This isn't the first time Hollywood's been on strike. Here's how past strikes turned out
NEW YORK — The common refrain is that there's nothing Hollywood loves so much as its own history — but that's a history inextricable from its labor movements.
As the industry comes to a momentous halt courtesy of dual strikes by its actors and screenwriters, it's worth looking back at the effects of past protests, walkouts and other actions.
The Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild, the forerunner to today's Writers Guild of America, were each founded in 1933, though threads of collective action and solidarity run to the very beginnings of the motion picture industry.
At its founding, SAG boasted less than two dozen members. Ninety years later, 65,000 SAG-AFTRA members are on strike (the two actors unions merged in 2012).
For a few decades, strikes erupted at a regular cadence. The first actors strikes came in the 1950s, and a SWG strike in 1953 secured the first television residuals. But protests largely tapered off by the late 1980s.
Before 1950, strikes were about basic working conditions, said Kate Fortmueller, associate professor of film and media history at Georgia State University and an expert in Hollywood labor history.
“Post-1950, the concerns are more about residuals, replays, so like distribution. So it’s less about sort of how we’re working and more about how do we share in the profits that our work continues to generate?” she said. The 2023 strikes, Fortmueller said, marks a return to the more fundamental concerns about working conditions — and existential worries about the industry's future.
Throughout it all the guilds have faced essentially the same opponent: the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. First a conglomerate of studio heads, it evolved to include studios and networks, and now boasts streamers and other major production companies, Fortmueller said.
“These streaming companies have origins in tech. And tech is a very different labor culture than Hollywood, in part because tech is not heavily unionized. And Hollywood has been for almost 100 years,” Fortmueller said, characterizing a major animating factor in AMPTP's evolution.
In a rare but major exception, the studios were not a combatant in one of Hollywood's most lurid strikes, a 227-day dispute between two so-called below-the-line unions that became defined by a single day. Whether you prefer “Bloody” or “Black” as the descriptor to that Friday in early October 1945, the resulting moniker for the melee in the Warner Bros. studio lot is appropriately weighty.
It may be tempting to prognosticate about the end of these concurrent strikes, but history is of little help here: Past strikes have spanned months and lasted minutes. Nonetheless, they're instructive for how the issues that drove the conflicts and the resolutions set the stage for today's disputes. Each success and failure has contributed to shaping the contemporary landscape.
Here’s a look at some of the most significant strikes in Hollywood labor history.
KEY ISSUE: Compensation, including residual payments, for shows and movies distributed digitally
MAIN RESULTS: Jurisdiction over projects created for the internet under certain guidelines; set compensation for ad-supported streaming programs; increased residuals for downloaded shows and movies
Since it was the most significant Hollywood strike in decades, it's the one most etched in most people's memories. All told, it had an estimated $2 billion impact on the California economy and is often credited with sending programming further into reality television's clutches (even if such gems as NBC's “My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad” didn't have much staying power).
While an analyst at the time told the AP the strike was “an unqualified success,” some WGA members felt they were pressured into accepting weaker terms because the Directors Guild of America negotiated their own contract on similar issues. A specter of that discontent reared its head again 15 years later, when the DGA reached a “truly historic” tentative agreement with AMPTP a little over a month into the 2023 writers strike.
“They have all these other concerns, like with prestige and credit and authorship ... and things that are not as tangible,” Fortmueller said of the directors guild's priorities through the ages.
KEY ISSUE: Residuals for television shows sold to foreign markets
MAIN RESULTS: More creative control over scripts and the reacquisition of original screenplays; salary increases, though guild negotiators said they were less successful in winning larger payments for the foreign market reruns
This contract was ratified on the 154th day of the strike, making it the longest WGA strike by a margin of one day.
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