The WGA is set to resume negotiations with the Hollywood studios and AMPTP on Friday, two days after the writers’ strike hit the 100-day milestone.
“Carol Lombardini has asked the WGA Negotiating Committee to meet with AMPTP negotiators on Friday,” the WGA wrote in a statement to its members Thursday. “We expect the AMPTP to provide responses to WGA proposals.”
Coming days after a meeting to discuss parameters around a potential restart to negotiations, the upcoming talks mark the first official return to the bargaining table since the strike began in May.
“Our committee returns to the bargaining table ready to make a fair deal, knowing the unified WGA membership stands behind us and buoyed by the ongoing support of our union allies,” the statement concluded.
The AMPTP did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
The meeting follows a prior meeting between the WGA and the studios last Friday, which ended unsuccessfully, according to a WGA memo, which informed members that the two sides remain too far apart to resume negotiations.
According to the WGA, chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman and the guild’s general counsel Tony Segall met with Lombardini and unnamed AMPTP staff discussed “a potential negotiation protocol and a preview of the issues each side intends to bring back to the table upon resumption.”
The meeting also touched on the AMPTP’s request for a media blackout, which the memo later on then accused the AMPTP of breaking by leaking details about the meeting.
Before the meeting, WGA leaders cautioned their members that the meeting with AMPTP might not result in talks resuming, as was the case following a meeting during the 2007-08 WGA strike that concluded without a deal, and the strike continued for an additional two months.
“Playbooks die hard. Every move they make at the bargaining table and every rumor away from it needs to be evaluated through the lens of their attempts to get us to accept less,” the guild’s negotiating committee wrote in the memo. “We’re not falling for it … Writers — screenwriters, Appendix A writers, episodic television writers, all writers — have marched together for 94 days now. We have struck to make writing a viable profession for all of us, now and in the future. We have not come all this way, and sacrificed this much, to half-save ourselves.”
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