Hollywood talks collapse
By 
Looks like a total shutdown is going to happen:
Hollywood’s first industrywide shutdown in 63 years neared certainty, with the union representing 160,000 television and movie actors poised to call a strike as soon as Thursday and join screenwriters who walked off the job in May.
SAG-AFTRA, as the union is known, said at nearly 1 a.m. Pacific time on Thursday that negotiations with Hollywood studios over a new contract had collapsed and that its negotiating board had voted unanimously to recommend a strike. The previous three-year contract expired at 11:59 p.m., after an extension from June 30 to allow for continued talks.
The union’s national board was scheduled to meet at 9 a.m. Pacific for a final strike vote. Pickets could start later on Thursday.
Fran Drescher, SAG-AFTRA’s president, called studio responses at the bargaining table “insulting and disrespectful.”
And this is happening, quite simply, because entertainment executives are trying to break the unions rather than negotiate in anything even remotely resembling good faith:
Receiving positive feedback from Wall Street since the WGA went on strike May 2, Warner Bros Discovery, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Paramount and others have become determined to “break the WGA,” as one studio exec blatantly put it.
To do so, the studios and the AMPTP believe that by October most writers will be running out of money after five months on the picket lines and no work.
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”
Omit the “but necessary” and you’ve got it.