Latest in Strike Talk

After taking the temperature on how labor talks were going with Teamsters’ Lindsay Dougherty, Deadline Strike Talk podcast co-hosts Billy Ray and Todd Garner get into things this week with Mike Miller, the VP and Director of Motion Pictures for IATSE. Miller sounds some encouraging notes here…

They’re baaack. We retired Strike Talk, the Deadline podcast by Billy Ray and Todd Garner Deadline hatched to lend perspective and serve as a beacon of hope to the industry during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. We’ve put the band back together because a potential standoff between the signatories and the…

After launching the Strike Talk podcast with producer Todd Garner to give WGA strikers comfort in the early days of 2023’s labor unrest, Billy Ray is signing off. When you are an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and a director and producer to boot, you’ve got to go back to work at some point. No one expected…

For a Friday that is time for reflection and giving thanks, host Billy Ray and returning original host Todd Garner welcomes WGA president Meredith Stiehm and SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher. They talk with the guys about the lessons learned from the long and brutal six month strike that is finally and…

So the good news is that the half year double strike that ground Hollywood to a halt is over. The bad news is Billy Ray has just about come to the end of the road on Deadline Strike Talk, which to our mind has been superb and a light in the darkness. He will do one more episode or two to wrap up the…

In his 27th installment of Deadline Strike Talk, Billy Ray leans into the need for labor and studios to realize they must be partners willing to compromise, for this business to get past the strikes and rebound in the coming years. To illustrate the need to be changeable, Ray harkens back to his own 2003…

In the 26th episode of Deadline Strike Talk — which for below the liners signifies half a year without a paycheck that hasn’t come from Uber fares or waiting tables — host Billy Ray hits on a zeitgeist theme that gets voiced a lot by people who just feel that the business isn’t as remotely as exciting or…

Week 25 of Deadline’s Strike Talk podcast comes amid a tough time on the negotiations front between SAG-AFTRA and the studios. No formal talks have taken place or have even been scheduled since October 11, when bargaining was suspended amid the latest impasse. The stalemate led to a group of A-list…

In the 24th weekly installment of the Deadline Strike Talk Podcast, host Billy Ray doesn’t seem too shaken by the surprise breakoff of talks between the studios and SAG-AFTRA. Even though CAA chief Bryan Lourd stated publicly there is a wide gap between the streamers and actors over residuals, Ray…

As the Hollywood strikes stretched to Week 23, optimism is high that a deal between signatories and SAG-AFTRA is close and the town can go back to work. That enthusiasm could be felt with all the deal stories that Deadline broke this week, a clear signal of hope. Not so fast, says Deadline Strike…

In the 22nd week of his Deadline podcast Strike Talk, Billy Ray sits with WGA Negotiating Committee co-chairs David Goodman and Chris Keyser to learn what happened inside the room during the negotiations and what gains were made in the deal struck Sunday with the AMPTP. Ray has been part of past WGA…

Billy Ray, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director and producer who has used his downtime during the Hollywood labor strife between shifts on the picket lines to turn Strike Talk into a tour de force that has demystified the issues and explained the inflection point that made this standoff…