SAG-AFTRA Tells Members It’s OK To Promote Their Movies With Interim Agreements At Film Festivals

Michael Keaton, after making his directorial debut with 2008’s The Merry Gentleman, steps behind the camera for only the second time with his latest film, Knox Goes Away in which he also delivers one of his finest and most poignant performances as a man facing a rare form of fast moving dementia, but who is racing the clock to save his estranged son’s life before it is too late.

Michaela Zee Jessica Chastain is encouraging independent producers to sign interim agreements amid the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike. “If a majority of independent producers, come forward and sign the Interim Agreement deal it will show the AMPTP how wrong they are when they say our contract terms are unrealistic or unreasonable,” Chastain wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday.

SAG-AFTRA’s presence at TIFF continued into Saturday with a special picket outside Amazon offices here in Toronto with Canada’s commercial actors union ACTRA, who’ve been in a 501 day contract lockout with the country’s advertising agency’s org.

OK, so there was one good deal point –one– to come out of the AMPTP talks with the WGA, as SAG-AFTRA National Executive director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland admitted at TIFF today: It was the streamer’s transparency on viewership numbers.

Amid the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” has an interim agreement set in place.

SAG-AFTRA’s National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator in a pitstop at TIFF revealed that the Taylor Swift: Eras Tour concert film, which is poised to open to $70M-$100M has a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement.

Jessica Chastain is making a statement while promoting her new movie.

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore‘s new movie May December is set to introduce the 2023 New York Film Festival later this month!

In principle, using the rainy-day, kitchen-sink post-rock of Manchester band The Smiths so prominently in a film like The Killer seems incredibly perverse, given that it’s an exotic, globe-trotting thriller about an American assassin. But in reality, it’s actually very sound choice indeed: legend has it that the band’s singer, Morrissey, had two reasons for naming his band so, the first being that “Smith” is one of the most common and thus unremarkable surnames in the world. The second, and much more subversive theory, suggests that it’s also a reference to David and Maureen Smith, brother-in-law and sister of ’60s serial killer Myra Hindley, the snappily dressed couple whose testimony blew open the Moors Murderers case and whose beatnik likenesses adorn the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1990 album “Goo”.

Five years after his triumphant A Star is Born world premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Bradley Cooper is back on the Lido with Maestro. Except, the director and star is only here in spirit owing to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

The glory days of Cinecitta are evoked in Finally Dawn (Finalmente l’Alba), a sprawling story of uncertain tone – sometimes thrilled, sometimes appalled and sometimes as generally bewildered as nervous ingenue Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci), an ordinary young woman of Rome who finds herself leading the way through this warren of a Wonderland. Cinecitta has recently revived its fortunes after a long slump, with a slow build of refurbishment and expansion, but director Saverio Costanzo leans heavily into nostalgia for times past, setting his story in the ‘50s when there were still legions of centurions marching around the studio lot and live animals awaiting their close-ups. A lion features here, roaring at passers-by. It may well be the film’s most sympathetic character.

EXCLUSIVE: The Walking Dead spinoffs Daryl Dixon and The Ones Who Live and Interview with the Vampire are set to resume production after AMC Networks struck agreements with SAG-AFTRA.

Megalopolis, the long-awaited passion project from Francis Ford Coppola, is the latest film to land an interim agreement from SAG-AFTRA. The film finished production earlier this year so it is unknown what the agreement would be used for but with festival season ramping up it could potentially be getting one in order to be sold on one of the markets or potentially screen an upcoming festival and in need of one for publicity purposes.

Week after week during the ongoing strikes by actors and writers, FilmLA reports that it has “no scripted TV series” with permits to shoot on location in and around Los Angeles. By contrast, in a normal week at this time of year, there would be dozens of scripted TV projects filming on location in the region.

EXCLUSIVE: LA-based Brit Stuart Ford has operated at the sharp end of international film sales and movie financing for more than two decades.

EXCLUSIVE: Radical, the Mexican true-life drama starring CODA‘s Eugenio Derbez that broke out of Sundance as the 2023 Festival Favorite, has secured an interim agreement that will permit publicity efforts ahead of its October 20th nationwide release, Deadline has learned.

J. Kim Murphy SAG-AFTRA issued a statement on Thursday evening to encourage members to promote and audition for approved interim agreement productions, as a means of “strengthening the union’s bargaining position and demonstrating solidarity.” The guild’s statement provides guidance in regards to the matter of promoting a project with an interim agreement, which has been a matter of contention among some SAG-AFTRA members since the strike began in July.

EXCLUSIVE: Isabella Gomez (One Day at a Time, The Goldbergs) is set to star in the indie horror film The Mannequin, from writer-director John Berardo (Initiation).

Fearing they won’t be able to set casts for film packages to sell at key festival markets, indie film producers are appealing to SAG-AFTRA to fast-track interim casting agreements that are holding things up.  

Ahead of its world premiere in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which follows the Presleys from the perspective of the King’s young bride, has secured a SAG-AFTRA Interim Agreement.