Thousands of film and TV producers have signed on to leave the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), Deadline said in an exclusive report.
The group sent a letter to AMPTP president Carol Lombardini with demands to drop the P from the organization. This comes a day after the Writers Guild of America (WGA) ratified a deal with the AMPTP to end the 148-day strike on Monday.
There are currently 2,338 signatories to this proposal, which began in June with a petition on Change.org. The idea to start The Producers Union was also floated around but did not gain traction.
Big names in the industry such as Bonnie Curtis (Saving Private Ryan), Guymon Casady (Game of Thrones), Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) president Janet Yang, Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum, and Nina Jacobson (The Hunger Games), to name a few, signed the document.
Producers wanting out of the AMPTP is not an unexpected occurrence. Hollywood studios and streaming service companies comprise the organization. Producers were negatively affected by the strikes, along with the writers and actors.
The lack of a guild representing them left them in a difficult position. Producers usually guide projects through production, solve problems that occur on and off set, and come up with project ideas and then find the writers to execute them.
And yet most of them do not get their fees until production starts. They can spend years developing projects and end up with nothing when it doesn't get picked up.
Producers are also usually the first to be asked to take a pay cut by the studios. Often times, it comes with the question, “Do you want to abandon this project that you've worked so hard on?”
Cathy Schulman, Crash producer and former head of Women in Film, told the entertainment news site that since most producers have been supportive of the strike, they shouldn't have to be lumped together with the studios. She added, “Watching our colleagues come together and stand shoulder to shoulder to fight for what’s right has motivated us to be active in our own rescue.”
Schulman also pointed out that the system that made the producers be part of the AMPTP is archaic. In the 1940s and 1950s, the studios employed producers and were under contract like the writers and actors.
In the 1970s, that all changed when agents started negotiating with studios for their actor clients to receive both front and backend deals. The producers were not part of it and instead received development deals.
They also do not receive health insurance or pension benefits. It's one of the sticking points of the petition.
However, the bigger problem is that they are essentially asked “to work without wages through the entire development period of a movie, while writers and underlying rights holders receive options and payments,” Rebelle Media Founder & CEO Laura Lewis said.
Lewis also stated that dropping the P in AMPTP is only, “Step [one] in a much larger fight on behalf of the value and the work of producers.”
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