Hollywood’s impasse spotlights NYC’s role in film and TV

The strike by Hollywood actors and writers threatens to have significant ripple effects in New York City, where industry stages, sound studios and production lots have shut down, some having closed even before the performers joined the writers on the picket lines last month.  

The Daily Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Problem with Jon Stewart, Saturday Night Live. All are produced in the city, and all have gone dark, leaving camera operators, technicians, caterers, make-up artists, drivers, stylists and others scrambling for work, filing for unemployment or, likely, both.

Consider, too, the hundreds of feature films and episodic TV shows filmed every year in New York City.

More than 185,000 people in the city were employed either directly in the entertainment industry or in businesses supporting film and TV productions in 2019, and represented nearly 4 percent of all city jobs, according to a study by the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. Altogether, they were paid about $18.1 billion and accounted for some $81.6 billion in economic output that year, when motion picture productions reached an all-time high, the 2021 study noted.  

“The stakes for the city of New York are high. The film and television industry is a core driver of the New York City economy,” Lowell Peterson, the executive director of the Writers Guild of America East, said during a Tuesday afternoon meeting of the City Council’s Committee on Civil Service and Labor, which convened chiefly to signal the Council’s support for the strikers. 

Earlier in the day, Council members assembled in City Hall Park for a noontime rally alongside hundreds of WGA and SAG-AFTRA members to call on the studios to negotiate a fair contract. 

The studios’ shutdowns, along with those of most television productions, began May 2 shortly after talks between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, a trade group representing Hollywood studios, broke down. The strike grew in numbers and stature when 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA walked out July 14, the first time both Hollywood writers and actors are on strike at the same time since 1960. Both sets of workers take part in daily pickets in front of studio offices and production lots in New York and Los Angeles.  

James Parrott, the director of Economic and Fiscal Policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, noted that because the television and motion picture industry is heavily unionized in the city, salaries are on the high end, averaging about $173,000. 

It also supports tens of thousands of middle-class jobs. “Still, about a quarter of all those directly engaged in TV and film production earn less than $52,000 annually,” Parrott said by email.

And although initial claims for unemployment related to the strikes haven’t yet shown up in the data, “that will come on top of the fact that continuing claims for unemployment insurance in New York State have recently been running about 20 percent greater than this time last year.” 

That increase is due to layoffs in the tech industry and other sectors, he said. 

Because of “a serious under-financing problem” plaguing the state’s unemployment insurance system, Parrott said, the strike could have consequential domino effects on an already precarious local economy. “With maximum weekly UI benefits about $200-$300 less than they would have been if our system were on a sound financial footing, the cost to the City's economy will be that much greater,” he said.

‘Ready, willing and able to negotiate’

As with nearly all work stoppages, the looming issue is money, with writers seeking higher minimum salaries and larger residuals. Actors, among them journeyman, most of whom work for scale, also want better pay, including for the time they spend at auditions. Actors and writers also seek a larger share of profits derived from television shows and movies featured on streaming services, which has become a growing distribution point for studios. 

Both groups also want to rein in the use of artificial intelligence in the entertainment industry, a technology they see as a threat to their livelihoods.  

Actors have previously urged their leadership not to accept anything less than a “transformative” deal. 

Fran Drescher, the SAG-AFTRA president and actor, who was born and raised in Flushing, Queens, told the City Hall Park crowd that she “never imagined that the show business that was so romanticized in the old movies of the 1930s and '40s, in 2023 would actually be led by such greed-driven and disrespectful people.” 

“My members want the same thing for their children that these uber-wealthy CEOs want for theirs,” she continued. “We will not be stepped on or squeezed out of our livelihood so that they can look good for their shareholders."

Hours after the rally and hearing, the Writers Guild of America notified its members through email that the AMPTP had reached out to the union to request to meet Friday. “We remain committed to finding a path to mutually beneficial deals with both unions,” a spokesperson for the AMPTP said in a statement. 

At its meeting, the Civil Service and Labor Committee unanimously passed two non-binding resolutions urging studios to return to negotiations.  

“We are here today not just to plead for a fair and just contract to defend the livelihoods of SAG-AFTRA and WGA members but also to protect New York city’s economy,” committee Chair Carmen De La Rosa said at the hearing’s outset. “A prolonged production shutdown threatens to cost New York City tens of thousands of jobs this fall.”

dfreeman@thechiefleader.com