The clouds over Hollywood’s increasingly contentious labor situation darkened further when the board of a union local representing thousands of cinematographers and camera operators endorsed a strike authorization vote later this week.
The unanimous vote by the International Cinematographers Guild Local 600 will encourage its members to vote this weekend to authorize a strike, a step toward a shutdown of film and TV production throughout Hollywood and beyond.
“Nobody wants to go on strike, but we have been given little choice by companies that are earning record profits off our members’ labor but are unwilling to treat those same workers with dignity and respect,” said Local 600 national executive director Rebecca Rhine. The local is one of the largest units in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, whose leadership asked for the authorization as negotiations stall with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
The local board’s decision is the latest pro-strike signal from IATSE, whose 60,000 behind-the-camera film and TV industry workers include the people who handle the cameras, and those who edit the resulting images, script coordinators, costume designers and more. Around three-fourths of the IATSE members are based in the Los Angeles area, with the balance spread across a number of union locals and “national” locals.
The union checklist includes a batch of quality-of-life issues: health insurance contributions, pensions, rest breaks, more time off between each workday, workdays shorter than the 15- to 18-hour runs that happen sometime, and fewer intrusions into meal breaks.
“We are expected to do it for months, there is no logical reason to work the crews to death,” Costume Designers Guild President Salvador Perez told Variety. “Why do studios insist on working 16-18 hour days? Isn’t it more cost-effective to work 12-hour days and add a day or two to the schedule?”
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The brewing battle over workplace issues in the era of streaming-fueled Peak TV has been hovering at the edges of Hollywood conversations for a while now. But with the IATSE contract four months into negotiations with little movement from the AMPTP (which represents Hollywood studios and digital majors such as Netflix and Amazon), it’s moving toward more bellicose language, and potentially action as soon as next month.
On Monday, several of the union’s biggest locals set a strike-authorization vote for Oct. 1. The authorization vote is considered likely to pass, but doesn’t automatically mean leadership will call a walkout. It’s the sort of saber-rattling, however, that can precede an actual strike if deals can’t be made.
If a strike is called, it would hit not just Los Angeles, where most of the union’s members live, but everywhere else the union’s locals operate, which is to say across the country. It wouldn’t directly influence productions in Canada, but IATSE union locals there are unlikely to continue work if a strike is called.
“They think they got us by the balls,” Joe Martinez, a visual-effects specialist who’s part of IATSE, told Variety. “We make the product. If we don’t show up to work, what are they going to sell?”
A strike could further complicate production pipelines that have only slowly restarted amid pandemic stoppages and new production safety requirements.
But unlike in previous strikes by other Hollywood guilds, it’s a different entertainment era. Streaming services offer hundreds of thousands of hours of library content for on-demand viewing, eliminating any immediate impact from a work stoppage.
Netflix, for instance, said recently that it will release 41 movies between now and the end of the year. Those movies were finished months ago.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek warned Wall Street that the Q4 release slate will be a bit light for Disney Plus and Hulu. But plenty of new stuff is on the way: Disney Studios is producing 61 movies and 17 series, while the TV group has 200 productions underway.
As well, Netflix, Amazon and others have increasingly been buying or producing programming made overseas. Some of those shows, as Netflix Co-CEO Reed Hastings has pointed out, have become global hits, from Lupin to Money Heist to Roma.
Again, those overseas productions and output deals reduce the leverage Hollywood unions would have in a strike, though Canadian IATSE locals almost certainly would refuse to work if their American brethren went out.
Chapek said in a recent investor conference that a “reset” is underway between talent and studios, as streaming changes the industry’s economic structures, and the bonuses and incentives for the most prominent participants.
The challenge is how to “bridge the gap” between the old structure and what’s becoming the streaming era approach pioneered by Netflix years ago, Chapek said. For big-name directors, actors and other prominent contributors, that likely will mean much bigger upfront payments, but an end to the practice of bonuses based on box-office performance.
Scarlett Johansson sued Disney last summer because her Black Widow deal, which was signed in 2017, was built around a box-office bonus that was significantly stunted by the pandemic’s impact on theater going. Her suit charged that Disney created and promoted a premium video-on-demand alternative to theatergoing that cost her money.
Disney acknowledged in court filings that it has raked in at least $125 million from Black Widow PVOD payments, which the studio doesn’t have to share with theater owners or Johansson. Making Johansson or other big stars happy is one delicate job for studio chieftains.
But the bigger challenge may be in signing new contracts with the union representing so many behind-the-scenes workers. Those deals may ultimately change the way films and TV series get made in the Peak TV era. Meanwhile, the festering unhappiness by many line workers threaten to complicate Hollywood production in months to come.
