‘A storm about to hit’: How the Hollywood strikes will change NZ’s screen industry

Sunday, 23 July 2023

Dozens of films and television programmes are stalled or cancelled and there are fears thousands of Kiwi screen workers will struggle to find employment for prolonged periods as the Hollywood actors and writers strike shows no signs of easing.

The strikes, off the back of the Covid-19 pandemic and a Government-ordered review of New Zealand’s screen rebates, represent the latest blow to the pipeline of activity for the country’s lucrative screen industry.

Industry insiders say that New Zealand screen bodies, including the Film Commission and NZ on Air, need to be highly focused on producing local content over the coming months to counter a possible dearth of international productions shooting in New Zealand as a result of ongoing strike action.

Already, films like Minecraft have come to a halt in Aotearoa, but experts say New Zealand has yet to feel the full brunt of the strike.

But Kiwi workers are keeping a close eye on the outcome of what’s happening in Tinseltown, with any concessions likely to have global ripple effects and set an international standard for dealings with production giants and streamers including Netflix, Warner Bros and Disney.

About 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the union representing actors, stunt performers, programme hosts, voiceover artists and media professionals, this week joined about 11,500 Writers Guild of America workers on strike. The writers have been on strike since May.

Both groups haven’t been on strike simultaneously since 1960, and together they make up two of Hollywood’s big three labour unions. Both have failed to sign new contracts in negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

The actors and writers want movement on a range of issues from the big studios, particularly higher pay, regulation of generative AI technology, higher residual payments (long-term payments to people who work on films and TV shows for reruns and other airings after initial release), minimum staffing requirements and shorter exclusivity deals for writers, and regulation of self-tape auditions for actors.

While the Film Commission couldn’t provide a list of productions looking at New Zealand as a possible filming destination that were now delayed, citing commercial sensitivity, Annie Murray, its chief executive, said the strikes “will have an impact” on New Zealand’s screen industry.

Even though local independent productions weren’t affected, projects affiliated with the alliance and any with a SAG-AFTRA-signed star attached were on hold. That meant upcoming work for some screen workers would be delayed, Murray said.

One of the delayed films is the Minecraft production in Auckland, which Brendon Durey from NZ’s Screen Industry Guild confirmed was on hold. The guild supported the actors and writers striking for better conditions, but said crews were the losers in the situation. Those out of a job would now have to compete for positions on other locally-produced content, but opportunities were slim.

An average production staffed hundreds of people, but only a small proportion of those were writers and actors, Durey said. “Any industrial action has its casualties.” It would only be a certain amount of time before Warner Bros asked for the sets to be “bulldozed”, he added.

While contract screen workers were at the mercy of production companies and lived precarious lifestyles that relied on forward-bookings, worries have been exacerbated further by New Zealand studios emptying out for the near future. “A lot of studios are unbooked right now … After Minecraft, nothing’s booked,” Durey said.

This was, in part, a result of a global recession and New Zealand not bumping its rebate to a more competitive amount, Durey said. Currently, New Zealand offers a 20% uncapped rebate to international productions, with a further 5% uplift for significant economic contribution. But other countries like Australia offer higher amounts - up to 30% for filming in Australia and up to 40% for films with significant Australian content. Elsewhere, rebates reach as high as 40-50%.

Despite a report detailing how New Zealand gets back $6.11 for every dollar spent on the rebates, Aotearoa was in “the middle of the pack” globally when it came to incentives, Durey said. “We don’t want to be in a race to the bottom.”

And the review of the rebates that concluded in May this year was drawn out - something that caused uncertainty for streamers and meant they were hesitant to book anything in New Zealand in case the rate dropped, Durey said.

The Government ended up cutting red tape for the rebate, something Durey said was positive and overdue. Though at a 6-1 rate of return, there was scope to lift it even further, he said. But with a cost of living crisis crippling Kiwis’ pockets, rebates have become a political hot potato - ACT is vehemently opposed to them and its deputy leader Brooke van Velden has even gone as far as saying the country would be better off scrapping them - something Durey and the rest of the sector say would be foolish and misguided. In 2018 the screen industry was worth more than $3.3 billion annually to NZ’s economy.

While New Zealand enticed productions with its friendly and experienced crews and scenic filming locations, Durey said mobile lighting riggers, technicians and grips would ultimately move wherever they could get work. “If we lose our competitiveness, [the industry] will dry up quickly.”

‘Very scary territory’

This week, Equity, the New Zealand actors’ union, held a meeting in Wellington in which members asked questions about the ongoing strike in Hollywood and prepared for their own collective bargaining that’s looming.

