CAA’s Bryan Lourd Encourages Early Negotiations Between IATSE and Studios

CAA CEO Bryan Lourd encouraged early negotiations between IATSE and AMPTP before the current guild’s contract expires next summer on July 31, 2024.

“I’ve been very careful, as you know, to not insert myself into this in any way and tell people what they should or shouldn’t do, but one thing I and a lot of my colleagues and a lot of my associates across town at other agencies and management firms have done is to try and force communication,” Lourd said at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles on Thursday. “What I hope happens is that everyone learns from this.”

Lourd continued by stating that “the minute” the current SAG-AFTRA strike reaches a resolution, he hopes that discussions between the AMPTP and IATSE “begin immediately.”

“We cannot leave the union out until June of next year with the rest of the positioning that has to occur in order to achieve a contract,” Lourd continued. “In between the pandemics and where we are now, that would be a disaster. So anyone that’s got any influence, encourage people to start an early negotiation.”

Lourd’s comments come just hours after Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed that negotiations between the studios and SAG-AFTRA came to an abrupt halt on Wednesday evening after the actors’ guild proposed a subscriber-based levy that was a “bridge too far” for the studios.

“What happened last night is that [SAG-AFTRA] introduced basically a levy on subscribers on top of this deal,” Sarandos said at the Los Angeles event on Thursday morning. “A levy on top of our revenue or per subscriber, with no insight into the revenue per subscriber or anything, we just felt like a bridge too far to add this deep into the negotiation.”

Sarandos noted that the studios had previously proposed a “success-based bonus” that was comparable to the deal reached by the studios and the WGA. Despite the fact that Sarandos said the proposal for the actors’ guild would cost four to five times as much as the deal for writers, the Netflix boss said the studios “wrapp[ed] their arms” around the potential solution.

“That issue that we got resolved with the writers was not only accepted in the deal, but ratified by a 99% vote of the writers’ guild,” Sarandos said. “I know that all these guilds are not created equal and they all have different needs and more bespoke needs, but like I said, that is one that worked that rewarded success, which we agreed with.”

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