Hollywood actors strike over pay and threat from AI

The risk to actors’ livelihoods from AI and poor rates of pay from streaming has led 160,000 performers in the US to strike, shutting down all Hollywood TV and film productions.

The Screen Actors Guild (Sag-Aftra) wants a fairer split of profits from the streaming giants and better working conditions.
It is also concerned by the possibility of actors being replaced by digital replicas and would like guarantees that AI-generated faces and voices will not be deployed

Actors cannot appear in films or promote movies that they have already made while the strike lasts.

Picketing will start on Friday morning outside the San Jose, California, headquarters of Netflix, before moving on to Paramount, Warner Bros and Disney.

Under streaming, actors who aren’t A-list performers receive much-reduced residuals regardless of the success of the show and say the process under which they’re paid royalties lacks transparency.

“In the old model, they get residuals based on success,” Kim Masters, the editor-in-chief of the Hollywood Reporter, told the BBC. “In the new model, they don’t get to find out what’s going on behind the scenes, because the streamers don’t share.”

On the threat to jobs from AI, the the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) offered what they called a “ground-breaking proposal” they said would protect the digital likeness of actors and require their consent when digital replicas are used in performances, or alterations are made. This was rejected by Sag-Aftra, whose chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said yesterday (13 July) that the AMPTP remained “steadfast in their commitment to devalue the work of our members.”

He denounced the offer for paying background performers for one day of work in exchange for the rights to their digital likeness “for the rest of eternity with no compensation.” He added: “If you think that’s a ground-breaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”

Fran Drescher, Sag-Aftra’s president, said the strike came at a “very seminal moment” for actors in the industry. “What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labour,” she said, “when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run.”

The strike has brought to the surface many accounts of actors who have appeared in prominent roles but received much lower pay than fans of those particular shows might imagine. Actor Kimiko Glenn, who appeared in the Liongate-produced, Netflix-distributed, hit Orange is the New Black, went online in 2020 in exasperation at the low income levels of the show, posting a video in which she opens a foreign royalty statement – “I’m about to be so riiich!”. When it reaches the grand total of $27 she shrieks, “WHAT?”

Matt McGorry, who played a corrections officer in the show told the New Yorker: “I kept my day job the entire time I was on the show because it paid better than the mega-hit TV show we were on.” Another actor in the show, Beth Dover, said: “It actually COST me money to be in season 3 and 4 since I was cast local hire and had to fly myself out, etc. But I was so excited for the opportunity to be on a show I loved so I took the hit. It’s maddening.”

Contractual terms are worse for actors appearing in streamed shows than on conventional TV. Traditional broadcast series pay residuals for each re-airing, calculated as a percentage of the actor’s salary. But under the 2012 New Media Agreement  residuals are not paid on the same basis; in the case of Orange is the New Black, some actors were paid only after the first fifty-two weeks the show was on platform, with the amount based not on how many times each episode was watched but on a percentage of the licensing fee that Netflix paid Lionsgate to distribute the show.

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