The year was 1960. An actor named Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild. It was at the time fired up about residuals over films licensed to or sold to TV. The end consequence was a strike that lasted from March 7 to April 18, which prevented films with notable actors like Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor from being released. The writers in the industry, who had been on strike since January of that year, were joined by the actors. The 148-day-long writers’ strike was over payments that screenwriters would receive from films that were broadcast on television, among other things.
Sixty-three years later, Hollywood is once again in the midst of a historic labour battle in which studios are facing a possible strike on two fronts in a protracted battle over new forms of distribution. By Wednesday night, when their extended contract officially expires, the SAG-AFTRA members have given their leaders permission to organise a strike if they are unable to reach an agreement with the big studios. They would join the Writers Guild of America, whose members have been on strike since May 2, expanding a labour dispute that has already impeded nationwide film and television projects. How did such a remarkable standoff occur? Historians and labour experts offer a number of possibilities, including tighter union ties in Hollywood, an increase in labour militancy across the country during the COVID-19 epidemic, and—perhaps most significantly—dramatic technical advancement.
The Writers Guild has frequently led the industry’s unions, which have gone on strike 20 times since 1936
Labour unrest has existed for almost as long as the entertainment industry. Additionally, this issue has almost always occurred at the same time as new technologies have altered how filmmakers, artists, and other industry workers have traditionally been compensated and how their work is disseminated. The Writers Guild has frequently led the industry’s unions, which have gone on strike 20 times since 1936, in an effort to demand fair and adequate compensation in the face of difficulties brought on by unrestrained technological advancements like kinescope recordings, television, cable, videocassettes, DVDs, and now the internet.
According to David Smith, an economics professor at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, “Technology has changed economics.” The last time performers went on strike against the studios was during a three-month walkout in 1980 over revenue from pay television and home videocassettes. In order to get paid for online content, writers went on a 100-day strike in 2007–2008, which helped to create the current conflict. The quick shift in streaming has resulted in an unprecedented influx of content, but authors have been protesting it on picket lines for the past two months because they believe it poses an existential threat to their careers.
“There’s an advent of new technology that’s widely adopted and that’s where we’re at now with streaming,” Smith said. “And it only makes sense that the existing contracts aren’t able to encapsulate all of the considerations because we’re in a new market that wasn’t able to be visualized or understood three years ago or even six years ago.” As with writers, the streaming era has enormously affected actors, toppling the traditional payment model when broadcast networks led the way.
Eric Edelstein, 46, arrived in Los Angeles from Spokane, Wash., in 2001, dreaming of becoming a character actor in the vein of 1960s TV actors Jack Elam and Victor French. He had heard that by playing bad guys on various shows, he could pull down half a million dollars a year. “That sounds like a pretty great life,” he said. For the last two decades, Edelstein was able to build a career doing so. “It used to be if you had three or four guest stars a year, that was actually enough to sustain yourself on and that worked pretty well if you could get a commercial or two,” he said.
All previous strikes were about getting a better share of the revenue
But given the prevalence of streaming, it is no longer the case. He has recently added voice-over work to his income (he voices Daddy Shark in the Nickelodeon programme “Baby Shark’s Big Show!”). Even if SAG-AFTRA negotiators returned with a 20% increase in streaming residuals, according to Edelstein, the costs associated with that kind of distribution would still be “so far away from how the old model used to pay.”
For example, Edelstein continues to receive payments from television reruns of the 2015 movie “Jurassic World,” in which he played a minor role as a dinosaur paddock supervisor. The cable residuals in a recent quarter came to $1,400. He said that over the same time period, he only received $40 for replays of the film on streaming services. Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers representatives have refrained from commenting on the SAG-AFTRA negotiations. However, those with knowledge of the negotiations said that the studios have resisted union requests, such as the requirement that residual payments be linked to a show’s success, and have asserted that the majority of streaming services aren’t lucrative.
While streaming has upended the industry on every level, the spectre of another new technology, artificial intelligence, has added another layer of trepidation to the current negotiations. AI represents a “really radical technological change, that has the potential to alter the relationship between writers and actors in the motion picture and streaming industries,” said USC history professor Steven J. Ross. “All [previous] strikes were about getting a better share of revenue,” Ross added. “This strike is about that, but it’s also about the fear of losing your job to AI. That’s the difference. And that’s why I think everybody sees this as a kind of high noon showdown because now the technology is not simply about undercutting your wage. It’s undercutting your every job.”
Actors are already often requested to sign away their ownership rights to the characters they portray so that the studio can utilise them
Ross pointed to NBC’s long-running and “highly formulaic” procedural, “Law & Order.” According to Ross, the producers could use AI to create new episodes using the show’s style. “Then you have the first draft. You bring a writer in to polish it. That writer doesn’t get as much because they haven’t done the first draft and you don’t have a writers’ room,” he said. “For the writers, it’s an existential crisis.” Actors express similar fears. Matt Bush, an actor who played Andy Cogan on the ABC comedy series “The Goldbergs,” is unequivocal on the importance of securing regulations over the use of AI. Without any, he said, “it doesn’t matter what kind of wage increase we get.”
Actors are already often requested to sign away their ownership rights to the characters they portray so that the studio can utilise them for action figures and other additional cash sources. Bush recalled that his persona from “The Goldbergs” as well as those of other performers were used in an app-based video game, but he didn’t remember being paid for it. Bush worries that performers will be required to routinely relinquish their rights to their likenesses and voices in order for AI to use them. “And that’s a step that I think none of us want to take,” he said. “To give away that consent upfront is also a scary thing too, compensation aside.” Also fueling the current labour conflict is a resurgence of union activism in Hollywood and other sectors, creating a greater level of solidarity among guilds than in the past.