Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC, Expedia Group and former head of a Hollywood studio, says top executives and highest-paid stars should take a 25 percent pay cut to narrow the gap between their salaries and those of employees in the bottom bracket. end of the pay scale.
“There is no confidence,” he said interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ Face the nation. “You have the Actors Guild saying, ‘How dare these 10 people who run these companies make all this money and won’t pay us? Whereas, if you look at the other side, the top 10 actors get paid more than the top 10 CEOs. I’m not saying either of them are right. In fact, everyone probably overpaid in the end.”
solve it? “The only thought that came to me was to say, as a measure of goodwill, both the highest-paid executives and actors should cut their salaries by 25 percent to try to narrow and narrow the difference between those who are highly paid and those who aren’t.”
Diller also argued that writers’ and actors’ strikes should be settled by September 1 to avoid “devastating effects”. The Writers Guild of America has been in turmoil since May 2 and SAG-AFTRA went on strike Friday after each union’s negotiations with the Motion Picture and Television Producers Alliance broke down.
“What will happen is, if it’s not actually settled until Christmas or so, Diller predicted, there won’t be many shows anyone can watch next year.” “So, you’ll see subscriptions taken away, which will reduce the revenues of all the movie companies, the TV companies, and the result is that there will be no shows. And at the exact time the strike is settled, and you want to go back, there won’t be enough money. So it’s going to be for this.” Indeed devastating effects, if not sorted out soon.”
He continued, “This is the truth [Hollywood] It is a huge company at the local level and for global export. … These conditions will lead to the absolute collapse of an entire industry. “
Deller went on to discuss artificial intelligence, which had been one of the sticking points for both syndicates and studios in their since-stalled negotiations. Diller believes fears of an AI takeover are unfounded, saying that it is “being overblown”. He does not see a reality in which artificial intelligence replaces actors or writers.
“Yeah, you can suck up all that stuff and spit out something that sounds like Shakespeare, but guess what? It’s not the original Shakespeare he argued. And writers would be helped, not replaced. I don’t think most of these crafts are at risk from AI.”
Meanwhile, Diller also doubled down on comments he made in April when he argued that publishers should file a lawsuit against generative AI. He said he and a group of “leading publishers” — he declined to say who — plan to sue to prevent AI from scraping and using data without payment and to protect copyrighted material. He did not give a timeline for when the lawsuit would be filed.
“It’s not hostile,” he said of potential litigation. It’s sharing a firm place in the ground to say that “you can’t absorb our material without defining a business model for the future.”
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