Latest news with #InternationalAllianceofTheatricalStageEmployees
UPI
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- UPI
IATSE pickets Will Smith music video
1 of 3 | Will Smith walks the red carpet at the Univision Premio Lo Nuestro award show on February 20. Picketers gathered outside where he was filming a new music video Friday. File Photo by Gary I Rothstein/UPI | License Photo May 23 (UPI) -- Members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees are picketing outside West Hollywood's Quixote Studios, where a Will Smith music video is in production. Friday's strike was in response to the producers' refusal to offer union benefits to crew members. Deadline reports that the entire crew, which consisted of 35 people, were fired, prompting the picket. Variety reported conflicting numbers. According to that outlet, IATSE Local 80 business manager Dejon Ellis said that around 20 people were fired. Breathe Entertainment president Stephen Trivieri said that 10 people had been let go after refusing to go to work. "While this music video features a globally recognized artist, it was independently financed and produced outside the scope of major studio or label backing. Like many artist-driven creative projects, this shoot was built around a clear non-union structure with transparent terms and fair compensation across all departments," Trivieri said, per Variety. The music video is for a song off the actor's newest album, Based on a True Story, which dropped March 28.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Union sues Tailgate N' Tallboys organizers over labor agreement
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) is taking action againstthe organizers of Tailgate N' Tallboys, alleging USA Concerts and Events breached a labor agreement and refused to hire local stagehands in multiple cities, the union has announced in a news release. USA Concerts and Events signed a collective bargaining agreement with Davenport, Iowa-based IATSE Local 85 in 2023. From rigging and forklift operation to spotlighting and camera work, union members have ensured safe, efficient, and professional execution of the event's technical needs. Similarly, Local 193 of central Illinois has covered the festival's operations for nearly a decade, the release says. 'Our Local has safely and flawlessly serviced the Tailgate N' Tallboys Festival in Clinton since itsinception,' said IATSE Local 85 Business Agent Joe Goodall. 'This event is a vital source of income for many area workers and their families. It's deeply disappointing that the organizers are forcing us to pursue legal action simply to ensure fair treatment for the local workers that have helped make this festival possible.' 'After almost ten years of IATSE Local 193 members serving as the dedicated workforce for Tailgate N' Tallboys, organizers want to abandon the workers and community that made it into the large and successful event it is today in favor of an out-of-state labor company. It's extremely disheartening,' said IATSE Local 193 Business Agent Michael Irvin. In the release, USA Concerts' decision to bypass union crews in favor of an out-of-state, non-union labor provider not only undermines standards for live event workers in the Midwest but also attempts to violate an established Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). The contract contains a clear Evergreen clause, which automatically renews the deal unless terminated by written notice, but no such notice was given. The situation is further aggravated by the festival's actions in Bloomington, Illinois, where Tailgate N' Tallboys also refused to hire area IATSE workers from Local 193. This pattern of bypassing local union labor undermines prevailing wage standards and deprives professionals of vital work in their own communities, according to the release. The Locals involved, with support from International union, are pursuing legal remedies and have issued a formal notice to USA Concerts, reinforcing their contractual obligations. The IATSE continues to call on the organizers of Tailgate N' Tallboys to honor their signed agreement and support the local communities they operate in by hiring qualified, area union labor. Our Quad Cities News has reached out to Clinton Parks & Recreation, USA Concerts & Events, and Clinton Mayor Scott Maddasion, and has not received a response as of 5 p.m. Thursday., International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees or IATSE (full name: International Alliance ofTheatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, Its Territories and Canada), is a labor union representing over 170,000 technicians, artisans and craftspersons in the entertainment industry, including live events, motion picture and television production, broadcast, and trade shows in the United States and Canada. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Greg Cannom, Oscar-winning Makeup Innovator Who Turned Brad Pitt Into Benjamin Button, Dies at 73
