hid hijack, What Exit?
So join a union
Moderating:
A modnote and a staff note and you still continue the Hijack.
I’ll make this simple, you are no longer to post in this thread.
No real excuse for missing that pair of notes.
This topic was automatically opened after 11 minutes.
Your standard actor doesn’t get to negotiate a contract. That they sign the union contract makes their compensation fairly reasonable.
In any case, by your own words, it is fine for the studios and the union who speak for the actors to negotiate a closed shop.
Residuals are profit sharing. Commercials, which use more actors than series, that run all the time make more money for the agency. Why not give some of that to the actors? Should CEOs get paid the same if their companies do $1 million in sales versus $1 billion? Widget makes would be like extras, who don’t get residuals. The widget designer might will have a bonus plan which gives more money for successful products.
Not to mention that residuals keep production costs down, paying your average actor a relatively smaller amount in return for a possible bigger payout later. Increase salaries to a living wage level and there will be fewer productions and thus less work for everyone, including crew who don’t get residuals.
As I understand it, that’s the system that was in place during the thirties and forties:
Residuals were the result of a few major labor actions:
https://www.sagaftra.org/membership-benefits/residuals/history-residuals
I trust that the people who undertook these major actions did so because residuals are really important to themselves and their colleagues, and that they’re undertaking the current labor action for similar reasons. If it made sense, from the workers’ perspective, to get paid piecework, that’s the system they’d be striking for.
In case there’s any confusion about why studio leadership is so desperate right now to break the unions and pad their margins long term, this article will be illuminating:
Not related to the strike, but directly related to the entertainment industry financial model. Basically the executives have totally muffed the transition away from the old packaged-cable model to the new world of streaming, leaving the whole balance sheet incredibly fragile. The unions want to break open the bookkeeping to determine their fair share, and the corporations are adamant that this cannot happen, not just because they’re trying to screw the talent, but because it shows everyone the house of cards they’ve built.
Makes you wonder how the execs justify their nine figure paydays if they were too incompetent to prevent themselves from marching into this financial dead end. Seems to me the shareholders want to be asking some really tough questions.
The SAG-AFTRA actor’s strike is threatening to spill over into concerns about AI in video game voice work and actor motion-capturing. The general vibe I’ve seen from groups of players I hang around with has been “Oh well, guess I’ll play the bajillion games in my backlog” which isn’t too dissimilar to “Oh well, guess I’ll finally catch up on Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/etc”
Apparently there’s been no progress since the strike started. 
Looking at this from the outside … there seems to be such a backlog of content available that the studios can hold out for a really long time. It’s not apparent to me, in this strike, where the performers’/writers’ leverage comes from. At least not in the immediate term.
Their leverage comes in large part because they are prepared for the long term, due to industry shenanigans that have reduced their pay so greatly they’re already being paid next to nothing and have found non-industry jobs to make ends meet (e.g. the TV showrunner who also drives for Uber). This was something the greedy studios failed to consider when they decided to keep all the money for themselves: they were teaching the talent how to do without their paychecks for a long period.
This is going to be a lengthy strike.
Sure, I can catch up on Netflix/Disney/Hulu and in that sense , there’s a backlog of content for the individual viewer. And the networks can try to fill their schedule with reality shows, and with series imported from Canada. But what are the networks going to do when I get used to not watching late night talk shows? Maybe after a year of watching something else rather than The Tonight Show , I just don’t go back to NBC at 11:30.
All the networks are owned by larger conglomerates so maybe you’re not watching NBC but you’re consuming some other Universal media product and, in aggregate, it’s mostly the same to the Powers That Be. The late night hosts have a problem, though.
I really miss the Jimmy Kimmel Show.
I can’t picture a solution to this strike that does not drive up the cost of streaming massively.
Tom Hanks is warning that a dental commercial that seems to feature him does not have his approval. It was made by AI.
SAG-AFTRA members roll their eyes at the union telling them what Halloween costumes they are allowed to wear.:
I just heard a rumor a deal has been reached.
Edit: Just being reported
The strike will be over as of 12:01 a.m. PT on Thursday, November 9, we hear, putting an end to more than seven months of labor unrest in Hollywood that saw the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA hit the picket lines in the industry’s first joint strike in more than 60 years.