Clooney, Emma Stone and SAG-AFTRA Leaders Meet to Discuss Stalled Contract Negotiations – Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: Some of Hollywood’s biggest names met with SAG-AFTRA executives today to get the lowdown on the breakdown of negotiations with studios and streamers last week.

George Clooney, Emma Stone, Ben Affleck, Tyler Perry and Scarlett Johansson were among a group of the guild’s most talented members who we heard spoke with guild president Fran Drescher and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland on Tuesday for a detailed report.

At a meeting with guild leadership via Zoom this afternoon, Oscar winners and other celebrities were especially interested in the revenue-sharing proposals that SAG-AFTRA presented to AMPTP and the CEO’s Gang of Four.

These efforts to obtain additional compensation for guild members were a bitter pill to swallow for studios and streamers from the time they began initial negotiations with SAG-AFTRA in June until the union joined the WGA on the picket lines in mid-July. When negotiations resumed on October 2, the proposal was still a matter of intense disagreement between the two sides.

Discussions were suspended by studio executives on October 11, with revenue distribution and artificial intelligence proving to be the main sticking points.

Throughout today’s discussions, Clooney, Johansson and the rest have been “extremely supportive” of union leaders and their position in seeking a new three-year contract for SAG-AFTRA, a source close to the situation told Deadline. “They had a lot of questions, a few suggestions and a lot of good feedback,” the insider said separately.

While SAG-AFTRA did not confirm or deny Tuesday’s virtual call with top executives, a union spokesman said, “We meet with representatives of all profiles every day and will not comment on these private conversations.”

Featuring David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley and Disney’s Bob Iger at the negotiating table during the parties’ second round of negotiations last week, SAG-AFTRA provided an updated look at how actors can capitalize on the success of a series or movie on streaming services.

Disagreeing with what AMPTP claimed was an $800 million-a-year price tag, the CEOs and their AMPTP team left mid-afternoon talks at SAG-AFTRA headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard last Wednesday and never returned. Expecting negotiations to resume the next day as scheduled, Drescher and Crabtree-Ireland later received a call saying that the only recently intensified negotiations had been stopped. Echoing AMPTP’s comments on the evening of October 11, Sarandos later characterized the latest revenue-sharing proposal as a “tax” on streaming consumers.

“We have taken big and significant steps on our end, including a complete transformation of our revenue sharing offering that will cost companies less than 57 cents per subscriber per year,” the guild said in an email to its members early on Oct. 12. “They rejected our proposals and refused to fight back,” SAG-AFTA added, saying the CEOs and AMPTP were trying to use “scare tactics” and “the same failed strategy they tried with the WGA.”

In response to Sarandos’ claim that the union is pushing for a submarine tax, Crabtree-Ireland told Deadline on October 14 at New York Comic Con that such claims are “absurd!” He added: “This is like saying workers should be compensated for their work in the form of a tax. This is not true. The reason the product exists is because of their work. Fair compensation, fair wages for workers are not and never have been and never will be a tax.”

At this time, since the optimism generated by the successful WGA deal has faded, no new negotiations between AMPTP and SAG-AFTRA are scheduled.

This Saturday marks the 100th day of the SAG-AFTRA strike, capping a record labor action for the 160,000-member union.