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Also, what happens if a writer/actor continues to work when they should be striking? Do you get fined or disbarred from the union/guild or something?
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Jul 15, 2023 09:33
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Looten Plunder posted:Who are the unions negotiating with? I know it's "the studios" but who exactly? I can't imagine the old school movie studios being on the same page as the Streamers. Wouldn't they all have differing interests? And then there is TV, wouldn't those studios have differing interests again? They're negotiating with the AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. That's all the studios, negotiating as a block. That means that they have to negotiate between themselves on what their position is where their interests differ before they can propose something to the union. You can see a list of producers represented by the AMPTP in 2020 on page 3 of the WGA's last agreement, and since then Netflix has also joined. It turns out there's power in a union: the AMPTP didn't always negotiate jointly, and in 1960, the unions exploited that by making separate deals with different studios. For a while, only Universal had a deal, so they were able to make movies while actors and writers were on strike against the others. That weakened the other studios' bargaining position! Pinterest Mom posted:From the NYT on March 8, 1960: Looten Plunder posted:Also, what happens if a writer/actor continues to work when they should be striking? Do you get fined or disbarred from the union/guild or something? Yes, if you scab and the strike ends with an agreement, the unions will make sure you never work a union job again. Pinterest Mom fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 13:00
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Pinterest Mom posted:They're negotiating with the AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. That's all the studios, negotiating as a block. That means that they have to negotiate between themselves on what their position is where their interests differ before they can propose something to the union. You can see a list of producers represented by the AMPTP in 2020 on page 3 of the WGA's last agreement, and since then Netflix has also joined. Isn't it great how this country has no problem with capital banding together to negotiate, but when labor does it, suddenly it's evil?
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Jul 15, 2023 13:33
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That tweet about the full-body digital scanning reminds me of Bojack Horseman and how he gets fired from his dream role, only for the CGI version of himself giving a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination. hosed up
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Jul 15, 2023 15:40
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Looten Plunder posted:Also, what happens if a writer/actor continues to work when they should be striking? Do you get fined or disbarred from the union/guild or something? As noted above, basically yes, but there is the small chance for certain independent productions that don't fall under the AMPTP to be OK for people to work for as long as they meet the unions' conditions.
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Jul 15, 2023 15:51
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Aces High posted:That tweet about the full-body digital scanning reminds me of Bojack Horseman and how he gets fired from his dream role, only for the CGI version of himself giving a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination. A kids movie Oscar-level performance, no less. From a movie that had initially started out as a straightforward biopic of the rise and fall of an American athlete. I mean, poo poo, now that can very plausibly actually happen: you bring an actor on under the false premise for one movie, then spin things around and use that footage of them to create another film that they would have never agreed to be involved with if they had known (for example: making a pro-QAnon movie with Tom Hanks as the edited-in star)
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Jul 15, 2023 15:57
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more stories more awful than the last keep coming out about actors and writers getting screwed over https://twitter.com/stevendeknight/status/1680022094510460929 (deknight also worked in spartacus previously, an awesome show people should check out)
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Jul 15, 2023 17:41
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Davros1 posted:You just KNOW the first thing this would be used for would be to put actressses who have "No nudity" clauses into nude scenes.
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Jul 15, 2023 18:21
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Jul 15, 2023 21:23
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Tree Reformat posted:I'd settle for the complete collapse of the US entertainment industry. Ditto, we have 70+ years of TV and almost 100 years of sound film. That's enough for a lifetime. We don’t need new material. Want new stuff? There's sports and Youtube. That's not including video games, foreign works, theater, etc. A average lifespan is 4.6 million hours. A well preserved archive should have that much (make it 5 million just to be safe). Island Nation fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 23:48
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https://twitter.com/EricHaywood/status/1680201703461888002
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Jul 15, 2023 23:54
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Good. gently caress the magazines simping for the execs. It's not surprising but still lovely
Happy Landfill fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Jul 16, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 23:59
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Happy Landfill posted:Good. gently caress the magazines simping for the execs. It's not surprising but still lovely Variety has been blatantly and unapologetically in the tank for the AMPTP ever since WGA strike rumblings began in late March. And they're part of Penske Media Corporation, the same as Deadline Hollywood.
