As an actress and author, Fran Drescher was never one to mince words, and as the president of SAG-AFTRA, she had some choice ones Thursday afternoon for Hollywood studios’ offers to try — in vain, as it turns out — to avoid a strike.
After the national board of SAG-AFTRA voted to go on strike Thursday, Drescher took to the mic to blast the last-ditch offer. “It came with great sadness that we came to this crossroads,” she said. “We had no choice.”
Drescher continued, “We are the victims here. We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right, while giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them.”
She continued, “At some point, the jig is up. You cannot keep being dwindled and marginalized, and disrespected and dishonored. The entire business model has been changed by streaming, digital, AI … if we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be … in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”
Drescher said, “What happens here … (is) what’s happening across all fields of labor by means of when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run.”
For its part, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers insisted it “presented a deal that offered historic pay and residual increases, substantially higher caps on pension and health contributions, audition protections, shortened series option periods, and a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members.”
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