Through the months-long Hollywood strikes, each the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have managed to win the courtroom of public opinion pretty simply. Studio heads like David Zaslav and Bob Iger made headlines for sticking their toes of their mouths fairly early on, and studios at large have made strikes that don’t paint them in one of the best of lights.
One other get together that’s been struggling to regulate the narrative? The Alliance of Movement Image and Tv Producers (AMPTP), which has been villainized for months for its strikes in opposition to the 2 worker-led unions and failing to safe a take care of the WGA particularly. Per the Hollywood Reporter, the AMPTP is now seeking to change that by hiring PR agency The Levinson Group. The Washington, DC-based firm helped the US Ladies’s Nationwide Soccer Workforce receiving pay parity, and founder Molly Levinson has beforehand labored at CBS and is claimed to be identified for serving to purchasers with “reputational and threat considerations.”
Although a selected plan from Levinson has but to be finalized, it’s mentioned the corporate has been introduced readily available to shift the overall view that common folks might have of studios and their CEOs as grasping and out of contact. A supply talking to Deadline famous that studios “want higher coordination, higher messaging” to fight the efforts of the writers and media over the summer season. As famous by THR, the AMPTP has beforehand employed non-entertainment PR companies to assist with strikes, notably throughout the 2007-2008 Writers Strike. SAG-AFTRA, for its half, has additionally introduced on some PR assist in the type of Stephanie Cutter, who was deputy marketing campaign supervisor for then-president Barack Obama forward of the 2012 presidential election.
It’s not shocking to listen to that the AMPTP is hoping for writers and actors to eat one another alive and take no matter deal is obtainable to them. What’s extra shocking is how the strikes are almost 4 months in and it thinks there’s an opportunity to salvage the general public picture of it and the studios. By social media and picketing, SAG-AFTRA and the WGA have made clear the place the blame lies for the strikes, and that they received’t again down till everybody concerned advantages from it. And since studios have publicly tried to play these strikes off as no big deal (and one thing they wish to actively punish strikers for), a brand new PR firm might not be sufficient.
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