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Movie and TV Stars Join Picket Lines in Fight over the Future of Hollywood

SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher (C L), with National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland (C R) and actress Frances Fisher (C bottom), joins Writers Guild members at a picket line outside Netflix in Los Angeles on July 14, 2023. (AFP)
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher (C L), with National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland (C R) and actress Frances Fisher (C bottom), joins Writers Guild members at a picket line outside Netflix in Los Angeles on July 14, 2023. (AFP)
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Movie and TV Stars Join Picket Lines in Fight over the Future of Hollywood

SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher (C L), with National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland (C R) and actress Frances Fisher (C bottom), joins Writers Guild members at a picket line outside Netflix in Los Angeles on July 14, 2023. (AFP)
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher (C L), with National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland (C R) and actress Frances Fisher (C bottom), joins Writers Guild members at a picket line outside Netflix in Los Angeles on July 14, 2023. (AFP)

"Ted Lasso" star Jason Sudeikis, Rosario Dawson and other top movie and TV actors joined picket lines alongside screenwriters Friday on the first full day of a walkout that has become Hollywood’s biggest labor fight in decades.

A day after the dispute brought production to a standstill across the entertainment industry, Sudeikis was among the picketers outside NBC in New York pressing for progress following the breakdown of contract talks with studios and streaming services. Dawson, star of the film "Rent" and the "Star Wars" TV series "Ahsoka," joined picketers outside Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California.

"Lord of the Rings" star Sean Astin marched with chanting protesters outside Netflix's offices in Hollywood. Also present at Netflix were "Titanic" and "Unforgiven" actor Frances Fisher and "The Nanny" star Fran Drescher, who is president of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

The actors’ arrival energized the picket lines outside Netflix, where music blared and the sidewalks were packed with demonstrators.

Elsewhere, "Once Upon a Time" actor Ginnifer Goodwin stood with protesters at Paramount Pictures.

The famous faces of Oscar and Emmy winners will likely be seen with some regularity on picket lines in New York and Los Angeles, adding star power to the demonstrations outside studios and corporate offices.

The walkout is the first double-barreled strike by actors and screenwriters in more than six decades.

In recent weeks, many actors made a show of solidarity with the 11,500 writers, who walked out in May. On Thursday, 65,000 members of the actors' union formally joined them on strike.

The two guilds have similar issues with studios and streaming services. They are concerned about contracts keeping up with inflation and about residual payments, which compensate creators and actors for use of their material beyond the original airing, such as in reruns or on streaming services. The unions also want to put up guardrails against the use of artificial intelligence mimicking their work on film and television.

Many on the picket lines took aim at Disney chief executive Bob Iger, who said Wednesday that the damage the strikes will do to the entertainment economy is "a shame."

"I think that when Bob Iger talks about what a shame it is, he needs to remember that in 1980, CEOs like him made 30 times what their lowest worker was making," actor Sean Gunn, who starred in "Guardians of the Galaxy," said outside Netflix.

Now Iger "makes 400 times what his lowest worker is. And I think that’s a shame, Bob. And maybe you should take a look in the mirror and ask yourself, ‘Why is that?’"

No talks are planned, and no end is in sight for the work stoppage. It is the first time both guilds have walked off sets since 1960, when then-actor Ronald Reagan was SAG’s leader.

"What we won in 1960 was our health and pension plans and the existence of residuals. That was the most important strike in LA union history, and now we’re on strike together again, and honestly, this strike is even bigger," Adam Conover, host of the TV series "Adam Ruins Everything" and member of the Writers Guild negotiating committee, said outside Netflix. "We’re going to win. If you are gaining momentum like we are, 70-odd days into a strike, you are going to win."

Conover was one of many picketers, including Sudeikis, who are members of both unions.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents employers including Disney, Netflix, Amazon and others, has lamented the walkout, saying it will hurt thousands of workers in industries that support film and television production.

The actors' strike will affect more than filming. Stars will no longer be allowed to promote their work through red carpet premieres or personal appearances. They cannot campaign for Emmy awards or take part in auditions or rehearsals.

The strike triggered cancellations of red carpet events scheduled for next week for "Special Ops: Lioness," starring Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman, and Christopher Nolan’s "Oppenheimer."

A "Haunted Mansion" premiere event at Disneyland on Saturday was set to go on as planned, but with no actors in attendance to promote the film.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said it was clear that the entertainment industry "is at a historic inflection point." She urged all parties to work around the clock until an agreement is reached.

"This affects all of us and is essential to our overall economy," Bass said in a statement.

The writers’ strike had already stopped much of television production, and the actors joining them immediately led to a shooting shutdown for many major films, including "Deadpool 3," "Gladiator 2" and the eighth installment of Tom Cruise’s "Mission Impossible" series. All are scheduled for release next year.

The writers' strike also shut down late-night talk shows and "Saturday Night Live," as well as several scripted shows that have either had their writers’ rooms or production paused, including "Stranger Things" on Netflix, "Hacks" on Max and "Family Guy" on Fox. Many more are sure to follow them now that performers also have been pulled.

