TORONTO — Canadian film and television workers are feeling the sting of twin strikes by Hollywood writers and actors.
Vancouver-based Derek Baskerville, who rents costumes mostly to U.S. film shoots, says he laid off a part-time worker last week and has scaled back the hours of other staff as work dried up.
Toronto writer-director V.T. Nayani says she’s put off plans to move out of her parents’ home while the strikes continue, and is pursuing Canadian commercial work to make ends meet.
And although unionized actors walked off the job just days ago, Toronto agent Karin Martin says many of her clients haven't worked since winter because U.S. studios anticipated job action and scaled back orders.
Hollywood’s biggest labour fight in decades pits unionized writers and actors against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents streamers and studios including Disney, Netflix and Amazon.
The Writers Guild of America walked off the job May 2 and was joined on the picket line Friday by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA.
Shared goals include improved residual payments – which compensate creators and actors for use of their material beyond the original airing – and guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence in film and television.
Even though it's a U.S. labour dispute, the strikes have touched films and series that shoot in Canada and employ tens of thousands of local crews and talent.
Martin expects lengthy strikes that could devastate many average Canadian workers who rely on U.S. productions driven by SAG stars and WGA scripts.
"I think a lot of people are going to lose their houses. I think a lot of people are going to leave the industry,” Martin says of a double whammy affecting her clients, who include production designers, cinematographers, line producers and others who work behind the scenes.
“They can't weather the storm because it's going to be a long vicious one. I think it's going to be bad all the way around."
But the impact goes far beyond sets to include an invisible support industry that helps movie magic come alive, says Ian Drummond, whose Toronto company the Ian Drummond Collection Inc. rents 20th Century vintage clothing to film and television productions.
"It's me with clothes, it's someone who does landscaping, it's someone else who has warehouses full of furniture, people who rent art, people who build things…. And nobody's working,” says Drummond.
“Most (people) of that level don't have the resources to wait six months for things to turn around.”
Drummond says he was packing "a huge order" for a show in pre-production in Vancouver when they emailed Friday to say they were pausing due to the SAG strike. There are questions now from film productions about how to handle clothes that have been rented for shoots that are not happening.
"I've been talking to costume designers, they're asking: What's the work around during this strike? How are they going to handle rentals, extended rentals? Should they send it back? Do we put it on hiatus out of goodwill?"
In Vancouver, Baskerville says he let one of his part-timers go because he couldn't afford to pay them. He's reduced two other part-timers to one day a week, and two full-time workers are down to four days a week instead of five. One of them is on a six-hour day instead of eight.
“It's been really bad for all of us gig economy workers for the last four years. And some people haven't survived, what with COVID and now this,” says Baskerville.
“This is — even for me in a 40-year career — this is quite an exception.”
He says he's lucky to have paid off his mortgage and have personal savings.
“Three of my colleagues are deferring their mortgage payments.... And two of them have also talked to the city, deferring their property taxes for a year,” says Baskerville.
“One of my colleagues, she had to take her kids out of daycare and out of summer camp because she can't afford it. It's summer. Kids want to go to camp. Not this year.”
Although she’s not a member of the WGA or the Writers Guild of Canada (WGC), Nayani, the writer-director, says she’d like to join both one day and is intent on showing solidarity by avoiding work that flouts strike rules.
The WGC and Canada’s actors union, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, have each offered advice to its members on how to support U.S. colleagues.
"As people who are also hopeful of being future union members, and don't want to be considered scabs and don't want to fall out of line with our fellow writers and stay in solidarity, a lot of non-union writers have decided that we're still going to fall in line with the striking conditions," says Nayani.
"They've definitely got the short end of the stick and I think they deserve more protection," she says of screenwriters.
"When a show's getting millions and billions of viewers around the world and the writers can't pay their rent, that's not OK."
Canadian productions with homegrown scripts and cast can proceed uninterrupted but Nayani says it's a competitive job field.
She expects 2023 to be a rough year, financially. The 34-year-old was looking at apartments in the spring when the WGA strike hit and suddenly realized she couldn't afford to move out.
"I'm in my 30s. I don't want to be living at home. But I've also got to pay my bills," she says.
Ontario’s film and television industry contributed $3.15 billion to the provincial economy in 2022 and created 45,891 full-time equivalent direct and spin-off jobs, according to data from the provincial agency Ontario Creates.
Domestic production accounts for 38 per cent of production spending in Ontario.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 17, 2023.
Cassandra Szklarski, The Canadian Press
