When Kymberlee Thornton meets with potential film and TV production company clients about being their hair and makeup artist on set, contract negotiations between the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) are top of mind.
“Projects due to start now are stalled or deadlines are pushed in anticipation of a pause,” Ms. Thornton told The Epoch Times. “They are still not secure on budgets and now they’re contending with the possibility of this upcoming work stoppage.”
Current contracts expire at the end of July, and IATSE officers are already expressing dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.
Union leaders began talks last week.
“The fact that negotiations have started so early, months before the contract expires, shows that Hollywood is trying to avoid another shutdown,” Critics Choice Association member and voter Sean Boelman told The Epoch Times. “With negotiations starting this early, the unions and producers will hopefully be able to come to an agreement before a strike is necessary.”
Some 2,000 union members marked the start of negotiations on March 3 by attending the ’Many Crafts, One Fight’ rally in Encino, California, where leaders from the American Federation of Musicians, the Writers Guild of America, and Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and other unions were on hand in support.
Proposals were reportedly presented by union officers. However, Deadline reported that AMPTP has yet to deliver a counteroffer.
Hollywood Branded CEO Stacy Jones. Maarten de Boer/Courtesy of Stacy Jones
“IATSE is fighting some of the same battles, especially with artificial intelligence because if there is more content that is created that does not need environments or sets built, there’s going to be less labor and less jobs needed along the way, so IATSE is looking at ways they can stop that,” Hollywood Branded CEO Stacy Jones told The Epoch Times.
Hollywood Branded is an advertising agency that works with prop masters, set decorators, producers, and directors in product placement and other marketing endeavors.
Craftspeople—that is, anyone on set who is categorized as below-the-line—are squaring off against companies such as Disney, NBC Universal, Paramount, Sony, Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Warner Bros, which are represented by AMPTP.
The AMPTP didn’t respond by press time to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
“There’s no reason these companies can’t build in more protection, reliability, and predictability that creates more security,” IATSE International President Matthew D. Loeb said in a Facebook post.
There are more than 170,000 IATSE members in Canada and the United States who work as stagehands, wardrobe attendants, hair and makeup artists, production technicians, set artists, designers, animators, and audiovisual technicians.
At issue are health and pension benefits relating to the shared Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plan.
“The people who work on film sets cannot make a living off their profession,“ Mr. Boelman, who also is a filmmaker and Fandom film critic, said. ”This is not sustainable for any industry.”
The negotiations are complex and time consuming because of the number of people involved, according to Ms. Jones.
The guilds involved include Local 52, Local 161, The Animation Guild, Teamsters Local 399, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 40, Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 724, United Association Plumbers Local 78, and Operating Plasterers & Cement Masons International Association Local 755.
“As the master negotiation starts, the individual guilds are going to come in,” Ms. Jones said. “There’s a courtesy being given to them because they are due and owed their own negotiation opportunities.”
During negotiations in previous years, IATSE voting members authorized a work stoppage although union officers averted a strike.
A new contract was agreed upon after negotiations were prolonged multiple times.
“The trouble with trying to get jobs in other industries is that most of the jobs are filled with people that could not get in the unions and the pay rates are questionable,” Ms. Thornton said.
Tracy Christian, founder of TCA MGMT. Photo credit: TCA MGMT
Filmmakers, talent agents, actors, and others are concerned the negotiations will escalate to a strike because Hollywood is an ecosystem in which individual professions are interconnected with all the others.
Tracy Christian, talent manager and founder of TCA MGMT, for example, is being very conservative with her spending, in the event there’s a protracted pause on productions this summer.
“It’s not just one area that’s affected,” Ms. Christian told The Epoch Times. “If hair and makeup people walk out, there’s a trickle-down effect. Other unions like SAG-AFTRA support IATSE, and their members will refuse to cross a picket line if film and TV actors can’t get their makeup done by a union person. The same is true for other crew.”
Talk of a strike in July is arriving on the heels of SAG-AFTRA and WGA’s strike last year, which is thought to have interfered with this year’s virtually nonexistent pilot season in which actors have historically booked roles in new TV series. That’s compared to 2020 when 12 full-length pilots were filmed in New York and eight in Los Angeles.
“The leading cause of the lack of a pilot season is that writers’ rooms were nonexistent for months in 2023, meaning that there simply aren’t enough scripts to shoot right now,” Mr. Boelman said.
The SAG-AFTRA strike began in July 2023 and ended in November 2023, while the WGA strike began in May 2023 and ended in late September 2023.
Filmmaker Neil Chase predicts a third consecutive strike would devastate an industry that’s already hanging by a thread.
“It’s a shame there’s even talk of yet another strike this close to the two the industry’s already had especially considering it still hasn’t recovered,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s just another step in an already deteriorating system.”
Filmmaker Neil Chase on the set of 'Christmas Cupcakes.' Photo by Thaimu Turay. Courtesy of Neil Chase
That allegedly deteriorating system is marked by claims of corporatization, such as AT&T owning Warner Bros. and Viacom CBS owning Paramount, as well as TV shows and films produced by Google, Amazon, and Apple on streaming platforms.
“Hollywood has been going through changes, and there’s a new Hollywood emerging,” Ms. Christian said. “There are more studios owned by corporate entities whose main profit center is not entertainment.”
