SAG-AFTRA Negotiator Anthony Rapp Claims Studios Stonewalled Talks Days Ahead of Strike

Abbey White
·8 min read
3
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Anthony Rapp claims the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers repeatedly canceled meetings during the final days of the extended contract negotiations with SAG-AFTRA and wanted “free rein” on several issues, including artificial intelligence and self-taping.

“[After] a certain point in the process I’m not surprised that we’re here, but initially, I thought, ‘OK, maybe they’re getting the message,'” the Star Trek: Discovery actor and member of the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee told The Hollywood Reporter on Friday during the first day of the actors union strike. “Because we went in with the strike authorization vote — it was a really excellent turnout, it was a huge margin — I thought that would be enough leverage to maybe make them get a little more serious.”

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Rapp said that as a first-time negotiating committee member, he found the studios’ approach to working on a new theatrical and TV basic contract — talks for which began June 7 — mystifying and disappointing. “I don’t know if it’s simply that they just think they’re calling bluff or what,” he said. “I don’t even know the number of days in which they didn’t even sit across the table, including an extension they would not engage with.

“These final days, they kept canceling our meetings. They would not meet with us, and then they called in the federal mediators. I have no problem with a federal mediator being a part of the process to learn and observe and help in any way, but even then, they didn’t engage with us until the end of the day, when we sat across the table from them and let them know that we were too far apart on all these issues, so we were going to call for an authorization of the strike,” Rapp told THR while on the Netflix picket line in New York on Friday.

On Monday, a spokesperson for the AMPTP denied that the studios had canceled meetings ahead of the July 12 negotiation deadline, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “It is simply untrue that meetings were canceled, or that the AMPTP would not meet with SAG-AFTRA.”

THR has reached out to representatives for SAG-AFTRA for comment.

Rapp said SAG-AFTRA plans to follow a move made by the Writers Guild and publicly release a “matrix” of the union’s proposals and the AMPTP’s, which released details of their proposal in a memo July 13. “That’s going to happen very quickly,” the actor said. “So there will be some real explication of some of the detailed proposals and how they were or were not addressed by the studios.”

Rapp, referring to the documentary Harlan County, USA, about the 1973 coal miners’ “Brookside Strike,” told THR that some of the AMPTP’s comments have sounded like “the kinds of things people were saying in the Pinkerton-era, coal-mining fights.

“When we announced that we were going to be striking, and I’m paraphrasing, they said we can’t talk to you anymore because we need to be talking to civilized people,” Rapp claimed. “Organized labor is protected in all sorts of ways by federal law, state law. It is our right to strike. That is a part of the process.”

Rapp was specifically responding to a comment made by the union’s chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, during a Thursday press conference announcing the strike. Crabtree-Ireland told union members and press that during a July 12 exchange with the studio negotiators, the union said it would be willing to come back to the table whenever the AMPTP was “ready to do so.”

“Their response to us was that they would be ready to talk whenever we would act in a civilized manner and not be on strike,” he continued. “We told them that it’s not uncivilized for people to go on strike. It’s a moral right. It’s a human right, and it’s a legal right of our members to collectively bargain, to organize and to go on strike if needed to defend their rights.”

Reiterating previous public statements, a spokesperson for the AMPTP told THR that Crabtree-Ireland’s summation of the union’s stance was out of context. “As has been said before, the comment in question has been distorted and taken entirely out of context,” the rep for the studios said.

Rapp was joined by other actors in New York on July 14, who made clear through their chants they feel some of AMPTP’s actions — particularly around the disputed AI proposal — are an attempt at union busting. It’s a sentiment that has been echoed by others like Sorry to Bother You director-writer Boots Riley and A Black Lady Sketch Show writer-actress Ashley Nicole Black, and was heard in chants on the picket lines on Friday, as reported by Newsday.

“I feel like it’s a union-busting effort, absolutely, and possibly fueled by the entry of companies like Amazon or Apple,” the SAG-AFTRA board member said of the AMPTP’s stances during the negotiations. “Interestingly, when Netflix was separate, Netflix was actually engaging with the union in all sorts of ways that were innovative, and we were making good progress with them on a number of fronts. Then they joined the AMPTP, so now they’re a part of the collective and all the dynamics are very strange.” (The AMPTP did not comment on this characterization.)

Rapp was joined by a large collection of fellow actors, WGA, IATSE, other union members and local Democratic Socialist of America groups outside the Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery New York offices in Union Square as the first double-strike in Hollywood since 1960 kicked off. While picketing, Rapp — who was with his husband, Ken Ithiphol, and son, Rai — elaborated on the early days of negotiations, how a federal monitor ended up being brought in and the biggest issues facing actors.

That includes an AI proposal mentioned by Crabtree-Ireland during the Thursday presser, which would allegedly allow digital replicas of background actors to be used for a single day’s pay in perpetuity, with no consent or further compensation. (The AMPTP has claimed Crabtree-Ireland’s summation of its proposal is “false.”)

Rapp shared that while the actors union brought forth its own AI proposal at the start of negotiations, it wasn’t until the Sunday or Monday ahead of the extension deadline that the union “heard back from them on their counterproposal to the package.

“They’re balking at the idea that I would have to be consulted on how else they might use it,” Rapp said of the negotiations around the use of AI for actors. “What if they want to use my likeness in a scene where a character kills a baby or in a sex scene? They wouldn’t even put fences around it. None.”

Limitations and barriers around work were a running theme in conversations with the studios, according to the New York negotiating committee member. That includes the use of self-tapes for auditioning, a topic the Rent star said was one of the strongest hardships the union heard from membership about heading into negotiations.

Increasingly prevalent in the industry following the expansion of virtual and remote work during the pandemic, some performers say self-taping places labor once predominantly performed by casting offices on the shoulders of actors, who sometimes feel the pressure to pay out of pocket for better equipment. While speaking with THR, Rapp acknowledged that “we all have phones,” but said people also sometimes have to pay to have another person to read with them. It’s a topic the union board member said the studios “just want free rein” on.

“There are no regulations on how much we’re asked to do. People are getting requests for 20 pages of material due the next day. All the specifications — it’s like being given a job interview and having to prepare a thesis for the next day,” he said. “That’s a quality of life issue. This sort of issue is not necessarily about money out of [the studios’] pocket. It’s just about trying to intervene in a process that makes better working conditions.”

While streaming’s impact on residuals was a recurring topic among actors on the line in New York on Friday, Rapp also pointed to its impact on the union’s pension and health contributions, more specifically the current contract caps. The caps are the point in which the studios will no longer pay into an individual actor’s pension and health plans past a certain earnings dollar amount.

“There’s the percentage on top of your money that goes into pension and health. That has been increased over the years, but there are caps on the money you earn,” the union negotiating committee member explained. “Those caps have not been raised in 40 years, and they’re balking at raising them in the wake of the pandemic, when it became even clearer how important and vital access to health care is.”

Rapp added that this is not only interfering with funding the health plan, but making it harder for actors to qualify for health care in a TV climate where episode numbers per season are shrinking. “Now when we’re doing eight episodes, 10 episodes, instead of 22 episodes because of the way the landscape has changed, all the money going into the health plan is down anyway,” he continued. “They’re not willing to offset that. They’re not willing to truly adjust or fully engage in it.

“When [SAG-AFTRA president] Fran [Drescher] said yesterday that we were being stonewalled, that’s what she meant,” Rapp noted.

Best of The Hollywood Reporter

Click here to read the full article.