The union that represents Hollywood’s actors has voted to join screenwriters on the picket line — and the work stoppage could have a multi-million dollar effect on Utah’s economy.
Leaders of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, which represents actors who work in film and television, voted Thursday to strike. Actors are joining the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since May 2 against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the major studios and streaming services. The SAG-AFTRA strike takes effect at midnight Thursday night.
If the strike is a long one, it could affect a dozen film and TV productions scheduled to shoot in Utah this summer, said Virginia Pearce, executive director of the Utah Film Commission.
Those dozen productions — which range from low-budget independent works to an upcoming Marvel movie — were projected to bring in $63.8 million to Utah’s economy and support some 3,000 jobs, Pearce said.
“It’s everyone, from obviously writers and actors, but it’s also directors and producers – and these are working producers,” Pearce said. “It affects everyone in the working crew, down to security teams, transportation, vendors that supply everything from lights to port-a-potties. These are people’s livelihoods.”
As of Thursday, the only production currently shooting in Utah, Pearce said, was the fourth season of “The Chosen,” a TV series depicting the life of Jesus Christ. The series films at the LDS Motion Picture Studio in Goshen, south of Provo.
Filming on “The Chosen” was set to continue shooting through Thursday night, Pearce said. After that, when the strike officially starts, “we don’t know yet,” Pearce said. A spokesperson for The CW, which recently picked up “The Chosen,” did not return immediately a request for comment Thursday.
For the other dozen productions, Pearce said that some will be starting prep work for shooting in August — so if the contract negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP are resolved quickly, those shoots would not be affected.
“I’m hoping both sides can come together and find an agreement they can live with,” Pearce said.
Thursday’s decision to strike came after negotiations for a new contract between the union and the producers’ alliance broke down, the Associated Press reported.
“A strike is an instrument of last resort,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s executive director, said in a news conference Thursday in Los Angeles.
Crabtree-Ireland said union leadership voted unanimously for the work stoppage to begin at midnight, hours after their contract expired and talks broke off with AMPTP, which represents employers including Disney, Netflix, Amazon and others.
Outside Netflix’s Hollywood offices, picketing screenwriters chanted “Pay Your Actors!” immediately after the strike was announced.
It is the first strike for actors from film and television shows since 1980. And it’s the first time two major Hollywood unions have been on strike at the same time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was the actors’ guild president.
“Employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run,” former “The Nanny” star and SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said in an impassioned speech that drew applause from union leaders in the room. “It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history.”
SAG-AFTRA leaders have told their members that a strike means withdrawing from promotional activities for current projects — including appearing at premieres or at such events as San Diego’s Comic-Con International. According to the Hollywood trade paper Variety, most major studios won’t have their usual presence on Comic-Con’s convention floor or in Hall H, where many blockbuster movies are previewed every July.
The strike should not affect Salt Lake City’s comic convention, FanX, co-founder Dan Farr said.
“The celebrities coming to FanX aren’t promoting new movies, so [we] don’t anticipate any issues related to a strike,” Farr said Wednesday through a spokesperson.
FanX runs Sept. 21-23 at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, and more than 80 actors and voice actors have been announced as attending.
With a stoppage looming, the premiere of Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” in London was moved up an hour so that the cast could walk the red carpet before the SAG board’s announcement.
The looming strike also cast a shadow over the upcoming 75th Emmy Awards, whose nominations were announced a day earlier.
Disney chief Bob Iger warned Thursday that an actors strike would have a “very damaging effect on the whole industry.”
“This is the worst time in the world to add to that disruption,” Iger said in an appearance on CNBC. “There’s a level of expectation that [SAG-AFTRA and the WGA] have that is just not realistic.”
A nearly two-week extension of the contract, and negotiations, only heightened the hostility between the two groups. Drescher said the extension made us “feel like we’d been duped, like maybe it was just to let studios promote their summer movies for another 12 days.”
Before the talks began June 7, the 65,000 actors who cast ballots voted overwhelmingly union leaders to send them into a strike, as the Writers Guild of America did when their deal expired more than two months ago.
When the initial deadline approached in late June, more than 1,000 members of the union, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence and Bob Odenkirk, added their names to a letter signaling to leaders their willingness to strike.
The stakes in the negotiations included both base and residual pay, which actors say has been undercut by inflation and the streaming ecosystem, benefits, and the threat of unregulated use of artificial intelligence.
“At a moment when streaming and AI and digital was so prevalent, it has disemboweled the industry that we once knew,” Drescher said. “When I did ‘The Nanny,’ everybody was part of the gravy train. Now it’s a vacuum.”
The AMPTP said it was disappointed in the breakdown.
“This is the union’s choice, not ours. In doing so, it has dismissed our offer of historic pay and residual increases, substantially higher caps on pension and health contributions, audition protections, shortened series option periods, a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses, and more,” the group said in a statement.
It added that instead of continuing to negotiate, “SAG-AFTRA has put us on a course that will deepen the financial hardship for thousands who depend on the industry for their livelihoods.”
SAG-AFTRA represents more than 160,000 screen actors, broadcast journalists, announcers, hosts and stunt performers. The walkout affects only the union’s 65,000 actors from television and film productions, who voted overwhelmingly to authorize their leaders to call a strike before talks began on June 7. Broadway actors said in a statement that they stand “in solidarity” with SAG-AFTRA workers.
The 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike since their own talks collapsed and their contract expired on May 2. The stoppage has showed no signs of a solution, with no negotiations even planned.
That strike brought the immediate shutdown of late-night talk shows and “Saturday Night Live,” and several scripted shows, including “Stranger Things” on Netflix,” “Hacks” on Max, and “Family Guy” on Fox, have either had their writers’ rooms or their production paused. Many more are sure to follow them now that performers have been pulled too.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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