Directors Guild Chief Says “We Are Ready to Fight” for Deal on Eve of Studio Talks

Abbey White
·3 min read

On the eve of the talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Directors Guild of America president Lesli Linka Glatter said the group’s upcoming negotiations offer a “small window” to set “the course for the future of our industry” amid the ongoing writers strike and SAG-AFTRA’s impending negotiations, but that the DGA “will not yield” until it has a “strong contract that treats our members fairly.”

In a statement released to press including The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, Glatter laid out the stakes for the upcoming negotiations between the DGA and AMPTP, which are slated to begin on May 10. The director and guild president called for solidarity among creatives, including directors and their teams, while pointing to key negotiation issues around streaming distribution, residuals, cost of living and inflation-related wage increases, the guild’s pension and health plans, training, diversity and inclusion, and the length of workdays.

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“This year’s negotiations are about more than reaching a fair agreement for the next three years — they’re about setting the course for the future of our industry,” she wrote. “Make no mistake: the current position of the studios is a threat to the economic model that for decades has protected tens of thousands of good, union jobs in our industry. The studios have built their businesses on the creative talent of directors, writers, actors, producers, craftspeople and other artisans across the industry and today our voices are strong and clear and in solidarity.

“If the studios want our partnership,” she added, “they should act like our partners.”

Glatter put particular emphasis on the impacts of streamers and the shifting business models of studios that “have merged or been bought by vertically integrated behemoths with control over both production and distribution.” She noted these companies “have largely stopped selling the films and television programs we create on the open market,” opting instead to support their in-house streaming platforms domestically and internationally, impacting director’s residuals.

She also said negotiations will home in on “fighting to protect the role and vision of directors,” including their “jurisdiction over projects produced abroad for U.S. audiences.”

“As their streaming platforms have gained millions of subscribers around the world, they haven’t allowed directors and our teams to share fairly in the international growth of these platforms or the global distribution of our work,” she wrote.

Many of the issues broached are similar to those currently on the table in the Writers Guild of America negotiations, which ended last week before a deal was reached, resulting in the current strike.

Of that strike, which has seen picket-line support from groups like SAG-AFTRA, IATSE and the Teamsters, Glatter wrote: “Like many others, we had hoped the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers would reach a fair and reasonable agreement during the WGA’s negotiating window. But despite six weeks of negotiations, the AMPTP refused to adequately address the writers’ core issues and concerns.

“We have a responsibility to our 19,000 members to negotiate the best deal we possibly can, and we take that commitment extremely seriously,” she continued.

Glatter also noted that SAG-AFTRA’s negotiations are set to begin on June 7 — something that “leaves [the DGA] a small window to negotiate” but a period that the union is “going to take full advantage of” for their guild members to ensure the new three-year contract “treats our members fairly and allows us to share in the success of an evolving entertainment industry.

“The studios must be prepared to invest more in us, in directors and directorial teams, and in all our collaborative partners. In this team sport of ours, we are only as good as our teams,” she concluded. “We know this will be a difficult challenge. But we will not yield from the premise that has sustained our industry for the last century: When artists succeed, everyone succeeds.”

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