WGA and Hollywood Studios Set Tentative Agreement on New Contract
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The Writers Guild of America and the major Hollywood studios have set the broad outline of a new master film and TV contract, quieting concerns about labor strife adding to the industry’s struggle to relaunch production amid the turmoil of the pandemic.
Multiple sources said the three-year contract agreement was essentially settled in the wee hours of Wednesday after a marathon negotiating session between WGA members and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Representatives for the WGA and AMPTP could not immediately be reached for comment.
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Sources said the WGA made significant gains on what was the biggest sticking point in the talks at the end, namely the issue of how long writers can be held off the market under exclusive option to a TV series when the show is out of production. The deal is also believed to raise the earnings threshold for writers working on short-order shows to be paid under a more advantageous per-episode formula.
Previously, writers who earned less than $280,000 per season from a show were eligible for the formula designed to make sure that they were still being paid at the guild’s minimum weekly rate — something that went awry for many writers as more shows began to have longer production cycles for a less than 22-episode orders. The new deal is believed to move that cap up to $325,000 per season.
The previous WGA contract set in 2017 expired at 12:01 a.m. PT Wednesday.
Talks between the WGA and AMPTP launched six weeks ago on a remote basis due to the COVID-19 pandemic after two start dates were vacated. Representatives were facing a June 30 expiration of the current film and TV contract — and the lack of a deal had prompted worries among studios that a strike could be in the works if no agreement is reached.
But the economic wallop of the pandemic cost the WGA the leverage of a strike threat. Rank and file guild members were not expected to embrace a work stoppage at a time when 40 million-plus Americans were have been abruptly thrown out of work because of the coronavirus lockdown.
The WGA negotiations were originally scheduled to commence on March 23 but were pushed back to May 11 and then May 18 as the coronavirus upended business as usual and brought production to a virtual standstill. And before talks started, the expiration of its current three-year deal was extended for two months to June 30.
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