Hollywood writers have been on strike for three months, and have now been joined by the Screen Actors Guild. This means that everything in Hollywood has come to a screeching halt.
Other than people who work in the industry, will anyone really notice? Are there any shows on TV that are so good that people will miss them over the coming weeks and possibly months?
As far as movies go, what are people going to miss? Yet another dumb superhero movie? Another woke lecture on why men are evil?
Breitbart News reports:
Hollywood Stars Go on Strike: Celebrities Walk Off the Job Bringing TV and Movie Production to a Historic Halt
Hollywood stars will walk off the job en masse Thursday night after the screen actors’ union SAG-AFTRA failed to reach a new contract with studios, effectively bringing scripted TV and movie production around the country to a screeching halt.
The actors’ work stoppage comes as Hollywood writers are in the third month of their own strike, creating a highly unusual situation in the entertainment industry that could jeopardize thousands of jobs and wreak havoc on local economies stretching from California to Georgia.
SAG-AFTRA’s strike declaration Thursday followed the union’s last-ditch effort to reach a compromise by agreeing to allow federal mediators into the talks. But union leaders still failed to make headway on issues including increased compensation in the age of digital streaming entertainment and guarantees that actors won’t be replaced by artificial intelligence technology.
Union leaders said in a statement Thursday that studios remain “unwilling to offer a fair deal on the key issues that are essential to SAG-AFTRA members.”
According to Deadline, the studios are intentionally dragging this out to drive the writers into poverty, so that they’ll be more desperate to make a deal:
With the scribes’ strike now finishing its 71st day and the actors’ union just 30 hours from a possible labor action of its own, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers [AMPTP] are planning to dig in hard this fall before even entertaining the idea of more talks with the WGA, I’ve learned. “Not Halloween precisely, but late October, for sure, is the intention,” says a top-tier producer close to the Carol Lombardini-run AMPTP…
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”
If Hollywood still had any good will left with the public, people might care, but in recent years much of America has turned on the entertainment business. It’s more woke than higher education.
