A bunch of rich and famous Hollywood stars have come up with a way to keep negotiations moving on the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, and it doesn’t involve them joining the picket lines or using their immense power and influence at all. Instead, it involves them doing the easiest thing a rich and famous person can do: writing a check. According to Deadline, a coalition of A-listers that includes George Clooney (once the highest-paid man in Hollywood even after taking a years-long acting sabbatical), Emma Stone, Ben Affleck, Tyler Perry, and Scarlett Johansson have proposed that SAG-AFTRA simply eliminates its cap on union dues and uses that money to pay for the union’s various asks. In other words, it would take a lot of the pressure off of the studios to do literally anything to support the people who make the things that make them money and put that responsibility on the union’s own members, which is… weird.
Deadline explains that SAG-AFTRA has a $1 million cap on dues, so eliminating it would mean that the union could bring in “more than $50 million” annually, with Clooney confirming the pitch to Deadline and noting that his crew is also proposing a new residual structure where the lowest-paid workers will get their money first. Clooney said that this is a way to “show that we’re all in this together” and that rich people like him want to “find ways to help close the gap on actors getting paid.”
Deadline insists that this is “admirable” and is bullish on this being a way forward for the union and the AMPTP, but again, it is weird to offer up this strategy rather than Clooney throwing this money into funds for people impacted by the strike or showing up on the picket lines with a pizza and bottles of Casamigos. Which may or may not have been the exact vibe that the people in the room got when Clooney and his pals made the pitch: According to Variety, the proposal “didn’t go well” and the negotiating committee “didn’t see the validity” of the idea, which left the A-listers “feeling dejected.”
Variety’s sources say that the idea is “not directly relevant” to the issues that caused negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP to break down, and negotiating committee member David Jolliffe did note that they “appreciate everybody’s help,” but added, “we’ve been doing this for almost a year now”—suggesting that the problem isn’t that nobody has come up with outside-the-box solutions like this.
SAG-AFTRA will reportedly release a statement today about the “stalemate” (as Variety put it) it’s come to with the AMPTP.