The WGA writers' strike may be sorted with Hollywood studios, but the SAG-AFTRA strike continues to rage on, as the actors have been on the picket lines for nearly 100 days. After SAG-AFTRA negotiations were suspended last week as the union and the AMPTP came to an impasse, George Clooney and numerous A-list actors met with SAG-AFTRA leaders on Tuesday to discuss a new $150 million plan. Reportedly it “didn’t go well.”
Clooney broke down the plan to Deadline, which had him alongside stars like Ben Affleck, Tyler Perry, Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson meeting with the union's president Fran Drescher and National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator of SAG-AFTRA Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. In Clooney’s words:
A lot of the top earners want to be part of the solution. We’ve offered to remove the cap on dues, which would bring over $50 million to the union annually. Well over $150 million over the next three years. We think it’s fair for us to pay more into the union. We also are suggesting a bottom-up residual structure — meaning the top of the call sheet would be the last to collect residuals, not the first. These negotiations will be ongoing, but we wanted to show that we’re all in this together and find ways to help close the gap on actors getting paid.
Some of the highest-earning stars in Hollywood are seeking to help bring an end to the SAG-AFTRA actors' strike as it now has become the longest strike in the union’s history. As George Clooney shared, they sought to make some changes regarding membership dues and the residual structures. Per Variety’s reporting on the star-studded Zoom call, SAG-AFTRA’s committee “didn’t see the validity” of the proposal made by the group of actors which apparently led to another dead end for the strike moving forward.
The union's committee, which has been actively making negotiations with Hollywood studios, found the collective ideas of Clooney and other major actors to not be directly relevant to what has transpired from conversations thus far. One member of the committee, David Jolliffe, showed appreciation for “everybody’s ideas” before underlining that the union has been “doing this for almost a year now.” Perhaps this comment illustrates that the committee feels that outside plans like this one aren’t necessarily helping them out.
The Ocean's Eleven star has been an avid supporter of the SAG-AFTRA strike since its inception back in July. On the day the strike was called, Clooney released a statement saying it was an “inflection point in our industry” and calling for “change” in order for Hollywood to survive. The actor and his wife Amal were also among A-list actors who donated $1 million or more to the union’s Emergency Financial Assistance Program to help out-of-work actors who don’t have things like a best-selling tequila brand to fall back on in the interim.
SAG-AFTRA will reportedly release a statement regarding recent negotiations with these A-list actors. Despite the ongoing actors' strike, some actors have special permissions to keep working and there are numerous upcoming 2023 movies to still look forward to.
