Daily Digest: Will Directors Vote 'Yes' on the Studio Deal?
➕ how the '07-'08 writers strike changed the trajectory of the talent agency business
All quiet on the Eastern front now that Canadian wildfires have forced New York City writers to pause pickets for the rest of the week due to health and safety concerns, while picketers on the West Coast have completely brought TV production to a standstill. And SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP are officially in a media blackout as they begin their negotiations.
So let’s do a quick check-in on where there might be some interesting action: Now that the Directors Guild has sent its pact with Hollywood’s major studios — which includes a 5 percent wage bump in its first year and a new residual structure — to its members for ratification, how many of them might actually vote ‘no’?
“This is a significant deal with gains for every Director, Assistant Director, Unit Production Manager, Associate Director, and Stage Manager,” said DGA president and Homeland helmer Lesli Linka Glatter in a Tuesday statement. “Our industry is rapidly changing and expanding, and this agreement is what we need to adapt to those changes, break new ground and protect the DGA’s 19,000 directors and directorial team members today, and in the years to come.”
DGA members have until June 23 to make up their minds, and a number of people I’ve had a chance to chat with this week — multi-hyphenate director-writers on the picket lines, business affairs execs — seem to think the agreement is a pretty good deal. But those who feel otherwise have, naturally, taken their dissent to Twitter, where some DGA members say they’re voting “no,” including Oscar-winning Hair Love director Matthew Cherry, Love Reconsidered director Carol Ray Hartsell and Halt and Catch Fire’s Christopher Cantwell:
Directors, how are you planning to vote? Tell us in the comments or talk to me: elaine@theankler.com.
Elsewhere on The Ankler…
Strike-adjacent, this is an excellent read from The Ankler’s Peter Kiefer on agency titans Ari Emanuel and Bryan Lourd:
If you want to chart the transformation of the talent agency business, the last Writers Guild strike isn’t a bad place to start. When the writers walked off the job back in 2007, everyone from producers to managers to agency heads accelerated plans for alternative revenue streams beyond scripted content. Sports, reality television and live events became major areas of investment.
It was also around this time that a firehose of private equity money was turned on. In 2010, TPG Capital made the first (a reported $166 million) of several investments into CAA, and by 2014, it owned a controlling stake (it reportedly poured in an additional $60 million, putting the total investment somewhere around $225 million for its 53 percent chunk). In 2012, private equity firm Silver Lake Partners invested $200 million into WME, for a 31 percent stake. Several more equity investments into WME soon followed, leading to the splintering off of Endeavor as a holding company separate from WME. Those respective investments provided the fuel for Emanuel and Lourd’s ambitions — and made them spectacularly wealthy at the same time.
“Ari and Bryan grew their agencies brilliantly and they reached the pinnacle but there’s a limit to that,” says a former high-level studio exec. “Sure, you can poach talent from one another all you want but there’s also a limit to that growth. So, they went out and got private equity. But if you take a couple hundred million dollars into your agency, you have to show growth that’s well beyond what you’re going to get from Michael Bay’s next movie.”
And so began the modern-day arms race.
Read the full story at The Ankler, for paid subscribers only.
Today in Strike News
There have been myriad changes in how writers are faring today compared to 10 years ago, but two especially jarring ways stand out: median weekly writer-producer pay has dropped 23 percent, and the percentage of writers on the minimum rate has gone from a third to nearly half. (Marketplace)
“One of the smallest committees in the Writers Guild, but [with] one of the loudest voices ever” — that’s how Native American and Indigenous Writers Committee vice chair Aiko Little describes her group, which had 100 members show up to picket Disney yesterday. (Variety)
Thanks to a landscape in which actors face many of the same issues as writers, an actors strike could take effect, which would — for a time — completely shut down an industry already in the thick of an existential crisis. (Vanity Fair)
Over the years, writers strikes have affected countless productions, including the original Michael Keaton Batman, J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot (which couldn’t alter its script while shooting), and License to Kill, a Timothy Dalton Bond flick that went a darker direction than originally intended. (Vulture)
Fresh off the culmination of their critical daring The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino might’ve been hoping to jump straight into their new Amazon drama Etoile, but the strike has suspended production on the ballet-focused series. (Deadline)
Robert De Niro’s first-ever scripted TV role, the Netflix drama Zero Day, began shooting on Monday in New York, but was immediately greeted by picketers who have caused the production to shut down. Helming the project as director and executive producer happens to be none other than DGA head Lesli Linka Glatter. (Variety)
Seemingly the only thing that can stop Taylor Sheridan’s prolific run of new and returning TV shows for Paramount might just be the strike, as season two of his Yellowstone prequel 1923 has delayed its Montana filming. (NBC Montana)
Picket Sign of the Day
Keeping those Zoolander references fresh. As spotted by PicketFits.
Additional reporting by Matthew Frank
Akko Little isn’t an enrolled member of any tribe and never lived on the rez.