Two actors unions and the U.S. advertising industry said Monday they agreed to extend a contract covering commercials on TV, radio, the Internet and other new media by six months through March.
The extension gives the Screen Actors Guild extra time to finish stalled talks with Hollywood studios over a contract covering prime-time TV shows and movies that expired in June. Actors continue to work under the terms of the old deal.
Both the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists held a six-month commercials strike in 2000 that drove work overseas.
The extension comes on top of a two-year extension agreed to in 2006.
At that time, the advertising industry and the unions commissioned Booz Allen Hamilton to study new compensation models for performers to deal with the shift of ads to the Internet and other new media. The study was completed early this year.
In March, SAG and AFTRA acrimoniously ended 27 years of joint negotiations with studios over movies and prime-time TV shows in a spat over jurisdiction and the makeup of the bargaining team.
SAG and AFTRA have yet to decide formally whether to jointly bargain on the commercials contract.
The ad industry is represented by a joint committee of the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More