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Jul 16, 2023 00:13
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"Motherfucker I got no money coming in and nothing to do with my time, you think I won't fight you for a couple million in defamation fees?"
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Jul 16, 2023 00:59
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kliras posted:more stories more awful than the last keep coming out about actors and writers getting screwed over Essentially it seems like nobody is getting paid except the top 1% of stars and people who have a steady gig on traditional TV.
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Jul 16, 2023 01:30
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I'm interested to see the details of the actors/writers requests on residuals based on viewership numbers. Like, Lord of the Rings might become a hit on Amazon, but when the budget is like $700m, it's never gonna become profitable. But then you'd have something like Louie or Master of None that is zero budget and became super popular. If services are already pulling shows on their services because they'd prefer not to have to pay the royalties for it existing l, I can see that problem becoming heaps more prevalent if a deal around this stuff ever happens.
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Jul 16, 2023 01:47
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Looten Plunder posted:I'm interested to see the details of the actors/writers requests on residuals based on viewership numbers. Like, Lord of the Rings might become a hit on Amazon, but when the budget is like $700m, it's never gonna become profitable. But then you'd have something like Louie or Master of None that is zero budget and became super popular. Royalties and residuals are separate things! Residuals are usually something like "each time you air this TV episode as a re-run, or sell a DVD, or sell this on iTunes, I get X¢". They don't depend on profits, and are guaranteed by contract. It's typically structured as a "you get to air this episode once, or put this movie in theatres, but once you start making secondary revenue streams, I get compensated for those too." They're also pretty much never a pay-per-stream for streaming services, currently, because that's just never been negotiated for. Royalties are things like "I get x% of profits from this movie", or "x% of merch sales that bear my likeness", etc. They're not necessarily tied to airing or reproducing the movie, and they're not guaranteed by the collective agreement contracts. They're ad-hoc things that writers and actors can negotiate for, individually, as part of their compensation.
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Jul 16, 2023 02:01
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I think the thing is gonna turn out that the studios/streamers REALLY don't want to have to do real residuals for streaming because it'll cause the whole house of cards to collapse. The only sane way to do it is something like x$ per 1k views or something and if it turns out that results in peanuts because fewer people watch some shows than they claim, the whole smokescreen falls apart.
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Jul 16, 2023 02:36
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Yeah, they really don't want to reveal streaming numbers and I think that's incredibly telling
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Jul 16, 2023 02:56
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It's buried a little bit under the calls for fair pay (understandably) but the transparency issue has also come up, like Tony Gilroy said in the interview posted last page, so much of the streaming viewership is hidden information that it's hard to even start throwing out fair numbers for compensation or even know what your audience is. Happy Landfill posted:Yeah, they really don't want to reveal streaming numbers and I think that's incredibly telling Yeah, comedy option is that streaming numbers are still super cooked.
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Jul 16, 2023 03:12
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I thought the sticking point of negotiations was AI-generated content, not residual for actual work done. Are they stuck on both?
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Jul 16, 2023 03:14
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I honestly don't know how these people do it https://twitter.com/linzraeallen/status/1679666879168933888?s=20
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Jul 16, 2023 03:14
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Why I'm sure that's plenty to live on in the famously cheap bustling metropolis known as Los Angeles!
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Jul 16, 2023 03:20
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It's not even $12/hr, and that's before taxes The people making coffee across the street from the studio are making more than that in far less hours
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Jul 16, 2023 03:24
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Vegetable posted:I thought the sticking point of negotiations was AI-generated content, not residual for actual work done. Are they stuck on both? From the outside, we're just seeing PR campaigns from both sides. We don't know what the actual sticking points are, because everybody has incentives to make a lot of noise about issues that they may or may not care about. Basically, nobody is seeing any residuals from streaming. Your show or movie can be sold to Netflix as a writer or actor, and it can be the biggest hit in history or a complete flop, and either way you're not getting paid. That's a huge departure from compensation as it's traditionally worked, and if things stay that way it's a huge hit to writers and actors' wallets. That's probably the real sticking point: are we moving to a new paradigm where because everything is on streaming, residuals basically stop existing? I suspect that the AI stuff is mostly a smokescreen that writers and actors will drop substantially if the AMPTP comes to the table with money for streaming. I don't know. But you can't really take what either side is saying at face value, they're negotiating and trying to dig in on multiple issues so they can strategically give stuff up when they negotiate later.
