SAG-AFTRA has handed out more interim agreements to film and television projects, including waivers featuring a new casting designation. An untitled Guy Ritchie film and Destry Allyn Spielberg’s directorial debut Please Don’t Feed the Children were among five films given an interim casting agreement as of Thursday.
This is the first time the union’s interim agreement list has featured two designations. According to the SAG-AFTRA website where the list appears, these new designations allows “members to audition and/or engage in negotiations regarding casting for these productions, but may not yet travel, rehearse, or otherwise begin rendering services for the production.”
So far the guild has granted 102 interim agreements through the close of business Thursday, with a majority of the waivers allowing projects not tied to Alliance of Motion Picture and Television producer-repped studios to film during the SAG-AFTRA strike. (The Unknown Country was recently granted an agreement so talent could promote the film before its release.)
Most of the list is made up of film projects, though there are nine TV projects.
Other projects with the casting designation made public today are the films Armored, Superthief and Return to Wickensburg.
A handful of indie producers have told Deadline they haven’t be able to lock in cast for film projects because SAG-AFRTA won’t allow agents to send actors scripts to read. It’s been stressful since they need to package the films, with talent, and with some lead time, ahead of the Toronto Film Festival and the American Film Market later this fall. The latest waivers seem designed to address this.
Applications for waivers were made available on the first day of the SAG-AFTRA strike, which was July 14, and the guild received “hundreds of applications … we will be responding to all of them,” SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said at the time, noting that projects can’t have “any AMPTP fingerprints on them” if they hope to be granted an agreement.
At Comic-Con, Crabtree-Ireland explained to Deadline why some projects have been granted interim agreements even though they may have ties to major studios.
“It goes to reflect the complexity and the business relationships and structures in this industry,” he said. He added that the agreements “are the terms of our last counter-offer to the AMPTP on all the issues in this negotiation.”
Jill Goldsmith contributed to this report