Dispatches From The Picket Lines: Strikers Rip Studios At First NYC Rally Since SAG-AFTRA Talks Broke Down; “It’s Tactics”, Says David Simon

Sean Piccoli
·5-min read

This is Day 92 of the SAG-AFTRA strike.

At the first actors to picket after Wednesday night’s breakdown of their talks with the studios and streamers, SAG-AFTRA members in New York City said that they were disappointed by the setback but “holding strong” to their demands.

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Striking actors who gathered Thursday outside Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery offices also cheered the announcement of bipartisan legislation in the U.S. Senate to protect them from artificial intelligence.

Writers joining them on the picket line after ratifying their own contract this week urged the actors to stay strong.

“It’s tactics,” The Wire creator David Simon told Deadline, speaking of the studios’ decision to suspend the talks and criticize SAG-AFTRA for demanding a share of studio profits. “They say you can’t have something and you’ll never get something, and ‘DGA settled for this and you don’t understand our industry.’ They say this shit, and then a month later — if you hold fast — suddenly it’s on the table.”

RELATED: SAG-AFTRA Accuses Studios Of “Bully Tactics” & Misrepresentation Over Revenue-Sharing Proposal Costs As Negotiations Crater

“And so we’re at that moment again, for SAG,” the veteran WGA negotiating committee member said, referencing the point in August when negotiations stalled out between the writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers before a deal eventually was reached. Simon added a parting shot at the AMPTP: “Their playbook is always the same.”

Actors Anthony Rapp and Jack Mulcahy, members of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee, told Deadline that they, too, see recent history repeating.

“In a way I’m not surprised that they’re doing the same thing with us,” Rapp said. “What I am a little surprised at is — it didn’t work with the WGA, so I don’t know why they think it’s going to work with us. … When the talks broke down with the WGA similarly in August, it lit another fire [for the WGA]. And I think they’ve done the same thing again.”

RELATED: SAG-AFTRA Interim Agreements: Full List Of Movies And TV Series

Rapp acknowledged that performers had allowed themselves some optimism. “After the WGA made their deal and then the CEOs said they were going to sit back down with us, we were all like, ‘OK, we’re going to get somewhere,’” Rapp said.

In light of Wednesday’s setback, he said that the message to SAG-AFTRA members is “that we are holding strong to make sure that we have a fair deal, we are not going to cave to arbitrary deadlines or nonsense about math that’s not real math, etc., etc., that we are going to hold strong on the issues that came from the ground-up from our membership that they asked us to address and make sure that we would shore up for the sake of everyone.”

“Because the alternative is unthinkable and untenable,” Mulcahy said.

Other actors at Thursday’s picket included Jaimie Alexander, Mike Doyle, Jill Hennessy, Kathleen Chalfant and Michael Cyril Creighton.

Mulcahy said that these talks feel different from the previous three he worked on.

“In 2020 we had to do the entire negotiation on Zoom for six weeks, so we were more concerned about Covid protocols and getting people back to work,” he said. “So whatever slipped through the cracks in that negotiation is coming back to bite us in the ass right now.

“However, with the advent and the threat of AI, it has pulled us all together,” he continued. “Historically, that room has been a little separated — performers, actors, stunts, background. But this time, with AI being the existential threat that it is, it totally unified us and we have been on the same page since Day 1.”

RELATED: Senate Legislation Would Outlaw Unauthorized AI-Generated Likenesses; SAG-AFTRA Lauds “No Fakes Act”

AI concerns took center stage at the tail end of the rally, as picketers were gathered in a circle to hear a closing pep talk from a strike captain — who then paused to declare “breaking news” and hand off to Rebecca Damon, executive director of SAG-AFTRA’s New York local.

Damon announced discussion draft legislation had just been presented in the U.S. Senate “to protect voice[s] and likeness[es] of actors, singers, performers and individuals from AI-generated replicas.”

Damon named four senators as co-sponsors of the Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe Act, or NO FAKES Act (read it here): Democrats Chris Coons of Delaware and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republicans Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

Cheers erupted, and the SAG-AFTRA strike captain, Sue Berch, repeated the news. “If you didn’t hear that I’m going to say it again: The Senate is trying to put through a bill to protect our voices and our likenesses from AI,” she said. “That’s how this works: We get legislation as well as being on the streets.”

A SAG-AFTRA representative told Deadline that the Senate legislation had been in the works for a while and provides federal backup to similar legislation that the union has helped to draft and get introduced to state legislatures, including New York’s.

The WGA contract includes groundbreaking limits on AI to protect writers from being replaced by software. While many writers have returned to work, Jason Gordon, a WGA East spokesman who joined picketing actors on Thursday, told Deadline, “We’re going to continue to support [SAG-AFTRA] until they get the fair contract they deserve.”

“We’re going to keep turning out members and showing up in numbers,” Gordon said.

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