Greg Cannom, a five-time Oscar-winning makeup and prosthetics artist celebrated for the incredible transformations of Robin Williams in 'Mrs. Doubtfire' (1993) and Brad Pitt in 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), died on May 3 at the age of 73. Cannom's death was announced by his former mentor and longtime collaborator Rick Baker. The two famously worked together on several projects, including Michael Jackson's 1982 'Thriller' music video and the 1977 science-fiction film 'The Incredible Melting Man.' More from WWD U.S. Beauty Showed Signs of Wear in Q1, per Circana How a Classic South Korean Dessert Inspired Glow Recipe's New Launch Ana de Armas Goes White Hot in Celine Dress for Her 'Good Morning America' Appearance, Talks New Film 'Ballerina' The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 706 Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild also announced Cannom's passing in a poignant message on Facebook on Thursday. A GoFundMe page launched for expenses said he experienced health challenges for two years, including 'severe shingles, a staph infection, sepsis and heart failure.' Born in Los Angeles, Cannom was mystified by the world of motion pictures from a young age, finding a particular interest in horror films. He even called himself a 'monster geek.' It wasn't until he attended Cypress College in Orange County when he began his training in stage makeup, learning the ins and outs while working on around 200 plays. By age 25, Cannom had landed a job as Baker's assistant, the artist best known for his work in 'Star Wars.' Their first project together was the 1978 'It's Alive sequel, It Lives Again,' creating baby monster prosthetics. Cannom and Baker later brought to life many legendary characters, including Jim Carrey's green alter-ego in 'The Mask' (1994) and Gloria Stuart's 101-year-old persona in 'Titanic' (1997). Indeed, turning Stuart into a 101-year-old lady in 'Titanic' was nothing like the aghast characters he'd constructed before. Yet, it was projects like this that helped solidify his reputation as an irrevocable makeup architect that could not only produce the inconceivable, but master realistic visions, too. Cannom also transformed brother duo Marlon and Shawn Wayans into white female twins with blond hair in 2004's 'White Chicks' and reconstructed Danny DeVito's hands to look like penguin feet in 1992's 'Batman Returns.' For more complicated jobs, Cannom would enlist up to 20 assistants to help him handle intricate facial molds. He advised on every detail and every facial expression, pointing out tiny changes that build an entirely new visage. Cannom later landed a job on the film 'Vice,' as a character makeup designer — the project that secured him his final Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling in 2019. WWD has contacted the Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild and Baker for comments. Best of WWD The Best Makeup Looks in Golden Globes History A Look Back at Golden Globes Best Makeup on the Red Carpet, From Megan Fox to Sophia Loren [PHOTOS] The Best Hairstyles in Golden Globes History
The Star
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
It's Hollywood, but not made in America
IT would have been simple to shoot the game show The Floor in Los Angeles. The city has many idle studios that could have easily accommodated its large display screen and the midnight-blue tiles that light up beneath contestants. But Fox flies the show's host, Rob Lowe, and 100 American contestants thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to answer trivia questions about dogs, divas and Disney characters at a studio in Dublin. It makes more financial sense than filming in California. In the past few years, as labour costs have grown after two strikes, producers of reality shows, scrappy indie movies and blockbuster films have increasingly turned away from Los Angeles to filming locations overseas. Those business decisions have considerable consequences for the industry's thousands of middle-class workers: the camera operators, set decorators and lighting technicians who make movies and television happen. Frustration has reached a boiling point, according to more than two dozen people who make their living in the entertainment industry. They say that nothing short of Hollywood, as we know it, is at stake. 'This is an existential crisis – it's an extinction event,' says Beau Flynn, a producer of big-budget movies like San Andreas, which despite being about an earthquake in California was filmed mostly in Australia. 'These are real things. I am not a dramatist, even though I'm in the drama field.' So, while shocking, US President Donald Trump's 100% tariff threat on movies produced outside the country to prevent the American movie industry from dying a 'very fast death' was not so fantastical. But of course, Trump blames other countries who are offering incentives to lure filmmakers. As Trump had said in a post on Truth Social: 'This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda.' Better incentives and cheaper costs Productions have been filmed outside the United States for decades, but rarely has Hollywood work been so bustling overseas at a time when work in Hollywood itself has been so scant. Studios in European countries are bursting at the seams, industry workers say. And film and television production in Los Angeles is down by more than one-third over the past 10 years, according to FilmLA data. Michael F Miller Jr, a vice president at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, who oversees film and television production for the union, says that roughly 18,000 full-time jobs have evaporated in the past three years, primarily in California. 