The national boards of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) voted to go on strike demanding higher wages. This was announced by the executive director of the union during a press conference, reports Variety.
The American film and television industry will actually stop working. According to representatives of the organization, after several weeks of negotiations, writers and actors with the Alliance of Film and Television Producers, they failed to conclude a deal.
The strike will begin at midnight on Thursday, July 13. After the start of the strike, members of the Actors Guild will not be able to participate in the filming and promotional campaigns of films and series, as well as attend premieres. The association consists of 160 thousand actors. According to the BBC, Christopher Nolan said he, Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt left the Oppenheimer premiere.
The previous American screenwriters' strike took place in 2007–2008. The action lasted 100 days and cost the California economy about $ 2.1 billion. At the same time, screenwriters and the Screen Actors Guild, the predecessor of SAG-AFTRA, went on strike for the last time in 1960. Then SAG-AFTRA was headed by Ronald Reagan, who later became President of the United States.
Since the beginning of May, the Screenwriters Guild has been on strike in the USA: work on new projects has been stopped, but the shooting of films and series with ready-made scripts has continued. It brought multimillion-dollar losses to studios, many projects were stopped, filming of films and TV shows was frozen. Then the writers similarly demanded the signing of a new contract with the Producers Guild, the strike ended only when it was signed. The current strike began immediately after the expiration of that contract – it ended on May 1, 2023. By now, it has already led to endless reruns of late-night TV talk shows and has disrupted much of the production of the fall TV season and filming of some big-budget films.
