Directors cut deal with producers

The Directors Guild of America has come to a new three-year agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after six days of negotiation. In a statement released Thursday afternoon, the DGA announced that the new deal:

? Increases both wages and residual bases for each year of the contract.
? Establishes DGA jurisdiction over programs produced for distribution on the Internet.
? Establishes a new residuals formula for paid Internet downloads (electronic sell-through) that essentially doubles the rate currently paid by employers.
? Establishes residual rates for ad-supported streaming and use of clips on the Internet.

”Two words describe this agreement — groundbreaking and substantial,” Gil Cates, chair of the DGA’s Negotiations Committee, said in the statement. ”The gains in this contract for directors and their teams are extraordinary — and there are no rollbacks of any kind.”

The AMPTP released a joint statement on the DGA deal that alluded to the ongoing WGA strike, stating, ”We hope that this agreement with DGA will signal the beginning of the end of this extremely difficult period for our industry. Today, we invite the Writers Guild of America to engage with us in a series of informal discussions similar to the productive process that led us to a deal with the DGA to determine whether there is a reasonable basis for returning to formal bargaining. We look forward to these discussions, and to the day when our entire industry gets back to work.”

For its part, the WGA released a statement saying, ”Now that the DGA has reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP, the terms of the deal will be carefully analyzed and evaluated by the WGA…. We will work with the full membership of both Guilds to discuss our strategies for our own negotiations and contract goals and how they may be affected by such a deal.”

The WGA statement continued, ”For over a month, we have been urging the conglomerates to return to the table and bargain in good faith. They have chosen to negotiate with the DGA instead. Now that those negotiations are completed, the AMPTP must return to the process of bargaining with the WGA. We hope that the DGA’s tentative agreement will be a step forward in our effort to negotiate an agreement that is in the best interests of all writers.”