SAG-AFTRA’s Fran Drescher & Duncan Crabtree-Ireland On Looking To “Reinvent The Wheel” In New AMPTP Contract & Moving SAG Awards To Netflix
deadline.comStreaming consumption has edged out broadcast and cable viewing multiple times over the past year in Nielsen’s monthly reports.
Yet in the contracts between Hollywood studios and unions, it is still classified as new or emerging media whose residuals pale in comparison to those from the traditional, linear networks.
That could finally change in the upcoming contact negotiations, SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher told Deadline on the SAG Awards red carpet. “I had a wonderful lunch with Carol [Lombardini] who is the president of AMPTP, and we were talking about maybe trying to look at how to reinvent the wheel a little bit and stop trying to build on a contract that reflected an industry from the 1980s that barely exists anymore,” Drescher said. “So that’s the approach that I want to take to together, roll up our sleeves and look at how we can have a contract that better reflects the industry at large that exists today.” As Deadline has reported, the DGA issues, the Writers Guild issues and the Screen Actors Guild issues have rarely been as aligned as they are this year because they’re basically all down to minimum compensations and on residuals.
As a result, there has been cooperation among the guilds, and the DGA leadership recently revealed that they won’t be going in first like they typically do, opening the door for the WGA to kick off the negotiations. “Certainly the Writers Guild, Directors Guild and SAG-AFTRA, we’re in touch, we talk to each other about what we think is important for our members, find areas of common interest and so on,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator, told Deadline. “It does look like the writers will be going first this time which is great,
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