After five months of strike in Hollywood, the salary agreement concluded with the studios and providing for “significant gains” in terms of remuneration, as well as protections to regulate the use of artificial intelligence, was approved Tuesday evening by the Board of Directors of the Screenwriters Union. They will be able to return to work on Wednesday. The actors remain on strike.
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The leaders of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the powerful screenwriters’ union, approved on Tuesday evening September 26 the recent salary agreement concluded with the studios and recorded the return to work of their members on Wednesday, after a strike which lasted almost five months and paralyzed Hollywood.
The union’s board of directors “voted unanimously to recommend the salary agreement,” he said on X, formerly Twitter. “The strike ends at 12:01 a.m. Los Angeles time this Wednesday.
Concretely, the agreement can theoretically still be rejected by the 11,500 screenwriters represented by the WGA in the United States: it must be the subject of a vote, which will take place “between October 2 and 9”, announced the syndicate. But most industry specialists believe that the ratification of this agreement, which includes “significant gains” in terms of remuneration as well as protections to regulate the use of artificial intelligence, should be a formality.
While waiting for the process to be completed, the industry’s feathers will therefore be able to resume work on Wednesday. Many American series and films stuck in the early stages of writing will thus be able to be restarted. Late-night talk shows, hosted by hosts who need scripts, are also expected to return to the air sometime next month.
Actors still on strike
But even after the final ratification of the screenwriters, Hollywood will still be far from a return to normal. Because the actors, represented by the SAG-AFTRA union, are still on strike. A resolution to this social conflict, which has been going on since mid-July, could take several more weeks. Because some of SAG-AFTRA’s demands go further than those of the WGA.
The negotiations therefore promise to be difficult. Especially since the studios know that what they release to the actors will serve as a standard for the technical professions in the industry, whose collective agreements must be renewed next year.
Even after actors return to work, it will likely still take months to actually get everyone back on set and catch up on backlogs for myriad Hollywood productions.
Content of deal revealed
The WGA also published Tuesday evening the details of the agreement reached with the studios, the exact content of which had not been filtered since its conclusion on Sunday. The compromise shows that the studios have given in to most of the demands put forward by the union and seems to represent a victory for the writers.
It notably includes a bonus when a series or film meets a certain success on a streaming platform, that is to say when “20% or more of the national subscribers of the service” view the production “in the first 90 days of its release.
In terms of artificial intelligence, the screenwriters have also obtained guarantees so as not to be replaced by robots. The agreement allows them to rework scripts initially generated by an AI, while being considered the sole author of this work, and therefore without being less remunerated.
A clause also provides that “the exploitation of the screenwriters’ material to train the AI is prohibited”. In other words, robots cannot be fed scripts from syndicated creators to improve their narrative capabilities. A point on which the studios had long remained silent.
With AFP
2023-09-27 04:25:58
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