Hollywood writers have voted almost unanimously to approve the contract agreement reached by their union leaders that ended a strike after nearly five months, while actors remain in negotiations to find a way out of their own strike.
The Writers Guild of America announced Monday that 99% of the 8,525 members who cast ballots voted to ratify the deal.
The agreement was widely touted as a win by leaders, and widely praised by members, with major gains in payment, size of show staffs and control of artificial intelligence in scripts. The result of the vote taken over the past week was never really in doubt.
"Together we were able to accomplish what many said was impossible only six months ago," Meredith Stiehm, president of the WGA-East, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, nearly three months after their strike began, leaders of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists were back in contract negotiations with studios on Monday, a week after talks restarted.
Unlike the marathon night-and-weekend sessions that brought an end to the writers strike, the actors and their employers are moving more methodically in their talks, and it was not clear how much progress was being made.
Writers guild leaders urged studios to grant actors' demands and said their members would picket alongside them until a deal was reached.
The writers' new contract runs thorough May 1, 2026, three years after their previous contract expired and they went on strike. After negotiations that saw direct involvement from the chiefs of Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, a tentative deal was struck on Sept. 24. Two days later, when the board members voted to approve the agreement and send it to members, the strike was declared over and writers were released to work.
They began almost immediately, with late-night talk shows back on the air within a week and other shows, including "Saturday Night Live," soon to follow.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios, streaming services and production companies in strike talks, congratulated writers for their vote, saying in a statement that the contract "represents meaningful gains and protections for writers" and that it "is important progress for our industry that writers are back to work."
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More