A-List stars offer to pay $150 million over 3 years to end stalemate – Deadline

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Exclusive: After meeting on a Zoom call Tuesday to figure out how to end an actors’ strike that will soon extend beyond 100 days, a group of Hollywood’s biggest stars presented SAG-AFTRA leaders with a groundbreaking proposal that would see the city’s biggest earners shoulder the cost of AMPTP signatories. By eliminating the cap on membership dues, to use them to promote health benefits and other areas that SAG-AFTRA is trying to support.

The bid would remove the $1 million cap on membership fees, and in a bid to bring a residual system to the system, the Stars also proposed a formula that would see the lowest names on the call sheet and those most in need of money be the first to be paid. Deadline has learned that SAG-AFTRA leaders presented the offer to their negotiating committee last night.

Deadline revealed on Tuesday that a lineup of stars including George Clooney, Emma Stone, Ben Affleck, Tyler Perry and Scarlett Johansson met with SAG leaders including Fran Drescher and Ireland’s Duncan Crabtree.

Deadline spoke with Clooney who confirmed the plan proposed by the stars.

“A lot of high-income earners want to be part of the solution,” Clooney told Deadline. “We have offered to remove the cap on dues that would bring the union more than $50 million annually. More than $150 million over the next three years. We believe it is fair for us to pay more to the union. We are also proposing a bottom-up residual structure.” The top. This means that the top of the call sheet will be the last to collect, not the first. These negotiations will be ongoing but we wanted to show that we are all in this together and find ways to help bridge the gap in actors getting paid.

There will be a lot to discuss about this as SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP negotiators blame each other after the studios walked away from the negotiating table. But many see this as a default signal that doesn’t help matters when a company shuts down and workers struggle to hold on after weathering a WGA strike, and now this strike. It seems admirable that this group is willing to inject this amount of money to push the negotiations to an end. Stay tuned.