Barry Diller, Ex-Fox, ABC, and Paramount Exec, Says CEOs and Top-Paid Actors Should Take Pay Cuts to End Strikes

Hollywood has slowed not to a crawl, but a screeching halt due to ongoing strikes by both the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA. With some reports suggesting producers are wanting to hold off negotiations until later this year, virtually all productions have stopped filming for the time-being given neither writers nor actors can be on set. Now, former television executive Barry Diller has thoughts on how the strikes could resolve.

In an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday, Diller said he thinks both CEOs and the highest-paid actors should take a substantial pay cut as a starting point in future negotiations. “Actually, everybody’s probably overpaid at the top end. The one idea I had is to say, as a good faith measure, both the executives and the most paid actors should take a 25% pay cut, to try and narrow-narrow the difference between those who get highly paid and those that don’t,” Diller said on the news program.

Diller, a former executive with ABC, Fox, and Paramount who’s now the chairman of IAC and Expedia Group, says the strikes are on the verge of collapsing the entire filmmaking industry.

“The only other thing I would do, I would call for a September 1 deadline. There’s a strike deadline,” the executive continued. “I think there should be a settlement deadline. Because unless it happens by September 1, the actions and you know, of course, who cares about Hollywood, who cares about it. But the truth is, this is a huge business both domestically and for world export. And if these conditions, it sounds like I’m crying to the skies, but these conditions will potentially produce an absolute collapse of an entire industry.”

One of the most contentious points of ongoing negotiations is the studio’s insistence of AI usage. According to SAG-AFTRA officials, studios wanted the ability to digitally scan actors and pay them for a single day in return for using actors’ likeness in perpetuity.

“This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday: they propose that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation,” SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland revealed at a press conference this week. “So if you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”