THEY FUCKING DID IT! fantastic news! Solidarity with SAG-AFTRA!
This is huge and historical, BUT The WGA strike isn’t over just yet!
Contract language is being finalised and will be presented to the wga board on Tuesday 26th September for voting. Once/if it passes, it will then move to the wider guild for ratifying.
The WGA is still officially on strike until the 27th September 2023! Solidarity continues with SAG-AFTRA.
(I put this in my tags but adding to reblog bc IMPORTANT! They have won but it ain’t over just yet.)
Facebook deleted this almost immediately. It’s almost like the ultrawealthy don’t want us knowing or talking about what’s at stake.
Just want to add one thing:
In countries with universal healthcare, this is a non-issue during a strike. Our access to healthcare isn’t tied to working. It’s an unconditional right for each and everyone of us.
The US system screws workers over in oh so many ways.
This is exactly why US companies fight so hard against universal healthcare; even if single payer healthcare is cheaper on a per-person basis and takes the cost away from the employer, it also takes POWER and leverage away from the employers… and they don’t ever want to give that up.
The entertainment industry is famous for, “creative,” (aka shady) accounting tactics that take money that would’ve gone to creatives and use it to pad the pockets of executives. There’s even a Wikipedia page for it called Hollywood Accounting. So it’s unsurprising that we’ve seen a lot of crappy, “cost cutting,” measures over the last year that have made projects like the Batgirl movie unavailable to the public despite being finished or near-finished.
The prevailing narrative here is that these are done as tax write-offs, where the less a title makes the less the studio has to pay taxes on its production costs (I think. To be honest the tax details are a little over my head, I just know they say burying these titles saves them money). But how does that work with titles that have already been out for months or, in some cases, YEARS. For example: Disney+ removed Stargirl & Artemis Fowl from their platform three years after those films were released. So how big can a tax write off really be?
So what does this have to do with burying projects? Well, if no one can watch a tv show or movie in any (legal) way that means the studios aren’t obligated to pay the folks who worked on that project their residuals. And if they were paying enough residuals on a title that removing it saves them millions or billions of dollars, that essentially means they’re stealing millions of dollars from those artists.
What’s more - as a WGA picketer I know pointed out - studios may be worried the removed content could end up being a HUGE HIT. What’s wrong with that? Because if it becomes that big and people notice, actors and writers will wonder where their residuals are. So they’re not removing these projects because no one is watching them. If no one was watching them, they’d be able to take a tax write off and not worry about expensive residual payments while keeping it available. The fact that removing the shows saves them money means people ARE watching it.
TL;DR - Studios removing exclusive streaming content isn’t just about tax write-offs, it’s about keeping residuals from the artists too.
Alright i dared yall to gimme some $ on ko-fi and I’d write a new childhood shenanigan about monster hunting and @0ryza13 actually did so here it is lmao
It’s important to know before we begin that Pretend featured heavily in the games I, my siblings, and my friends played as children. So much so, that in the midst of these games every new invention or action that required narration usually started out as “Okay, so pretend that-” “Alright, pretend-” “Pretend-” ‘Tend that-“ to the point that it would probably be more accurate to call it a game of 'Tend instead.
'Tend was a versatile game that could be picked up and started or continued anywhere at any time. Sometimes we were the players off on adventures as ourselves and sometimes we were newly created characters specially designed for the game at hand. In the house, 'Tend was played with toys, model horses and GI Joe and army men and Barbie and whatever other thing that could be added. Outside, 'Tend involved ourselves and our wits and the woods. And a favorite game, which had no plot or story other than whatever we invented then and there was Monster.
When a project isn’t aired, the artists involved can’t point at it and say, “You can see my skills here!” You can put it on your resume but employers aren’t able to judge the quality of the work themselves. It’s damaging to every artist involved in that show, especially when they turned down other opportunities to work on a project people will never see.
If you order a season of television, you should be contractually obliged to finish and air that season. Otherwise don’t order it.
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
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/
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