Wga Strike - Tumblr Posts
Even though I never post stuff like this
Congratulations to everyone in the writers' strike for reaching an agreement in your contract. I hope everything goes amazing, you all deserved that win, and I hope that all the other strikes will have a successful win as well :)
GUYS
the fact that she deleted the video too…
I’ve been side eyeing this lady since she made those comments about the Depp / Heard trial and now this…something a’int right with her 👀
as a actor myself i 100% support the sag-aftra strike but 😣😣 timing couldn’t be any worse it pains me that none of the barbie cast can even acknowledge it rn
anyways
This really makes the Studios costing themselves even more money (and getting more unions involved) by prolonging the strike for the promise of free ai labor even more fucking funny. you dumb fucking bastards lol
Just so we're all on the same page with the writer's strike.
If during the strike, it's announced about AI generated shows. We are not watching them. Not even out of curiosity. Let them fail every AI generated show they try make.
The human voice can not be replaced by AI. Don't let them try.
JON STEWART HAS EMERGED FROM HIS GROUNDHOG HOLE EVERYONE
Since the strike is ending, petition to have Strike Force Five all go on Conan's podcast at once so we can finally get the Conan episode we all wanted. Plus Matt and Sona for extra spice.
Keep seeing posts in solidarity with the WGA strike that say things like “no one cares about your favorite shows” and “fuck your tv show. I hope it gets canceled” and while I understand and agree with the underlying sentiment, which is clearly “Real people are more important than fictional ones, you dipshit” I don’t like the framing because, well, it feels shitty to dismiss the importance of the work made by the workers we’re trying to defend.
No one cares about your favorite shows more than the writers do.
No one understands the power and importance of tv and film more than the writers who created them.
No one loves tv, movies, games, and stories more than the people who fought tooth and nail in an incredibly competitive and underpaid profession for the chance to be part of it.
They know it’s important. They know it changes lives. They know it can be more than just a story, more than just a bit of entertainment. They’ve loved and respected this medium, continue to love and respect this medium, more than you ever will.
The person who wants a show to get canceled the least is the writer who poured their everything into making it good.
TV and movies are great, actually, and you are not wrong to be invested and care about them. That’s what the writers gave you. That’s what the writers wanted when they wrote it. That’s why they wrote it.
Which is why we respect them when they make the call that this strike and its demands are worth risking it.
The people on that picket line do not want their shows canceled. They want to keep writing them. They can’t, not under the current conditions.
So we accept the risk with them and support them.
But I don’t want to berate the power and importance of their work, the value they put into it and the love they have for it, in the same breath that I am defending their strike. Worthy shows will likely get canceled or derailed and that will be a tragedy worth mourning. The writers know that better than anyone.
So when they say something else is even more important, we listen. And when your favorite show gets ruined, you make sure your fully justified anger and grief is pointed in the right direction - at the CEOs who killed it.
Wow! I am suddenly craving a titanic remake. It would be really great if the studio executives were to gain inspiration from the Titanic shipwreck! Up close and personal. In a submarine.
![July 25, 2023 - Striking Stuntman Mike Massa Walks In The SAG-AFTRA Picket Line While On Fire. [video]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/96add8db60a5bd0aa8471a87f8825c4b/0436937ebd8701b2-3e/s400x600/7a27e16e9f1707625de992c7058a1c5ea325c259.gif)
July 25, 2023 - Striking stuntman Mike Massa walks in the SAG-AFTRA picket line while on fire. [video]
For those following the SAG and WGA strikes there’s new shit a-brewing, this time targeting background actors (aka extras).
Some may know that one of the issues SAG is fighting is that studios want to take virtual scans of background actors and use them in perpetuity (meaning forever) without any additional compensation to those background actors. So you would just see a bunch of AI generated humans in future movies based off of a background actor that worked one day.
This is already shitty because working as an extra for 3 days on a union set (if you receive a union voucher each day) is one of the main ways to qualify for SAG eligibility. This means that a lot of actors working background do not yet have union protection and likely do not have an agent or manager to protect them. Disney has already allegedly told background actors to do this on the set of Wanda Vision: https://www.avclub.com/wandavision-background-actors-say-disney-scanned-them-1850709900
Here’s where it's worse.
There is one main company that supplies background actors for major union and non union productions. Central Casting. They love to brag about their very long influence in the industry - in old movies dating back to the 40s you can hear jokes about hiring extras from Central Casting.
