The threat of a total stoppage in the film industry has come true. What at midnight on Wednesday seemed inevitable, after the deadline to reach an agreement between the actors union and the big studios expired, Hollywood, it was completed hours later. After a morning meeting, Fran Drescher, the president of the union of actors (Sag-Aftra, for its acronym in English), announced at a press conference for History in Los Angeles that the 160,000 members of the collective that represents film and television will join the strike of the writers, on strike for two and a half months.
“They have not left us any other way out,” Drescher said in an impassioned speech charged with anger and frustration at the situation. “I thought we could avoid a strike, but I’m surprised how far we are from reaching an agreement. It’s disgusting. They should be ashamed. They are on the wrong side of history.” The 65-year-old interpreter said that the actors are “victims” of the greed of some studies driven by Wall Street interests. “You cannot change the business model and not pretend that it changes agreement. We demand respect. They can’t exist without us.”
Some have already given this horror film a title for the film industry: the perfect Storm. And it is that it had been 63 years since a similar situation had occurred, since 1960, when Marilyn Monroe was still the great star of the time. the new scenario could paralyze thousands of shoots and seriously affect the flow of content on the platforms streaming. If the writers’ strike meant the paralysis of programs like the talk shows nightclubs in the United States, the lack of actors threatens to immediately stop a considerable number of projects.
The blow would be fatal to the economy of California and the United States in general. They depend on the film industry more than 2.4 million employees and 122,000 companies, according to data from the Motion Pictures Association. A shoot can mean an injection of about 250,000 dollars a day for a local economy, a sector that distributes 21,000 million dollars a year among 260,000 businesses in cities and towns throughout the country.
Hours before the announcement of the strike, Drescher had described as “insulting and disrespectful” the proposals by the employers, the Alliance of Film and Television Producers, the entity that represents the main studios and platforms of streamingincluding Amazon, Apple, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony y Warner Bros. Discovery. “Businesses have refused to engage meaningfully on some issues and have blocked us outright on others,” the actress said in a statement. “Until they negotiate in good faith, we can’t start reaching an agreement.”