SAG-AFTRA has adjourned its 2023 national convention to focus on the renewed talks with studios, the guild announced Saturday.
“While it’s disappointing to have to adjourn the convention early, the Negotiating Committee must immediately get back to the hard work of preparing to secure a fair contract,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said in a statement.
The guild’s national convention began on Friday and was set to last through Oct. 23. But contract talks have been on pause since Oct. 11, when the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios in negotiations with Hollywood guilds, abruptly walked away from the bargaining table.
Earlier Saturday, the groups announced in a joint statement that they are returning to the talks on Tuesday, Oct. 23. Adjourning the convention is a clear sign of how seriously the guild takes the resumption of negotiations that could bring an end to the actors’ strike.
As of Saturday, Hollywood actors have been on strike for 100 days, the longest ever such action against TV and Film studios.
When it walked away from talks, AMPTP cited objections to a streaming revenue sharing plan proposed by SAG-AFTRA — $1 per streaming service subscriber that would be passed on to the guild and then shared among members — that studios dismissed as a “levy” on streaming services.
On Friday, SAG-AFTRA disputed that. According to the guild, the proposal averaged to 57 cents per subscriber. It also said other key issues such as artificial intelligence protections were still not fully resolved when talks broke off.
After the historic deal struck by the Writers Guild of America in September, there was increased hope that the strike that has crippled the entertainment industry since May would soon be over. Those hopes were tempered somewhat by the halting of talks with the actors guild, but perhaps the moves on Saturday give reason for renewed optimism.
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