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Jul 16, 2023 03:34
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AI on the SAG side is probably getting play because it's viscerally awful and plays well with people. But it's also looking like the studios are serious about using it to replace a bunch of low-level actors in the near future and trying to cut filming days, so they probably do need to actually get out ahead of it. Otherwise they'll be stuck with another streaming residuals situation where the AI rules are super out of date. AI on the writers' side is a more practical concern because it ties in with all their other concerns about jobs getting cut and writer's rooms getting shrunk.
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Jul 16, 2023 03:41
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Yeah, I agree that AI will eventually, and maybe fairly soon, become existential for writers, but it's really hard to know what a regulatory structure even *looks* like. The tech didn't substantially publicly exist like two weeks ago, and we don't really know what it'll look like in a month. It might be hard to agree to anything substantial in an environment where the sides are uncertain to what they'd even be agreeing to. I suspect that the structure of a deal for writers might look something like "movement on residuals for streaming shows, and a side agreement to have a joint WGA/AMPTP working group studying the use of AI technology plus with a X year moratorium", without committing anything on AI to the actual contract language? I'm talking out of my rear end here and don't know anything, but I think the AMPTP will have a red line on putting any rules on AI inside the actual contract, but also isn't particularly married to "we will be using AI to write scripts in 2025". They need to resolve streaming residuals now, but they can push the big fight on AI to the next contract cycle once everyone actually understands what's at stake better. Pinterest Mom fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Jul 16, 2023 |
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Jul 16, 2023 03:54
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Didn't the US Copyright Office come to a (temporary?) conclusion that material created by AI, even with a human "co-creator", can't be copyrighted in the standard way? I see that (sadly) probably having more of a chilling effect on use of AI than the concerns/arguments around fair payment for writers/artists if a studio can't maintain an iron grip on sole commercial use of a "creation".
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Jul 16, 2023 03:58
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Jerusalem posted:Didn't the US Copyright Office come to a (temporary?) conclusion that material created by AI, even with a human "co-creator", can't be copyrighted in the standard way? I see that (sadly) probably having more of a chilling effect on use of AI than the concerns/arguments around fair payment for writers/artists if a studio can't maintain an iron grip on sole commercial use of a "creation". Mostly not. They've issued guidance on the easy stuff: "if you tell an AI 'give me a picture of Céline Dion in a spacesuit', the resulting image is not copyrightable". But some of the things that the WGA is worried about, like rewrites, that remains almost certainly covered by copyright. Right now, a writer turns in a draft of a script and gets paid. Execs read it, and might have notes. If they want substantial changes, they have to hire a writer, maybe the same one as the original draft, and there are minimum rates established for how much the writer gets paid (and it depends on if you're doing a "rewrite" or a "polish"). The WGA wants to put in the contract "no rewrites or polishes by AI" to make sure that writers are never bypassed by execs. If a human writer hands in a script, and then a producer feeds it through an LLM and says, idk, "modify this character's gender from male to female", that's fine, copyright-wise. The script as a whole is still largely human-authored, and all you've done is use a tool to modify it. The copyright office doesn't see a problem with that. It's not too different, copyright-wise, from taking a photo and then hitting the magic wand "make it look better" button, really. Yeah, you're replacing a human who would normally be adjusting the colour balance and exposure and so on, but the main thrust of the work is the photo you took, it's just been modified a bit. Similarly, the writers want a ban on "generate a script or outline from AI, and bring in a human writer to do rewrites". Doing a rewrite from base material pays less than writing a full draft of a script, so this could be a way for the studios to pay writers much less than they currently are, and maybe even deny credit. The copyright office explicitly considers this and says "yeah, if the modifications are substantial enough, you can copyright the work as a whole. The AI generated parts aren't really protected, but the human ones are." Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence posted:As the agency overseeing the copyright registration system, the Office has extensive experience in evaluating works submitted for registration that contain human authorship combined with uncopyrightable material, including material generated by or with the assistance of technology. It begins by asking “whether the `work' is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” [23]
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Jul 16, 2023 04:22
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Thanks for that, it's a really good explanation!