'We are allowing California to become to the entertainment industry what Detroit has become to the auto industry,' Miller says. Plenty of production has stayed within the United States; 38 states have spent more than US$25bil (RM107bil) in tax incentives for film and television, leading to hubs in Georgia and elsewhere. (Some economists deride this use of taxpayer money as a revenue loser for those states.) But with established infrastructure and cheap crews internationally, more productions are now leaving the country. Some Marvel movies, long the beating heart of Georgia's film industry, are decamping to Britain. Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of Netflix, says in February that the company – which has constructed a filming hub in New Mexico and is building another in New Jersey – would invest US$1bil (RM4.3bil) over the next four years to produce series and films in Mexico. International sites often come with lower labour costs and more expansive tax incentives than those that California offers, making it much cheaper to film there. Hungary has become one of the most popular locales. Aaron Ryder, who produced Arrival, Dumb Money and many other films, recalls bumping into actor Mark Strong at the Four Seasons Hotel in Budapest while he was scouting a project. He has also seen the producer Jerry Bruckheimer using a treadmill in the hotel gym, he says. 'You can walk into the bar in the lobby in the Four Seasons and probably see more colleagues or actors and directors and agents and people you know there than you can at the Four Seasons in LA,' Ryder says. That is bad news for people like Josh Viers, a concept artist for more than 25 years. He says he latched on to three major movie projects in the past six months but was cut prematurely on each one when the productions moved to England, Australia and Hungary. 'I more or less have given my career, my life, to this industry,' says Viers, a 48-year-old father of two whose family lost its house in Altadena, California, during this year's wildfires. 'It just really hurts.' Sometimes a movie calls for a California backdrop. And sometimes the cost of shipping props and people overseas ends up costing studios more than they hope to save with tax credits. But more often, producers say, the cost of working in California is prohibitive. The budget is the budget, and those budgets keep getting tighter. Peak streaming is over, fewer people are going to movie theatres, and studios no longer get dollars from DVD sales. 'We're getting a smaller piece of a smaller pie,' says Paul Audley, the head of FilmLA. In January, when the wildfires were still smouldering, producer Amy Baer wanted badly to move her upcoming buddy comedy from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Los Angeles. It would help her director, whose neighbourhood had been destroyed. And it would help her city. But when Baer ran the numbers, she found it was impossible. To meet the US$10mil budget, her team would have to cut 10 weeks of work – a third of the schedule. 'The idea was, 'Can we take a run at keeping this in Los Angeles?' And the answer was no,' says Baer, whose credits include last year's 'The Apprentice.' 'We've reached a tipping point where we run the risk of losing the ability to make movies here for good.' More countries offer generous tax incentives than ever before, and many of the programmes – including Germany's and the Czech Republic's – have recently sweetened their deals to give out rebates that are comparable to or larger than California's, with looser rules that allow more kinds of projects to qualify. Unlike California, some countries allow productions to include residuals and the costs to employ actors, directors and producers when they calculate their expenses, driving up the size of the tax credit they get. Other countries make reality television and game shows eligible for a tax credit. Even without those incentives, filming outside the United States is often cheaper and more streamlined than filming in a state with a refund. 'It's criminal what California and LA have let happen – it's criminal,' Lowe, the host of The Floor, recently quipped on his podcast. 'Everybody should be fired.' 'Roll cameras, not luggage' In California, its governor Gavin Newsom has pushed to more than double the available funding for the state's tax incentive programme. Under pressure from constituents and several coalitions that formed after the wildfires, California lawmakers have also put forward bills that would increase the base rate of its film tax credit and make more kinds of programming eligible. Another sticking point is the limited window of time to apply, which can pose logistical problems for filmmakers. At a hearing in Sacramento last month, however, some state officials argued that many of the restrictions were critical. 'We don't subsidise any above-the-line work, anybody that has multiple million-dollar actors' salaries,' JT Creedon, a state finance budget analyst, says during the hearing. 