2023 SAG and WGA Strike Picket-Line Updates Week 8 (original) (raw)

punching up Aug. 28, 2023

The AMPTP’s No Good, Very Bad Week

Photo: Hollywood To You/Star Max/GC Images

Welcome to Vulture’s Strike Recap, or Strike-cap, if you will, a regular rundown of all the biggest news from the WGA and SAG picket lines.

AMPTP had a rough week. How rough? It hired a crisis PR firm, and now the PR firm is dodging bad PR for accepting the job. It started last Monday, August 21, when the WGA negotiating committee was invited to meet with Bob Iger, Donna Langley, Ted Sarandos, David Zaslav, and Carol Lombardini. “We accepted that invitation, and in good faith, met tonight, in hopes that the companies were serious about getting the industry back to work,” an August 22 email from the committee read. Rather than discussing a second counteroffer, the WGA members found themselves “met with a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was.”

After this meeting failed to produce results for either side, the AMPTP released the details of its counteroffer. “Our priority is to end the strike so that valued members of the creative community can return to what they do best and to end the hardships that so many people and businesses that service the industry are experiencing,” Lombardini said in a statement accompanying the release.

If the AMPTP was hoping that WGA members would support the deal once they got a look at it, those hopes were dashed. The WGA called the offer “neither nothing, nor nearly enough,” but individual writers called it “a giant nothing burger of an offer,” “ridiculous,” and “their usual laughable bullshit.” It also may have been a violation of labor laws. “They are trying to appeal to the union membership directly, which is a violation of the duty to bargain in good faith,” Andrea Schneider, director of the Kukin Program for Conflict Resolution at the Cardozo School of Law in New York, told the Los Angeles Times. “This is not going to work. It hasn’t worked in labor negotiations for 50 years.”

Then on Friday, the Hollywood Reporterwrote that the AMPTP had hired crisis PR firm the Levinson Group, which is perhaps best known for working with the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team on pay equity. This move, too, got meme’d to hell. Memes, more cast reunions on the picket line, and other union victories below.

The AMPTP hired the Levinson Group last Friday, which gave the online commentariat a whole weekend to get to work. Traditional public-relations firms are still trying to figure out how to work with/against the gleeful nihilism of the average poster. How do you win hearts and minds when everything is the opportunity to make a Simpsons reference? Guess we’ll find out.

Peep the Veep cast, who gathered at Disney August 25. Glee had a reunion at Warner Bros., which included sign tributes to the late Cory Monteith and Naya Rivera.

On Wednesday, August 23, the Food Network’s _Worst Cooks in America_’s crew went on strike and shut down production of the show. The work stoppage is in an attempt to get IATSE recognition, per THR. On Friday, Bravo made a statement clarifying that cast members on their reality shows can break their NDAs if it’s relevant to unlawful acts in the workplace. “To be clear: any current or former cast or crew is free to discuss and disclose any allegedly unlawful acts in the workplace, such as harassment or discrimination, or any other conduct they have reason to believe is inappropriate,” Bravo said in a statement.

Whether this will bear fruit for Bethenny Frankel and her attempt to unionize reality TV is yet to be determined. But on the “definite labor victory” side of things, the dancers of North Hollywood’s Star Gardens celebrated their big opening weekend as the nation’s only unionized strippers. They marched at Amazon on August 23 and celebrated Star Garden’s grand unionized opening with Tom Morello.

Who better to rally the rebel alliance than Tony Gilroy?

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The AMPTP’s No Good, Very Bad Week