The WGA received a different version of this bonus that will go directly to project contributors and will not be pooled. SAG-AFTRA has estimated its version could yield around $120 million over the course of its three-year contract.)
Scenes from the strike: Picket signs from SAG-AFTRA supporters in October. 2023.
Eight months after their union’s strike ended, SAG-AFTRA members still don’t know the details of the larger pool that will receive this bonus. And some aren’t happy about its overall structure. Take L.A. Local board member Kevin McCorkle (The Amazing Spider-Man), who says, “Instead of us standing up and saying ‘We want revenue share’ … we got hoodwinked into this [provision that] if a show has 20 percent of eyeballs in the first 90 days, then a bonus kicks in. And the actors that are given that bonus must relinquish 25 percent to go back into the general pool.” According to Crabtree-Ireland, a committee within the union is still in the process of finalizing a trust agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. SAG-AFTRA has just received its first tranche of data of first-quarter projects that qualified for the bonus.
But perhaps the most important result of the strike are the provisions that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA secured on AI. In what could be the first union agreement to tackle AI in a specific business, the WGA and employers agreed to bar the technology from being able to write or rewrite scripts or generate the “source material” upon which scripts can be based. SAG-AFTRA secured a long list of regulations, including that actors must consent to employers creating a “digital replica” of them for a job. If an employer creates a non-human “synthetic performer” using generative AI, that employer must inform the union and “bargain in good faith” for the character to replace a human performer.
With adoption of the technology moving quickly, SAG-AFTRA’s language regulating AI has generated concerns and confusion among some union members. Both Nandini Bapat, an actor who has appeared on Mythic Quest and Barry, and stunt performer Marie Fink (Barbie, Thor: Love and Thunder) were, this past spring on two separate Warner Bros. shows, taken aback when they were asked on their first day of work to consent to the creation of a digital replica in their contracts. Fink was working on The Sex Lives of College Girls, while Bapat declines to name the show she worked on as a co-star. Neither were informed before their first day that this consent might be requested and both balked at what they were being asked to approve, and so did not sign.
But the performers say they were then told that signing was a condition of employment, that the contract language was standard. (The 2023 SAG-AFTRA contract allows employers to decline to hire performers who do not consent to digital replicas.) Both Bapat and Fink were under the impression that their new union contract required advance notice of such a contract ask (Bapat says her work contract even included language that the “producer has provided the requisite advance notice”) and that they had to be given a description of how the replica would be used. They both involved the union.
After an arduous back and forth, Bapat eventually did not have to sign this part of the contract for the job, which she completed and was not scanned for, while Fink says the studio eventually sent her home after she wouldn’t sign off on the language. She received a day’s pay anyway, but not her “stunt adjustment” — bonus compensation that rewards the difficulty level of the stunt. From SAG-AFTRA, she has received “no updates and it’s pretty upsetting.” (Warner Bros. did not end up scanning anyone on The Sex Lives of College Girls, according to a person familiar with the show.)
A SAG-AFTRA spokesperson says that advance notice is only required 48 hours before the creation of a digital replica, or before a scan occurs, and that a “reasonably specific” description of any use of the digital replica is required prior to a performer consenting to that use, with limited exceptions. Warner Bros. declined comment.
The jury is still out on how effective the unions’ AI language will be. In the view of Renard Jenkins, a former Warner Bros. senior vp and the current president and CEO of tech and consulting firm I2A2, the WGA’s AI contract language still holds up, in part because, for now, AI-generated works are not copyrightable. Jenkins believes the SAG-AFTRA language ultimately “may need more work” because “the technology is changing so quickly and it is becoming so good that it is relatively easy to replicate an actor or actress and essentially put them in places where they haven’t been.”
Scenes from the strike: Members of SAG-AFTRA walk in protest at the SAG-AFTRA Strike at Walt Disney Studios on Nov. 1, 2023, in Burbank.
One key area to watch moving forward, according to entertainment attorney and Jackoway Austen partner Darren Trattner, is the legality of using material generated by writers to train AI systems. “Everyone punted on [that battle] in the 2023 labor negotiations,” he says. “Ultimately, training and scraping is a significant issue, the resolution of which will likely come from the courts,” he adds.
In the shorter term, Vincent Amaya, a background actor who has appeared on 9-1-1 and Sons of Anarchy, currently says he’s happy with the gains in the SAG-AFTRA contract. He is excited about the unusually high minimum wage rates that SAG-AFTRA set for background actors (11 percent in the first year alone), an increase in required background performers on West Coast television shows from 22 to 25 and the AI protections. Background actors have, for some time prior to the 2023 contract, been required to get scanned for certain jobs. Now, Amaya is planning on declining any work that gives advance notice of digital replica scans (a request he hasn’t encountered yet under the 2023 contract).
Amaya says the strikes “were definitely worth it” because the technology was looming: “We wanted to get ahead of the ball. We did not want to have ambiguity in our contracts because we failed to recognize that the world is changing around us.”
Additional reporting by Lacey Rose.
This story appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.