SAG-AFTRA Picketers Celebrate Halloween—And Show Support for the Negotiating Committee

With the SAG-AFTRA strike reaching its 110th day, the Warner Bros. picket line was filled with an appropriately chaotic group of supporters celebrating Halloween.

Among the (non-struck) Halloween costumes on display? An homage to the viral Taylor Swift fan site’s “seemingly ranch” tweet (plus a non-affiliated “Red”-era Taylor Swift), generic doctors, people wearing inflated lobster and dinosaur outfits, sports jerseys, a Garfield, many witches, and a take on Carol Lombardini. (Lombardini is the president of the AMPTP, who is currently negotiating with SAG-AFTRA on a new deal; there’s also a parody Twitter account dedicated to her.) 

A handful of kids—as well as several dressed up pets—were among the crowd that included Bryan Cranston, Jason George, Gabrielle Carteris, Noah Wyle, Mary McCormack, Bob Clendenin, and Danny Pino, as spooky season music played (“Dead Man’s Party,” “Thriller”) and candy was handed out.

For Pino, a picket regular, walking the lines is “about the consistency,” he tells Give Me My Remote in the video below. “Consistency of giving a deliberate, loud, united voice to the industry—to our fellow actors, writers, directors, crew members, people who are suffering now with ancillary businesses—to say that this is serious to us. This continues to be serious to us. That we are not relenting. That we’re here to get a fair deal. And we feel that if we get a fair deal, that promotes other unions to fight for a fair deal, as well. That’ll lift the entire industry.”

This also marks the second week studios and guild are negotiating—their second go-round post-strike after breaking off talks earlier in the month—and Pino acknowledges he and other performers are out “to support our negotiating committee.” 

“[We] send a resounding full-throated message to them that we have their backs,” he says. “Obviously, we’re all worried and we feel responsible for actors who haven’t worked for a while. We feel responsible for crews who haven’t worked in a while…that empathy and that sympathy is something that we acknowledge and that we do feel the pressure of. And that’s why we need to stay out here: to hopefully show our resolve to those people who are our partners at the end of the day, the studios and the networks. And we hope that we can have cooler heads and we can just stay in the room and figure out a fair deal.”

With the stop-starts of the negotiating—and the combined labor stoppage about to hit six months on Thursday (WGA went on strike on May 2)—”I think that we all need to have steady emotions with it,” Pino says of the process. “I think that when it comes to negotiation, especially a negotiation that is now over 100 days long, and when your negotiating partners have walked away multiple times—obviously, that can cause all different kinds of emotions. And it could also cause you to maybe turn against the people who serve your own best interest, too.”

“So I think a steady hand, a calm approach, an approach that understands that it’s an emotional time [is needed],” he continues. “But it is also time for us to think, to strategize, and to get what it is that we need—not only as individual actors, but as an industry and also as a guild.”

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