SAG-AFTRA was asking for restrictions around wholly-generated AI-created actors or performers, and restrictions around the usage of actors’ images after projects have finished.

New Zealand actors have similar concerns, Equity director Denise Roche said. Front of mind was deepfakes, or generated images of non-performers made up of images of real people. Deepfakes also exist in the world of audio, with voice actors’ voices being used by AI to create generated performances.

The worries tie into the lack of regulation around body scanning - some studios have been paying background actors in exchange for scanning their bodies. Those images can then be fed to AI technology for the use of deepfakes, meaning the actors’ images are being used in perpetuity by a production company.

Roche said Equity was aware of at least one case in New Zealand where this had happened with an extra on Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series that shot in Auckland.

“It’s very scary territory. Those are your moral rights,” said Roche. “[To have your image] regenerated or reinterpreted as a deepfake or on another project without your consent basically steals your rights.”

Actors were also concerned about fully digitally created content with no live performers at all when AI became more advanced. “These are threats down the road.”

The discussions SAG-AFTRA was having were going to be on the negotiation table for New Zealand’s actors as well, Roche said. Whatever SAG-AFTRA achieved would have flow-on effects across the globe. “It will set a precedent for how to deal with those issues.”

Now was the time for the NZ Film Commission and NZ On Air to be commissioning and green-lighting local content in an intentional push so workers would have ensured employment, she said.

NZ On Air was trying as much as possible to keep a pipeline of domestic work going, said its head of communications and research Allanah Kalafatelis. It had opened a special scripted funding round, and productions could now also apply for NZ On Air funding alongside the Film Commission-administered screen rebates.

As a result of the latter, it was expecting to see applications for series “of scale and ambition” that would create jobs and opportunities, Kalafatelis said.

Alice Shearman, the executive director of the NZ Writers Guild, said its members were having “lots of conversations” as a result of the Hollywood strikes, but its position was the same - it stood in solidarity with its United States counterparts. Local screenwriters are less directly impacted by the strikes as they mostly don’t service international productions.

In addition to pay issues, production giants were starting to use ChatGPT to create proposals before getting writers to author the next drafts, Shearman said. “That cuts a writer’s earnings in half.” The guild wanted to ensure AI tools did not cut productivity or entire career pathways for writers.

While the strikes would hit screen crews hard, it was for a greater good, Shearman said. “The use of AI impacts everyone who works in the screen industry. Is there going to be a point where everything is created in the digital space, and crew are replaced by technology? … There are far-reaching implications we can’t see yet.”

Shearman said New Zealand was coming out of a lull of screen work. Uncertainty around the Covid-19 pandemic, the screen rebate review and the scrapped RNZ-TVNZ merger had created a harsh “trifecta” downturn effect for the industry.

Despite the strikes, the production lull was starting to lift for writers, Shearman said.

John McKay, a veteran sound editor and co-chairperson of the Screen Music and Sound Guild of NZ, said screen composers were equally “under the attack of AI”, with sound editing and mixing now feeling the effects of the technology.

Screen composers already struggled to get employment due to cheap “sound-alike” tracks being offered online.

But music was now being put into AI and being changed by a few notes to avoid copyright, which companies could then use for screen productions, McKay said. “It’s just dynamite … AI is a storm about to really hit creative industries.”

From the picket line

Auckland-based Alex Liu has been a member of the Writers Guild of America since September of last year, when he was offered a contract to write a feature film for MGM. In March, he quit his job at Stuff to pursue it full-time, but two months later, it was pencils down with the other guild members.

That’s meant cancelled trips to Los Angeles and meetings with potential collaborators - “gutting” as a new entrant to the industry trying to network and hustle.

“The most immediate effect was just the anxiety of when, or if, the next cheque was going to arrive. … If my wife wasn’t working, I’d be in a lot of trouble,” Liu said.

But what the workers were striking for was more important than immediate compensation, Liu said. “AI is really scary as a writer, honestly. Franchises and sequels are big business, and if a studio can take one script, run it through AI and have 10 more variations that can be spun off into different films all for the cost of one movie? Yeah, that's terrifying. Where does it stop?”

If a studio invested all its cash into productions written by AI, no money would be left over for anything written by people, he said. “This is looking at the extreme. But you have to - the studios and tech companies are pushing back on this for a reason.”

In terms of residuals, Liu said if a company continued to rake in profits off a product, the creators should also profit.

“It's pretty insane it's gotten to this point. … I didn't think we'd get to a point where robots get to make art and humans are in the factories, but we're pretty bloody close.”