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Jul 16, 2023 04:24
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Vegetable posted:I thought the sticking point of negotiations was AI-generated content, not residual for actual work done. Are they stuck on both? Whenever there's a big contract like this there are a lot of clauses you have to fight over, and while AI was apparently where negotiations fell apart entirely it doesn't sound like they were particularly close on anything else. That's the thing, there's a lot that's slanted against actors and writers and so on, to the point where the fields have gone from "hard to make a living in" to "virtually impossible to make a living in." (This is also why, I suspect, we're hearing the nepotism debate more- the problem isn't just that you need the connections, it's that you need to come from money of some kind to be able to afford a career in the arts unless you're very lucky/insanely clever/somehow do not require sleep/etc.) So anyway that's why they've got a lot to fight about. And I can't really see them being able to sacrifice anything and get a good result- like, if they give on AI that's gonna gently caress them over, if they don't get a better residuals situation you still have nobody making any money, etc. Even if they get the AMPTP back to the table in a reasonable amount of time it's gonna take a LOT of talking.
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Jul 16, 2023 08:35
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Happy Landfill posted:Yeah, they really don't want to reveal streaming numbers and I think that's incredibly telling It's really rad that when repeatedly sued for non-payment (and losing), the studios have the God-given ability to say to a judge: "oh no thank you, we would rather not disclose how we do the 'math' that lets us claim that we lost a quarter billion dollars on something that cost us a tenth of that. Yep, that's some fine self-regulation.
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Jul 16, 2023 08:39
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UltraShame posted:It's really rad that when repeatedly sued for non-payment (and losing), the studios have the God-given ability to say to a judge: "oh no thank you, we would rather not disclose how we do the 'math' that lets us claim that we lost a quarter billion dollars on something that cost us a tenth of that. Dollars to donuts the whole thing is going to be basically Pivot To Video part deux. There is no way these numbers aren't partially (or fully) cooked with how tight-lipped they're being about it Happy Landfill fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Jul 16, 2023 |
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Jul 16, 2023 08:55
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Curious to see what actors and writers will scab I know this will end with me disappointed with someone I liked, but so be it
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Jul 16, 2023 10:47
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teen witch posted:Curious to see what actors and writers will scab
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Jul 16, 2023 10:52
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Pinterest Mom posted:From the outside, we're just seeing PR campaigns from both sides. We don't know what the actual sticking points are, because everybody has incentives to make a lot of noise about issues that they may or may not care about. It's partly why the AMPTP's resistance to higher base pay seems very odd to me. I mean obviously management are scum who never want to actually have to pay people more, especially when keeping pay flat lets them TECHNICALLY not cut pay while basically cutting it in real terms, but higher base rates as a means to mitigate the residuals issue to some extent, maybe with a provision for a minimum residual level for streaming with an arbitrarily high barrier before you get a higher amount seems like an obvious proposal to make.
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Jul 16, 2023 16:53
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Davros1 posted:You just KNOW the first thing this would be used for would be to put actressses who have "No nudity" clauses into nude scenes. Already past that point. GoT had two separate scenes with cgi nudity featuring actresses with no nude scene clauses.
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Jul 16, 2023 21:20
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wrong thread im an idiot
escape artist fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Jul 17, 2023 |
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Jul 17, 2023 00:56
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https://twitter.com/jonrog1/status/1680720631984422912?s=20
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Jul 17, 2023 01:18
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If nothing else, I hope this strike forces a release of viewership numbers. I hate how streaming and other online platforms obscure or straight up hide their actual user metrics.
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Jul 17, 2023 01:28
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