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It’s over. The stream of sweatshirted and placard-wielding Instagram no-filter/no-makeup posts from stars is at an end. The Sag-Aftra film and television actors’ strike in Hollywood is paused after four months, with a tentative deal giving actors larger minimum-pay increases, a streaming bonus and “consent and compensation” provisions against AI, although how exactly this last is to be enforced remains to be seen. For those who had thought of Hollywood as the very epitome of free-marketeerism, the spectacle of an actual strike, which remained reasonably popular and un-demonised in the press, and which produced a result, is quite startling. Especially as British Equity doesn’t have this kind of power.
In the movies themselves, from Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront to Sylvester Stallone in FIST to Peter Sellers’ Hitler-moustached shop steward Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack, there is a long tradition of showing unions and union activity as dramatically compromised. The closing scene of Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike shows the workers being collectively shot, interspersed with images of a cow being slaughtered. But today’s Hollywood cow is in pretty good shape, despite rumours that studios have been using the strike as a cover to make production cuts.
But what does it mean for the moviegoing public? Well, not perhaps all that much immediately, unlike the writers’ strike in the US where talkshows were suspended and Drew Barrymore was criticised for breaking the strike by attempting to restart her show. Production can reportedly recommence on titles such as Deadpool 3, Gladiator 2 and Wicked which had been stymied, and a release can be scheduled for delayed films including Dune: Part Two – but the unblocking of all these sequels and adaptations does not on the face of it seem like a reflowering of creativity or “storytelling” which industry honchos solemnly declare to be their vocation.
Striking Hollywood actors had been forbidden to make promotional appearances, which had meant not appearing on talkshows. Perhaps British TV audiences for The Graham Norton Show or The Jonathan Ross Show might not have noticed any great difference, but we have seen a greater emphasis on non-film-promo celebrity turns: Arnold Schwarzenegger has been around to boost his self-help book and Dame Judi Dench her work on Shakespeare. And we have been spared that most depressing of phenomena – the group appearance, whereby three or four people from the same film sit grinningly on the sofa and hog all the limelight and turn the programme into an advertorial for their film.
But during the strike, Hollywood stars had been allowed to put their heads over the parapet on the understanding that they were doing so as producers, and film festival selectors had reportedly gone easier on movie stars’ “passion projects” on the understanding that they would be allowed to make a red-carpet appearance as producers. This was surely the case with Chris Pine and his wacky, sub-Lebowski film Poolman this year, in which he was director, star, co-writer and co-producer – and which had people at the London film festival groaning and checking the time on their phones. The strike had given oxygen to Chris Pine and Poolman which should maybe have been withheld. The end of the strike will mean business (almost) as usual: streamers and studios will have drawn in their horns; performers will be encouraged to stay in their lanes, but with the knowledge that this is still a really lucrative industry – and actors have triumphantly restaked their claim in it.