Actors strike threatened: SAG-AFTRA outraged at studios failure for fair agreement

Actors strike threatened: SAG-AFTRA outraged at studios failure for fair agreement The leadership of the SAG-AFTRA actors union reported Monday that negotiations with producers so far have yielded no agreement on a new three-year contract, and it said it was asking for a strike authorization vote to strengthen its hand.

It said in a statement on the union’s website that it had been hard at work bargaining with the major studios and networks represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers about a new three-year contract covering motion pictures, television and new media.

“We had hoped to be sharing the good news that we had reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP but, unfortunately, their unwillingness to come to a fair and equitable agreement means we are coming to you with very different news,” according to the statement.

“We have presented reasonable proposals to address the critical concerns facing our members and that are integral to making a living in this industry. The AMPTP has responded with outrageous rollbacks that cut to the core of our basic terms and conditions.”

When a computer generated voice sounds natural (listener not able to determine if a real person or a computer speaking) the days of “actors” will be coming to an end.

“Hollywood” will be where ever a production company wants to work. The left will leave their socialist California to die on the vine.

But the Writer’s Guild “won” thus keeping prices so high and benefits and restrictions so outrageous that whole genres died. No more variety shows, for example. Too expensive.

The last three writer's strikes were in 1960, 1988, and 2007. The 1988 strike didn't kill the variety show. It had been dead long before. And saying that variety shows were too expensive is absurd. They were famously inexpensive. All you needed was a TV studio. Most of the crew worked one day. It's the same model as all of the talent shows now. A stage, a studio audience, a series of acts and a few cameras to give you enough coverage to cut between. That's why there were so many variety shows back in the 1970s. Especially as summer replacements. Then people got burned out on them and by the late 1970s they were dead. It had nothing to do with writers' wages.

Here's WIkipedia's take: "Variety shows began to fade from popularity during the 1970s, when research began to show that variety shows appealed to an older audience that was less appealing to advertisers; over the course of the so-called "rural purge", several of the early era variety shows were canceled, though newer ones (fewer in number nonetheless, and generally stripped down to music and comedy) continued to be created and broadcast for several years after. By the late 1970s, even these generally celebrity-driven variety shows had mostly ended production, in part because of audience burnout;[3] the highest-rated variety show of 1975, Cher, was only the 22nd-most watched show of the year."

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