With an official new deal for the WGA potentially in sight, it may be tempting for everyone to think that the end of Hollywood’s Hot Strike Summer is almost here and that the studios that comprise the AMPTP are just going to buckle and give SAG-AFTRA everything it wants after being so thoroughly trounced by the unions over the past few months, but that doesn’t seem to be the case—at least not yet. Though, really, that shouldn’t be too surprising at this point. The AMPTP has made it clear over this summer that it is nothing if not aggressively obtuse and disinterested in doing anything the easy or straightforward way, so why assume that’s going to change now?
Anyway, in a Deadline story about how SAG-AFTRA and the studios “could meet within days,” a spokesperson for the actors union says that, actually, they have “no confirmed dates scheduled” to return to bargaining with the AMPTP, and “there will not be meetings with the AMPTP this week.” Furthermore, the union says “we will inform our members” when there are confirmed dates for bargaining, and “no one should rely on speculation.”
In other words, don’t trust any source but the union on this stuff, and don’t assume anything (because, as we all know, you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me” when you do that). Deadline is framing all of this as SAG-AFTRA possibly setting up bargaining meetings with the AMPTP, putting the onus on the union to follow through on these rumored meetings (Deadline says the union has “penciled in meetings” with the AMPTP and not that the AMPTP has “penciled in meetings” with SAG-AFTRA). Intentionally or not, that suggests that it would be SAG-AFTRA’s fault if these talks don’t happen “within days,” despite the fact that it’s the AMPTP that has been stubbornly refusing to bargain with the unions all summer. (Was it someone associated with the unions who said that the plan was to wait until people started losing their homes or was it someone associated with the AMPTP? We can’t recall.)