Don’t get all excited about the end of the writer’s strike. What, you ask? It just ended! True, but there’s another contract renegotiation coming up that could ruin things even more than the writer’s strike did: the Screen Actors Guild. Their contract is up in July, and if the actors go on strike, Hollywood would shut down even faster, and even more fully, than it ever did last fall.
Luckily, The Hollywood Reporter is telling us that people on both sides of the negotiation—it’s SAG vs. the same old AMPTP producers this time—are working to start negotiations early, hoping that a deal can be struck before the summertime deadline. Even George Clooney is getting in on the action, encouraging people not to be too extreme and to be willing to negotiate fully.
Unfortunately there might be a little bad blood between SAG and another actor’s union, AFTRA, that could cause this whole thing to get ugly. SAG and AFTRA have always re-negotiated their contracts together, but it was looking recently like they might try to go it alone. Now they seem to be back together, but those diverging paths could hurt them in the end.
I think I speak for all of us when I say, please God, don’t make us go through another strike. The actors seem a lot less likely to get the same kind of public support than the writers did—the celebrity spokespeople will just remind us how some actors are making scrillions of dollars, and the unknown actors who really need to be fighting, no one will be interested in seeing. Plus, I need my movies. I need my television. Wrap this up like the DGA did and let this industry stay back in business.
