With the Hollywood strike going on indefinitely — no new negotiations are set yet — the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s NextGen board members and supporters were out on Sunday in Los Angeles to give voice to the voiceless amid this challenging time for entertainment professionals.
“The biggest thing that’s impacted me is the calls that I’m getting from all my friends that are suffering,” Yvette Nicole Brown said of the Hollywood strike during the MPTF fundraiser at NeueHouse in Hollywood.
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The multihyphenate talent — an actor, comedian, writer and host — has been on the strike line at least three times a week, she said.
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What has she been hearing out there?
“There are people that have lost their homes,” she said. “There are people that are living in their cars. I just heard tonight about someone who was living in his car, has lost the car, and now is asking himself, ‘When this ends, if I’m able to find shelter until it’s over, well, how will I get to work?’ This is not a joke. People are calling the MPTF line for food money. This is people not eating, which is huge. So, it’s very, very difficult to see in the news, the idea that we want this, or this is something that we’ve chosen or that we’re just going to be stubborn. No one wants to be out on that line. The writers don’t want to be out. The actors don’t want to be out. But if we don’t fight this now, we won’t have an industry.”
The fight is for the future of the entertainment industry, with the striking Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and Writers Guild of America focused on streaming residuals and the potential impact of artificial intelligence.
“If they scan our bodies, they can put us in any television show or movie they want to, and we’ll never get paid again,” Brown said of AI. “This is very serious. It’s not a game. And if we don’t find a way to regulate it right now and find a pay structure for it now, it’s over. It’s over. And streaming, well, we’ve never had any money from streaming, and I don’t know how to fix it. But maybe it should be based on subscriptions. I don’t know. But that’s not good either. You do work and you never get paid for it again, and it just runs and runs and runs. It’s a mess.”
Actor Max Greenfield, of CBS sitcom “The Neighborhood,” put it more broadly: “It’s like anything. Specifically, with tech, there’s great benefits, tremendous benefits, and there’s also a downside. And I’d like to lean into the beneficial side of that. One of the things that we’re all fighting so hard for is protection against the downside.”
He was out in support of MPTF to raise funds, he added, with the organization providing working and retired members of the entertainment industry with financial help, as well as health and social services. These days, the nonprofit is receiving 10 times more calls, with 75 percent coming from “grips, camera operators and production assistants,” according to MPTF, which raised more than $80,000 at the event this year.
“We’re all thinking about the people who work in this industry who are directly affected,” he said. “As someone who works on a network television show, we all expected to go back to work. I mean, our office and some of our crew members, in July, even before that, in June, shooting in August, and all that’s been postponed indefinitely. When this city, specifically Los Angeles, is in production, it’s not just the people who work on those shows, it is this entire economy. And so, I personally am thinking so much about those people…It’s why you come to an event like this tonight and support. People are really hurting right now.”
Hosted by Darren Criss — who performed cover songs inspired by summer — the event brought out Camilla Belle, Ben Barnes, Olivia Holt, Bailee Madison, Harry Shum Jr., Cynthia Addai-Robinson and Colman Domingo. Not everyone spoke to press; Brown was among the most vocal.
“I’ve been saying from the beginning that this strike is not about a clash of titans,” she said. “It’s not billionaires and millionaires duking it out for supremacy. This is about the rank-and-file actor, the rank-and-file writer. It’s about the crews. It’s about the makeup artists, craft services people that are scared, because they’re losing everything while we try to get the producers to give us a fair deal…I’m speaking up for them and speaking up for the future of this industry. And it’s been really hard.”