DGA & Studios away from deal despite 2 weeks of talks – Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: With the clock ticking and writers picketing all over town, the Directors Guild of America and the studios are far from even the framework of a deal.

Two weeks after their negotiations, the union led by Lesli Linka Glatter and the Alliance of Film and Television Producers have not “agreed on anything significant”, say well-positioned sources. Not entirely surprising at this juncture of talks obscured by the media, the reality of the situation quenches the rumor circulating through the city today that a deal is near.

“There is a process, it takes time”, a high ranking DGA one member told Deadline. “Everyone in the rooms is following [the process] with full knowledge of what is happening on the picket lines.” Another DGA member added about the pickets and protests: “There is a lot of noise outside, in front of the studios, but the negotiators can’t get too involved in all of that. We have to stay focused, we have a lot of ground to cover before any deal is in the offing.”

In fact, having first sat face to face on May 10, just over a week after the Writers Union went on strike on May 2, the DGA and PTAMP negotiating committees have emphasized a modular approach. After initial meetings at the AMPTP’s Sherman Oaks offices, the two sides split into smaller subcommittees to highlight particular contentious issues such as “ensuring wage increases that address inflation” while the union made its priorities public. earlier this month.

Neither the AMPTP nor the DGA responded to a request for comment on the status of the talks.

Looking at the calendar, the jon avnett-chaired the 80-member DGA negotiating committee and the carol lombardiniThe fronted AMPTP still has plenty of time to reach an agreement. The DGA’s current contract with the studios and producers expires on June 30.

Like almost all Hollywood guild talks, this one will likely come down to the final week of whether or not it succeeds. With the city and the industry at a tipping point in this broadcast era, there is always the chance that the generally more moderate DGA could join the more militant. WGA on the pickets. However, a DGA strike would be an even bigger break with tradition than the Directors Guild ceding its first-place bargaining spot to scribes earlier this year.

The DGA, which now has 19,000 members, last went on strike when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. That the 1987 LA labor action lasted only three hours and 15 minutes on the East Coast (or five minutes less than the running time of Godfather II), and for 15 minutes on the West Coast before a new deal was struck with the studios.

Certainly many in the WGA are anxiously watching to see where the DGA ends up. With not-so-recent history in mind, not a few writers have said that a deal for the latter could deal a heavy blow to the former as it did in the last scribes’ strike in 2008.

Residuals aside, there are many different issues this time around between what the WGA wants from the AMPTP and what the DGA wants. Still, the two guilds have publicly supported each other. Several individual directors have been picketing with the writers over the past three weeks, and Avnet was on stage at the Shrine Auditorium for the WGA rally on May 3 with the scribes and other union leaders, including the head of Teamsters Local 399, Lindsey. dougherty.

Due to the architecture of the Tinseltown labor negotiations, now that the AMPTP is negotiating with the DGA, they cannot officially participate in the barter with the WGA; The five-week long talks ended acrimoniously on the afternoon of May 1.

At the same time, while the DGA and AMPTP have been silent during their negotiations, the union has been very busy online.

The DGA posted this on Instagram on May 23 with some fairly high profile members expressing pride in being in the guild.