Breaking Exclusive: How That SAG-AFTRA Open Letter Came Together

The story of how it came together in 24 hours.

I don’t typically send out a bonus newsletter, but I wanted to make sure this received as much distribution as possible. I hope you’ll forward it to others, since none of the trades have this story yet:

On Thursday night, an open letter from nearly 4,000 SAG-AFTRA members was posted in support of the union's negotiating committee. The letter stressed the committee had the signed member's "trust, our support, and our power behind you now."

Over the past week, stories surfaced in the entertainment industry press that a group of so-called "A-list actors - many of whom are also producers - had spoken with the leadership of SAG-AFTRA in hopes of moving the strike towards a resolution.

The group offered some proposals they hoped would make upcoming negotiations easier. Although as I noted at the time, not only were the proposals pretty unrealistic, some of the actors making the proposals were seen by some union members of not being especially supportive to the strike, to begin with. 

But the proposals received a lot of attention because of who was making them and some striking SAG-AFTRA members I spoke with in recent days were concerned that the star's proposal would be seen by the studios as a sign of weakness or fatigue on the union side.

At first glance, the open letter seemed like a reaction in part to that star actor proposal and according to one of the people behind the effort, that was indeed one of the catalysts that drove the decision to organize and post the note.

"Obviously the George Clooney thing was frustrating," Kate Bond explained via email early Friday morning as she was working to add more names to the open letter." It is genuinely a good thing when members reach out to leadership and get involved, and I'm sure everyone in that group had good intentions, but getting high-profile members to pressure union leaders to cave is not only an old union-busting trick--it's one they'd just used the month before with the WGA. So there's a good chance that group prolonged the strike as the CEOs waited to see if more members would put pressure on our leaders and our solidarity would break."

Bond said she was "cautiously optimistic" when the studio CEOs asked the union to return to the negotiating table. "But on the picket line Monday, we were still hearing rumblings about a handful of prominent members exerting pressure on our leadership to take the deal currently on the table."

A  lot of us were understandably pretty frustrated about that," she continued. "We've been out on the line since day one (some of us since day one of the writers' strike), and it's not fun to have wealthy people who don't bother to show up to picket regularly (or at all, in some cases) say this is too hard, so we need to give up and not gain anything from the 100+ days we've been on strike."

Bond began talking with a group of captains about what they could do, and they came up with the idea for the open letter.

"We put it together quickly and started sharing the link with other captains and fellow SAG-AFTRA members last night (Wednesday). We had planned to hold it until next week to let the signatures build up. But I woke up this morning to 2,000 signatures, and then by the end of the first 24 hours we had almost 4,000. And when we heard that our Negotiating Committee had been at the table with the CEOs all day and that they were heading back into negotiations Friday, and we wanted to give them all the power and leverage we could ASAP. So we worked as fast as we could to get the letter and all the names ready to publish tonight."

While Bond said she was the primary author of the letter, she insisted that "all credit goes to the strike captains as a group--even those who didn't participate in the writing of the letter, even those who weren't comfortable signing it themselves (or just didn't hear about it in the 24 hours before it was published)."

It's impossible to know yet what effect Thursday's impressive open letter might have on future negotiations between actors and the studios. But if you're on the SAG-AFTRA negotiating team, knowing nearly 4,000 of your members signed on to an open letter supporting your efforts has to provide extra assurance you're on the right path.