'The limitations, I think, are our strength.' Labour leaders says that they understood that Hollywood was a business, and that it would never cost the same to film in California as it does in Bulgaria. That is part of the reason Miller and others says the federal government must step in, although it is not clear what Trump's efforts to bring more business back to the US might mean for filmmaking. The competition abroad is fierce. Labour costs in countries where the government pays for health care are often far lower than anywhere in the US, particularly in California. And the disparity has only grown wider, some say, after the studios and the unions agreed in recent years to new contracts that included wage increases for workers. Los Angeles now ranks as the sixth-best location for filming according to a survey of studio executives by ProdPro, which tracks production trends. Toronto, Britain, Vancouver, Central Europe and Australia are all more desirable, the survey says. Industry workers are concerned about the new landscape. During one unseasonably hot day in the valley this month, hundreds of them rallied for improved incentives to keep productions in California. 'Roll cameras, not luggage,' one sign says. Recently, Nadine Mejia, 38, of Pomona, California, upended her schedule and arranged for child care to go to the hearing in Sacramento. As a Hollywood labourer in Local 724, Mejia moves furniture around studio lots and lugs desks up the stairs of production offices. Theoretically. She found a single day of work in February and a single day in March. Long a single mother, Mejia says she got married two years ago as 'almost a way to survive.' But these days, she says, times are so tough that she and her partner 'question whether or not even being together is affordable.' When she is not working, her husband has to pick up the slack even though he, too, has children to care for. Should they sell their home? Go their separate ways? 'We've got one shot at this,' says Alex Aguilar, the business manager for Mejia's union. 'If we screw this up, this industry's gone.' — 2025 The New York Times Company This article was first published in The New York Times,
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘We can't let it go down the drain like Detroit': Jon Voight is Trump's Hollywood ally looking to save US production
Actor Jon Voight, one of Trump's three 'special ambassadors' to Hollywood, says the president's recently announced threat to place 100 percent tariffs on foreign-made films was greeted with enthusiasm by the industry, despite numerous press accounts from insiders that the plan could cripple film production. 'We've gotten a lot of good response from people,' Voight told Variety on Wednesday. 'We're really rolling up our sleeves and working. I think we have a good plan, and we're just beginning. This little team of mine has worked very hard to try to figure out things. The union people and producers give their expertise and understanding to this problem, and we're working together. A lot of people had a lot of input and we're listening to everybody.' Voight has submitted a 'comprehensive plan' to Trump, including 'federal tax incentives, significant changes to several tax codes, the establishment of co-production treaties with foreign countries, and infrastructure subsidies for theater owners, film and television production companies, and post-production companies,' according to his manager, Steven Paul. The actor argues that such steps are needed to keep Hollywood and the larger U.S. as a prosperous film production hub, as other locales like the UK, Canada, and Hungary offer generous film incentives. 'It's come to a point where we really do need help, and thank God the president cares about Hollywood and movies,' Voight added in the Variety interview. 'He has a great love for Hollywood in that way. We've got to roll up our sleeves here. We can't let it go down the drain like Detroit.' Industry unions were split on Trump's tariff idea after it was proposed in a Sunday night Truth Social post. 'The United States needs a balanced federal response to return film and television jobs,' Matthew D. Loeb, the president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents much of Hollywood's behind-the-scenes talent, said in a statement. 'IATSE recommended that the Trump administration implement a federal film production tax incentive and other domestic tax provisions to level the playing field for American workers.' The Teamsters union celebrated the tariff idea, calling it a 'strong step' toward 'reining in the studios' un-American addiction to outsourcing our members' work.' The White House has walked back the tariff plan, describing it as a non-final proposal, while Trump has said he'll meet with industry figures. 'I'm not looking to hurt the industry; I want to help the industry,' Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. 'We're going to meet with the industry. I want to make sure they're happy with it, because we're all about jobs.' California Governor Gavin Newsom announced this week that he wants to collaborate with Trump on a $7.5 billion federal tax incentive for the film industry.