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Reviving Hollywood Glamor of Silent Movie Era, Experts Piece Together Century-old Pipe Organ

A crate containing some of the hundreds of pipes that are part of the Barton Opus 234 theater organ that is undergoing restoration are shown at Carlton Smith Pipe Organ Restorations in Indianapolis, Tuesday, July 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
A crate containing some of the hundreds of pipes that are part of the Barton Opus 234 theater organ that is undergoing restoration are shown at Carlton Smith Pipe Organ Restorations in Indianapolis, Tuesday, July 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
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Reviving Hollywood Glamor of Silent Movie Era, Experts Piece Together Century-old Pipe Organ

A crate containing some of the hundreds of pipes that are part of the Barton Opus 234 theater organ that is undergoing restoration are shown at Carlton Smith Pipe Organ Restorations in Indianapolis, Tuesday, July 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
A crate containing some of the hundreds of pipes that are part of the Barton Opus 234 theater organ that is undergoing restoration are shown at Carlton Smith Pipe Organ Restorations in Indianapolis, Tuesday, July 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

A massive pipe organ that underscored the drama and comedy of silent movies with live music in Detroit's ornate Hollywood Theatre nearly a century ago was dismantled into thousands of pieces and stashed away.
The Barton Opus, built in 1927, spent four decades stored in a garage, attic and basement in suburban Detroit. But the towering musical curiosity is being lovingly restored in Indianapolis and eventually will be trucked, piece by piece, to the Rochester Institute of Technology in western New York, to be reassembled and rehoused in a theater specifically designed to accommodate it.
In its heyday, the Barton Opus was able to recreate the sounds of many instruments, including strings, flutes and tubas, says Carlton Smith, who has been restoring the organ since 2020. It also contained real percussion instruments such as a piano, xylophone, glockenspiel, cymbals and drums and could produce sound effects including steamboat and bird whistles, Smith says.
For many moviegoers, the organs — and the organists — were the stars, The Associated Press reported.
“One guy could do it all,” Smith says. “In the big cities, they were literally filling the theaters’ thousands of seats multiple times during the day. They were showing live shows along with the films. It was a big production.”
The Barton Opus enjoyed good acoustics at the Hollywood Theatre, according to the Detroit Theatre Organ Society. The theaters in Detroit at that time, the golden age of the city's auto industry, were as glamorous as any in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to John Lauter, an organist and organ technician.
“We were such a rich market for moviegoers that the theater owners built these palatial places,” Lauter says. “There were no plain Jane movie houses back then.”
Lauter, who also is the director of the Detroit Theatre Organ Society and president of the Motor City Theatre Organ Society, says the Hollywood Theatre organ was one of the largest made by the Bartola Musical Instrument Co. of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Only three were sold, while the other two were installed in the Highland Theatre in Chicago and the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Illinois.
Of the three, this is “the last one left that hasn’t been altered," Smith says.
In the decades that followed, televisions began to appear in living rooms across the nation and silent movie houses fell out of favor. The Hollywood Theatre closed in the 1950s, its fixtures were sold and its famed Barton Opus was on the verge of being lost to history.
But in the early 1960s, Lauter’s friend, Henry Przybylski, bought it at auction for about $3,500. Przybylski scrambled to remove the massive instrument, parts of which stood two stories tall, before the theater was demolished.
“He pulled together all of his friends in the winter of 1963,” Lauter says. “The building had no electricity and no heat. They came in with Coleman lanterns and block and tackle.”
They took the organ apart and Przybylski — an engineer and organ buff — transported the thousands of pieces back to his Dearborn Heights home where it would remain, unassembled, for about 40 years.
“He never heard or played that instrument ever,” Lauter says. “He lived a majority of his life owning that thing. He’d roll up the garage door and there would be that console in there. He made it known it was the very best there was.”
Przybylski died in 2000, but that did not spell the end of the Barton Opus' odyssey.
Steven Ball, a professional organist who taught at the University of Michigan's Organ Department, asked Przbylski's widow in 2003 if the pipe organ was for sale.
“I came up with every last bit of cash I could,” Ball says.
But he also put the pipe organ straight into storage.
“This whole project was to see this organ through to safety, until I could find an institution to restore it to what it was," Ball says, adding that he had always hoped the Barton Opus would end up in a theater mirroring its original home.
In 2019, Rochester Institute of Technology President David C. Munson reached out to Ball, whom he had known since Munson served as the dean of engineering at the University of Michigan years earlier.
“I contacted Steven and asked where we could acquire the best theater organ,” Munson says. "Steven said, ‘Well that would be mine.’”
Ball will donate his Barton Opus to the school, where it will be the centerpiece of the new performing arts center. The theater that will house the organ is expected to open by January 2026. Restoration work on the organ is a little over two-thirds complete, according to Smith.
“The theater is designed to accommodate exactly this organ,” Munson says, adding that the architect, Michael Maltzan, "designed the pipe chambers to have the same dimension as in the Hollywood Theatre. We have all the original plans for that organ and how the pipes were laid out.”
The exact cost of the work hasn’t yet been determined, Munson says, adding, “It’s an investment we’re making, but I think the results are going to be remarkable.”