My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calcottin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily os. It's Monday, the seventeenth of July. I'm Sam Kazlowski.
I'm Zara Seidler.
The Union for Hollywood Actors has gone on strike for the first time in forty three years.
One hundred and sixty thousand performers from TV and film will now join scriptwriters on picket lines as production of TV shows and movies suddenly grind to a halt.
What this effectively means is that Hollywood as we know it is at a stand still.
Both writers and actors say the transition to streaming has affected their financial security and healthcare.
Before we get there, and I am they're very excited for Lucy's debut on the podcast. There was a by election on the weekend.
The Coalition have retained the Queensland seat of Fadden after a by election on Saturday following the resignation of former Minister Stuart Robert. The Liberal National Party will hold the seat with about a two point four percent margin, which is a seven point six percent reduction from its previous margin of ten percent. Cameron Caldwell will be the new member.
The US Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into chat GPT. The Washington Post says the Commission will examine if its owner OpenAI has engaged in deceptive or unfair practices. It will also look into chat gbt's capacity to generate false information.
Nearly one third of the population of the US are currently under heat warnings after record temperatures were documented across the country. An all time high of forty eight degrees celsius was recorded in Arizona, with Las Vegas nearing its all time higher forty seven degrees. Is addicted to hit fifty four degrees in California's Death Valley in the next few days, which would be one of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on the entire planet.
And the good news effective immediately, there will now be equal prize money for men and women at all international cricket events, including at World Cup tournaments. That is some good news for your Monday.
Lucy Tassel, Welcome to your podcast debut.
Thanks for having me.
It's so fun to have you in front of the mic because you actually work on the podcast every single day. Behind the mic. You're our full time fact checker, so you are the last line of defense before something goes out on TDA, whether it's on Instagram or newsletter or podcast, to make sure it's actually true. But today you're on the pod because you live and breathe this topic. What are we going to talk about today?
Today we're talking about the actors strike. I love this story and I would say that if you are the sort of person like me, someone who loves movies and TV and is interested in how they get made, this is the biggest story of the week.
Said the scene for me. When did this strike begin?
This strike began Thursday midnight LA time, so early Friday morning our time, and in London at the UK premiere of the upcoming film Oppenheimer.
Mister Chris Nolan film, Right That's.
Right, which I'm very excited to see. At that premiere, which was about five pm last Thursday, London time. The actors were starting to get nervous on the red carpet because they knew that the strike was about to happen. They were being asked questions by journalists about will you support the strike, how do.
You feel about an actor strike?
And when do you think they might see a resolution to because I know it's kind of ominous.
At this point.
Well, I'm not in the room, so I can't say when you see a resolution to it, but I got to say that, you know, collective bargaining only works if the collective is involved uniformly.
The actors in that film said yes, because they are all in the Actors' Union, which is called sag AFTRA. It's a very powerful employment body. Pretty Much any Hollywood actor you've ever heard of is in sag AFTRA. One of the actors in Oppenheimer, Matt Damon, who we would all know, said that he was really keen to support the strike to help out lower income actors. What we would be striking for if we strike is unbelievably important.
We had to protect with people who were kind of.
On the margins. So the actors. Once the strike was authorized at midnight, La time five pm ish London time. The actors walked straight off the red carpet and they didn't stay for the movie because one of the conditions of the strike is that you're not allowed to promote anything. No more promo appearances for that film by the actors. So the director of the film, Chris Nolan, inside the theater right before the movie started he had to kind of explain to the audience. Normally the actors would be
up here with me, but they've just walked off. They're going to go and stay preparing their picket science because they're now on strike.
I want to go deeper on why they're striking and what has kind of led up to this moment. But before we get there, one of the comments on our Instagram when we put it up on Friday was boohoo, poor millionaires. And there's this sense of why are we spending time on this podcast talking about changing rights and contracts for these multimillionaire actors. Why should we care about this story.
I can totally understand that perception, because for most of us, our only understanding of the people in show business would be the big stars would be your Margo, Robbie's, You're Matt Damon's You're Ryan Goslings. All of those people are just a tiny fraction of who the Actor's Union actually
represents though. So SAG AFTRA represents one hundred and sixty thousand people, So that includes actors, that includes some radio personalities, dancers, stuff people, extras, well we don't call them extras anymore. They're called background performers. Puppeteers are included on SAG's website. I was very charmed by that. But that's a huge number of people, a tiny fraction of whom you would
know who would be big names. But anyone who makes from one hundred dollars for a day on set to one hundred thousand dollars for a day on set are all covered by SAG, and they're all impacted by industry changes, and they're all on strike together.
So we have this moment in London where actors literally walk off the red carpet because this strike has come into play. Now give me a sense of what the strike is actually in relation to why are they so angry?
