Hollywood production schedules have pretty much ground to a halt and now the writers and actors guild is going on strike.
“We are the victims here,” said Fran Drescher, president of the actors union, during a news conference Thursday. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us.”
“It is disgusting,” she said in fiery remarks. “Shame on them.”
Fran Drescher is reportedly worth about $30 million.
Negotiations have failed between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers meaning that movies and TV will cease.
The Writers Guild of America is trying to increase wages but is also concerned over the use of artificial intelligence to assist in writing scripts. If a studio uses AI you need fewer writers, faster results, and better quality products. Which is why the actors are jumping in, if the studios switch to AI the actors can go back to work.
Currently, the average screenwriter gets paid around $110,000 a year.
Americans were starting to get sick of Hollywood since 2022 – just look at the box office numbers -and Hollywood is about to learn a very hard lesson.
America isn’t going to miss them.
It appears that Disney President Bob Iger knows this and said that the strike is “disturbing.”
“It’s very disturbing to me. We’ve talked about disruptive forces on this business and all the challenges we’re facing, the recovery from COVID which is ongoing, it’s not completely back. This is the worst time in the world to add to that disruption,” Iger said of the situation.
“I understand any labor organization’s desire to work on behalf of its members to get the most compensation and be compensated fairly based on the value that they deliver. We managed, as an industry, to negotiate a very good deal with the directors guild that reflects the value that the directors contribute to this great business,” Iger continued.
“We wanted to do the same thing with the writers, and we’d like to do the same thing with the actors. There’s a level of expectation that they have, that is just not realistic,” he said. “And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”
Iger concluded, “It will have a very, very damaging effect on the whole business, and unfortunately, there’s huge collateral damage in the industry to people who are supportive services, and I could go on and on. It will affect the economy of different regions, even, because of the sheer size of the business. It’s a shame, it is really a shame.”
Just wait for Hollywood to realize that nobody misses them.