Central Casting has been including an electronic document for all actors in their database to sign as part of onboarding. Signing it gives Central Casting the right to use your images, your videos, and YOUR LIKENESS in perpetuity, forever. They would OWN your likeness. Instead of it being a studio supplying the AI background actors, it would be Central Casting instead.
Receiving any work from Central Casting in the future is conditional upon signing it. No signature = no extra work = no extra income for union actors trying to make health insurance minimums, no union extra work for pre-SAG members.
SAG already reached out to Central Casting to tell them to stop. Central Casting refused.
Edit to say: this is not new. It’s part of actors onboarding and is called the Photo, Image, and Video Release. It’s phrased to sound like you are just giving them permission to use your image and video for CC’s website and promotional purposes. But the actual language is much broader. It's only recently being brought up as a point for discussion because some casting directors (who are generally supportive of the strike) started pointing it out.
Central Casting is owned by Entertainment Partners which is also a giant software conglomerate and owns a lot of the software used to organize background casting and pay actors. https://www.ep.com/company/about-us/
August 4 - Hollywood Food Insecurity Spikes Amid Strikes
The entertainment industry’s most vulnerable workers are increasingly unable to feed themselves amid a historic double strike with no clear end in sight, according to non-profits tasked with addressing the food insecurity crisis. They describe Hollywood’s ongoing work stoppage — prompted by the contractual impasse between the writing and acting guilds on one side and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on the other — as a humanitarian emergency broadly affecting the community, not just striking union members.
The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, which runs pantries for those in need throughout the county, attributes a meaningful portion of its nine percent uptick in year-over-year distribution to the strikes’ impact. “When income stops immediately, the demand rises very rapidly,” explains chief development officer Roger Castle.
“This is happening right after the pandemic, which drained a lot of people’s savings,” observes Keith McNutt, executive director at the Entertainment Community Fund, which has distributed $3 million to more than 1,500 workers as of Aug. 1. “So, you have the financial burden on people who’ve already been depleted.” As a result, his organization — whose donors include Seth McFarlane, Steven Spielberg, and Greg Berlanti — has seen an unprecedented wave of immediate requests for basic living expenses, including groceries. “Before this started, we would do about 50 grants out of the L.A. office a week. Now we’re getting 50 applications a day.”
On July 28, below-the-line unions IATSE and the Teamsters Local 399 held a drive-through food drive for industry members affected by the strikes at IATSE’s West Coast headquarters in Burbank. It drew about a thousand vehicles throughout the day.
According to the relief nonprofit Labor Community Services, which helped to organize the event and is planning another in August, the organization distributed 1,740 food boxes, feeding an estimated 8,700 people, that day.
In California, striking workers are ineligible to receive unemployment assistance, while nationally, they cannot receive SNAP food benefits unless they qualified pre-strike — something Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is aiming to change with a new bill, introduced July 27. One place that striking actors in particular can turn to for help during the work stoppage is the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, which offers emergency financial assistance and other resources, including grocery store gift cards, to union members. SAG-AFTRA made a seven-figure donation to the Foundation early in its strike to assist these efforts. (The WGA West does provide its own members with emergency financial loans from its strike fund and Good and Welfare fund.)
Cyd Wilson, its executive director, has seen an explosion in demand for the organization’s help. “People are making these decisions: Should pay my rent, or should I put food on the table? Should I put food on the table, or should I pay my utilities?” she explains. “There’s a great deal of suffering that’s happening.” By Wilson’s estimate, the foundation is now handling 40 times its typical number of applications per week, and it has already distributed as much in grants since the beginning of the WGA’s strike three months ago as it typically would in the span of a given year.
Meanwhile, Groceries for Writers, a direct aid project administered by Humanitas, a non-profit focused on film and television writers, has distributed more than 1,100 gift cards to WGA members since the onset of its work stoppage in early May. Humanitas executive director Michelle Franke says that “many of these writers have left notes indicating they’re in very urgent financial situations. Writers describe struggling with student debt, falling into eligibility gaps with CalFresh and EDD [state unemployment assistance], eviction notices, writing teams splitting low pay, having only just moved to Los Angeles and not having a large local support network as a consequence, dwindling savings.”
