In case you missed it before the weekend, my L.A. colleague Rebecca Winters Keegan has a report on the possibility of an actors’ strike in Hollywood this summer, and the reasons for the dispute. One striking arresting detail—a phone war between the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which has a tentative deal with the studios already, and the Screen Actors’ Guild, which doesn’t like the deal:
Now the fight has gotten to the hair-pulling stage: SAG is attempting to defeat AFTRA’s contract vote, which would force the unions back to the bargaining table together. The latest weapon is dueling robo-calls: actor James Cromwell is calling AFTRA’s members to support the contract. Sandra Oh is calling the 44,000 actors who are members of both unions to vote to defeat it.
Another nugget: effects-heavy movies like Transformers 2 can switch over to CGI work if actors are unavailable. Surely someone can generate a CGI David Caruso in the event of emergency too?