There's two big things that I would say this strike is broadly about. So the first one is the rise of streaming. The second one is AI. I mean those feel like the two biggest stories in entertainment in this century. That doesn't feel like an overstatement. So first streaming. Streaming has changed the entertainment industry so completely that I start to wonder if we could ever go back to a pre Netflix world. And it has only happened really in
the last ten years. Like I was really struck recently. I looked up when Orange Is the New Black was first put on Netflix, and it was ten years ago, So ten years or so since TV pretty much changed forever when Netflix started producing its own content and pivoted from selling DVDs by mail to people in the US to becoming the global streaming giant that everyone has in their homes or now has to have in their homes because of the passwords sharing, backdown account and you know, oh,
we've all been kicked off. So streaming had one really huge change that has had all these other ripple effects. So to understand this, you have to understand how actors used to make money. For example, say you're Jennifer Aniston on Friends. You're on a long running major TV show that produces twenty two episodes a year for ten years. You might work thirty weeks out of that year working on that show. Anytime that you're not on the set of that show, you're getting paid for the episodes being
aired on TV. In streaming, that's not necessarily how it works. When those early streaming shows were being made, the contracts for the actors were set up under an old contract system that was designed to cover things like short YouTube videos, where you would pay an actor who was in the union to appear in your short YouTube series, which I.
Guess was the closest thing to it at the time.
Yes, that contract was not set up for the Netflix world because they didn't know what that was going to look like. Yeah, of course, But that leads us to an ongoing problem where someone like Jennifer Aniston still makes a huge amount of money from Friends being played on TV and a small amount of money from Friends being
put on streaming platform. But if you are, for example, an actor from Oranges The New Black, which ran for six seasons on Netflix, and you're in pretty much every episode of that show, you're only getting paid the small amount that it was agreed was fair under the original streaming content contract. So one of the actresses from Orange is The New Black, Camiko Glenn posted a video to Instagram where she shared her residuals for forty four episodes of Oranges and New.
Black Gold be so rude.
And it amounted to about twenty seven dollars. What and one of the ripple effects of that is that, because as we all know, the American healthcare system is very complicated to say the least, many people's healthcare is tied to their employment. That is true for actors in the US. So if you're in SAG, you have to earn a minimum of twenty six thousand dollars in order to access healthcare.
Obviously harder to make if you're a streaming star or a streaming professional. Now that was for TV exactly. Now let's turn to AI. So AI is the other destabilizing factor that is being incorporated into these contract negotiations. What's the core issue here?
So this relates back to background actors that we touched on a little bit before. So the lead negotiator for SAG after he's a man named Duncan Crabtree, Ireland, lovely name, beautiful name. He said that the studios pitched SAG an offer in their contract negotiations relating to AI.
They proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day's pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that's a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.
That really speaks to a major ongoing issue if that were to become the case where background actors could be paid for one day's work and their likeness used in perpetuity. Not only is it concerning because these studios wouldn't have to ask for people's consent to be used in the background of any scene imaginable, it also takes away like the bottom rung of the ladder, it's just that much
harder to get into the industry. Major actors, people like Leonardo DiCaprio got their start as background actors, So that's a major concern that sag after it has to protect its actors.
So essentially, the actors are asking for more compensation and a bit more security around their jobs to account for these huge changes in the landscape. What are the media companies saying in response to all of this.
So the rise of streaming has also had impacts on major media and entertainment companies. Sure it has impacted their short term profits. There are things that it is much more expensive to do in the streaming landscape, like, for example, run a streaming platform. If you're a movie studio that previously was just releasing movies, running a streaming platform, hosting content,
producing original content that goes on. All of these things incur costs in a way that's more complicated than simply we make a movie, we release a movie, we get our ticket money back. That is added to the cost of living. Crisis has meant a lot of people pulling their subscriptions from these various streaming services.
So what do you think is going to happen now? I mean, we find ourselves in somewhat uncharged territory. What will the next couple of weeks look like?
It's a very interesting position to be in. So the writers have also been on strike since May, so actors and writers are on strike at the same time. That effectively means almost nothing can be produced and made. Certainly, under strike rules, no one can go to a set, no one can pitch a film or an episode, of something or write it. No one can promote it or appear at an awards show to accept an award for it. So these effects are not necessarily going to be clear immediately.
We're going to have to wait and see. It does seem to me that since the writers have been on strike since May with absolutely no sign of slowing down, the actors could hold on for a long time.
Well it have any change for say, you going to the movies? Like, is Barbie now not going to be on?
Barbie's fine, Barbie's locked and loaded. It's just that we won't be getting any more Margo, Robbie and Ryan Gosling play with Puppies interviews because they're not allowed to promote it anymore. But Barbie's going to come out. It's what will happen next year. Even assuming that the writers and the actors strikes get resolved within a matter of months, that's a long period of time where nothing has been made.
So it might be a year before we suddenly realize, Hm, there hasn't been a movie come out in a little bit. It will be because yeah, they weren't allowed to make them. During the American summer of twenty twenty three, we might just have a really thin oscars in twenty twenty five.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Daily Ours. We have loved seeing your feedback on Spotify. Please keep it up. It tells us what you want more of and what you're loving so far. We'll see you again tomorrow