Hollywood's writers and actors strike is going global and now Australian productions are being affected.
Leading the charge in the fight against streaming services and film studios is US actress Fran Drescher, who is best known for her role in The Nanny.
Drescher is also a comedian, writer and activist but her biggest role yet is as the president of the actors' union which announced that, for the first time since 1960, it will join the striking writers.
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"I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly," Drescher said.
"They plead poverty, that they're losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them."
Actors took action and stood in solidarity with writers in the midst of two major film premiers.
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The first hint the Hollywood strike was going nuclear was when the star-studded cast of Oppenheimer walked out on the film's London premiere.
Matt Damon, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Junior, Florence Pugh and Kenneth Brannah left director Christopher Nolan to carry the event.
The strike has taken the Barbie movie promotional bandwagon off the road as well and the lights have gone out on big television productions like White Lotus and Stranger Things.
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The battle started when writers claimed their pay was being whittled away as royalties disappeared with the rise of streaming.
"The majority of our members… 99.99 per cent of them are journeyman performers. They're people that are just working-class people trying to put food on the table," Drescher said.
There are concerns they could be made redundant by technology and that AI could be used to write scripts.
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"It is a slippery slope into a very dangerous time and a real dystopia if big business corporations think that they can put human beings out of work and replace them with artificial intelligence. It's dangerous and it's without thinking or conscience," Drescher said.
But actors joining the strike was a twist studio and streaming executives feared most.
Like their writing colleagues, actors on the margins have watched their income stream reduced to a trickle by streaming.
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Studio bosses like Disney's Bob Iger say writers and actors are living in a dream world.
"This is the worst time in the world to add to that disruption," Iger said.
"There's a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic and they are adding to a set of challenges this business is already facing."
It seems that a solution for all could still be a long way off.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiiwFodHRwczovLzlub3cubmluZS5jb20uYXUvYS1jdXJyZW50LWFmZmFpci9ob2xseXdvb2RzLXdyaXRlcnMtc3RyaWtlLXJlYWNoZXMtYXVzdHJhbGlhbi1zY3JlZW4taW5kdXN0cnkvMDRkMDJmNDYtOTgyNy00NjE1LWI5NDMtZDQxNTNkZmVjNGY10gFEaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAubmluZS5jb20uYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8wNGQwMmY0Ni05ODI3LTQ2MTUtYjk0My1kNDE1M2RmZWM0ZjU?oc=5
2023-07-15 10:11:49Z
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