George Clooney and other backlogs and celebrity donation proposals “A gesture of goodwill,” says SAG-AFTRA executive director

A plan presented to SAG-AFTRA this week by George Clooney and other big stars to resume potentially stalled negotiations with studios is “worthy of review and consideration,” the union’s chief negotiator says.

“We’ve got your back, we’ve got your back,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told Deadline today of his insights into the ideas and feelings of the Oscar winner and others. “We just want to do what we can to help, and I think someone who wants to help is not someone who wants to undermine.”

As Deadline exclusively reported, Clooney, Emma Stone, Ben Affleck, Tyler Perry Scarlett Johansson and other celebrities met with guild leaders on Tuesday to discuss the status of the strike and the lack of talks with studios. During the Zoom meeting, top members stressed to union president Fran Drescher and Crabtree-Ireland, as Clooney himself exclusively confirmed to Deadline today, that “many of the top earners want to be part of the solution.”

SAG-AFTRA has been on strike for 98 days so far, and no new talks with the studios and streamers are currently planned. However, Crabtree-Ireland today said a new deal was “certainly possible”. He added: As long as everyone comes back to the table and does so with the thought: Let’s find this path to a fair deal.

In their desire for a fair deal, the A-listers put a number of details on the table for the guild to consider.

“We have offered to lift the contribution limit, which will bring the union more than $50 million a year,” said two-time Oscar winner Clooney, explaining the stars’ proposals to bring the situation back to the negotiating table. “More than $150 million over the next three years. We think it is fair that we pay the union more. We also propose a bottom-up residue structure, meaning that the top part of the call sheet is the last to collect residues, rather than the first. These negotiations will continue, but we wanted to show that we are all in this together and find ways to close the gap in terms of actor pay.”

On Thursday, Crabtree-Ireland undertook a comprehensive assessment of the A-lister’s offer, on the poster line at Warner Bros.

“The idea of ​​removing our contribution limits and providing higher membership fees can help fund all kinds of programs that can help members, such as programs to help uninsured members who need health insurance, premium assistance or similar,” noted the SAG – AFRTRA Leader . . “But that’s no way to put money into benefit plans. It’s not even legal to put money into benefit plans except from employer contributions.”

“So I really see this as a gesture of goodwill and support aimed at strengthening membership rather than influencing treaty negotiations,” he explained.

Although contributions weren’t a big topic in the SAG-AFTRA deliberations this year, the A-lister’s idea of ​​flipping the residual payout carried real weight, not least symbolically. In effect, the Clooney-led proposal, by putting itself at the bottom of the list and putting working actors at the top, could empower the vast majority of the guild’s 160,000 members, many of whom don’t even earn enough to qualify for health. insurance. Health benefits

With Netflix’s Ted Sarandos repeatedly accusing SAG-AFTRA of trying to sneak a “subscriber fee” into the deal, the guild’s revenue-sharing proposal has been a major sticking point in entering into a new three-year agreement. Right from the start of the talks at the beginning of this year, the actors’ guild sought new financial compensation for the casting of successful streaming shows and films – which has always been unsuccessful for the AMPTP.

In the latest round of discussions that began on October 2nd, the guild lowered the proposal from 2% of Steam revenue to 1%. Last week, SAG-AFTRA returned with an overhaul aimed at reducing the fee to about 57 cents per subscriber on the streaming services.

It didn’t go well. In fact, on October 11, the studios and streamers canceled planned talks early and later called Crabtree-Ireland to inform them that they would not be returning and that consultations had been “suspended”. The AMPTP claimed the proposal would cost it $800 million a year and impose an “unsustainable economic burden”. SAG-AFTRA disputes the estimate, calling it inflated by hundreds of millions.

“They told us that under no circumstances would we agree to anything linked to revenue, so our committee went back, soul-searched, worked very hard for a few days and yesterday came up with a new proposal that doesn’t income is not linked. is bound. at the subscriber level, just as they asked,” Crabtree-Ireland, chief union negotiator, told Deadline on October 12 on the Netflix pickle line. “Their response to that was, instead of, ‘Oh, wow, that’s something we can talk about,’ their response was, ‘We’re leaving the negotiations.’

Although talks between the studios and streamers have been on hold for more than a week, Netflix also described negotiations as “ongoing” in its third-quarter earnings report yesterday — which could suggest a reboot is coming sooner rather than later.