Groceries for Writers is hardly alone in addressing the growing need. In July, L.A.’s World Harvest Food Bank founder and CEO Glen Curado estimated to The Hollywood Reporter that his organization, which is offering free food to striking writers and actors, was serving an average of 150-200 members of this group per day. That effort was inspired by The Price Is Right host Drew Carey’s gesture of paying for all striking writers dining at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank and L.A.’s Swingers Diner for the duration of the work stoppage.
THR asked both the AMPTP and the talent unions whether they bear any responsibility for the worsening situation. In a statement, a spokesperson for the AMPTP said: “Like those negotiating on behalf of the guilds, representatives from the AMPTP and its member companies came to the table in good faith, wanting to reach an agreement that would keep the industry working and prevent the hardships caused by labor strikes.” SAG-AFTRA didn’t respond to a request for comment, while a WGA spokesperson said in a statement: “The public knows that working people are putting everything on the line in order to negotiate a fair deal with the studios who have caused this strike and the resultant suffering by refusing to address the reasonable proposals that writers brought to the table over 90 days ago.” Neither the AMPTP itself nor any of its major studio and streamer members responded when THR asked if the companies or their philanthropic arms had made any contributions specifically to address the industry’s food insecurity crisis since May.
Support staffers — early-career workers who fill roles such as assistants and coordinators and tend to be low-paid — are especially at risk at this time. “So much of the compensation that they receive is, no one’s going to say it, but it’s implied to be food-based,” notes Liz Hsiao Lan Alper, the co-founder of advocacy group Pay Up Hollywood and a WGA West board member. Alper says that support staffers are often paid the “bare minimum” but access complimentary food through writers’ rooms, craft services on sets or in agency kitchens and conference rooms. And so, when the strikes occurred, the need was “overwhelming,” she explains: “It’s invisible compensation that just went away when the work stoppages happened.”
For that reason, on June 7 Pay Up Hollywood relaunched its COVID-19-era Hollywood Support Staff Relief Fund. So far, the fund has distributed around $45,000 in one-time financial need grants up to $1,000 apiece, according to organizer and support staffer Alex Rubin, who says she’s encouraged support staffers to obtain free food distributed on picket lines. “I think that there is a little bit of embarrassment and insecurity about not being able to feed yourself,” she says. “It is the reason why we give our grants as just like, ‘Here’s a one-time grant. You don’t have to tell us how you want to use this.’”
Helping people in entertainment with food during work stoppages is a “tangible message,” says James Costello, a Teamsters Local 399 driver and an IATSE Local 44 prop master, who was volunteering at IATSE’s July 28 food drive. A second-generation Teamster, Costello still remembers a union strike in the 1980s that prompted his parents to warn their children that their Christmas holiday would be affected that year, and the Teamsters emergency relief that arrived in the fall, offering groceries and a Christmas tree.
As the strikes drag on and both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have yet to formally reprise negotiations with the AMPTP (although the Writers Guild is set to have a preliminary meeting with the studios’ organization on Aug. 4), the non-profits on the front lines of the industry’s food-insecurity crisis are girding themselves for a long period of need. SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s Wilson says it’s pursuing a “very aggressive fundraising strategy” to meet the demand. (Already, it’s netted over $15 million in emergency assistance from stars like George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, Matt Damon and Dwayne Johnson, who are donating $1 million or more apiece.)
The Entertainment Community Fund’s McNutt notes that pocketbook pain will outlast the current conflict. “Just because the strike ends, it doesn’t mean the need will end. Everyone doesn’t go back to work the next week. We’re going to be looking at this [elevated] level of need for months afterward.”
Give to the Entertainment Community Fund
Give to Humanitas' Groceries for Writers
Give to the Green Envelope Grocery Aid mutual aid fund
Re: writers' and actors' strikes
I'll say it here rather than burying it in various tags again:
Always remember that the people hoarding the money can make the strike stop at any time.
And they, the studios and streaming services, want you to forget that their profit hoarding is the problem. They're the reason this is happening, not the writers and actors.
You can't see that movie you wanted because a studio is clutching a fistful of nickels. They can afford to pay writers and actors--large collectives of not-famous workers--something even a little bit closer to fairly. But they are determined not to, with the cruelest resolve. An unnamed executive said, and I quote exactly this time, "The endgame is to allow things to drag on until [writers'] union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses."
Get mad that you won't get your movies and shows.
Get mad at the right people.
what black mirror episode are we in now
I need to do more than eat the rich. I need an all you can eat bourgeoisie buffet.