Christina Wren Instagram – When I first joined the union, I was meeting actors a step ahead of me who – not being famous – had been able to buy homes, support families and live good lives off their craft.
Things were in the midst of changing and no one knew how to process it. Contracts were shrinking. Residuals were shrinking. The option to negotiate at all was disappearing. I knew people who lost jobs simply because their reps tried one round of negotiations. I know huge stars who were given base rates or told to walk on huge projects. I have friends whose faces were all over billboards, promotional materials, red carpets, press tours for huge shows on major streaming platforms, then returned home to their rental apartment, financially anxious.
When I graduated college, I didn’t want to be famous, I just wanted to be a “working actor.” Someone who could live, be it simply, off of my work, as I had seen many before me do. After years of striving and even having some successes, I learned that for the vast majority of us – even if we are working – it is no longer enough to support a life. You have to become supremely famous and/or get a side hustle. The model for making money off of media now comes from subscribers vs. ad dollars and yet the contracts we still use are from a model that hardly exists.
Because as actors, part of our job has always been keeping up an illusion of stardom, it can be confusing to know there is much struggle behind the scenes. A family member found something online that said I was worth tens of millions of dollars 🤪. While that’d be nice, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Despite the blessings and great opportunities I’ve had, I’ve only had a few years where I could live off of my acting work.
The idea of residuals is that a product makes a bunch of money and all the people who collaborated on its successes share a piece of that pie. If the model is now that writers and actors (and a whole host of others) work in making wonderful shows and those shows are what drives viewers to subscribe, then subscribers fees is the pie that we should all be sharing in.
And don’t steal our likeness for AI. C’mon now.
#actor #sagaftrastrong #sagaftrastrike2023 | Posted on 19/Jul/2023 20:57:02
