Episode 27, The Actor Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The Australian performers' union and a century of organising - Australian performers first organised nationally as the Actors' Federation of Australasia, registered in January 1920. The body that became Actors Equity of Australia operated from that lineage; the union itself dates its work improving performers' conditions to 1939. - The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) was formed in 1992 (with the amalgamation completed across 1992-1993) through the merger of Actors Equity of Australia, the Australian Journalists Association, and the Australian Theatrical and Amusement Employees Association. Performers are represented through the MEAA Equity section, governed by the National Performers Committee, and affiliated internationally to the International Federation of Actors (FIA). - Protections won through this organising include minimum rates, residuals, rehearsal pay, per diems, and conditions covering safe and harassment-free workplaces. Intimacy coordination on Australian sets - MEAA released Australia's first Intimacy Guidelines for Stage and Screen in November 2020, developed with Screen Producers Australia, the Australian Directors' Guild, the Casting Guild of Australia, the MEAA National Stunt Committee, and the Australian Writers' Guild, and following 2018 workshops with the British intimacy coordinator Ita O'Brien. - The guidelines are industry best-practice and the expected standard rather than a statutory requirement. They emerged in the wake of #MeToo and an MEAA member survey reporting widespread experience of sexual harassment or assault on stage and screen. Related screen-safety guidance is hosted through Screen Safe Australia. The 2023 Hollywood labour disputes and the AI provisions - The Writers Guild of America struck from 2 May 2023. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing roughly 160,000 American performers, struck from 14 July 2023. It was the first joint strike of the two unions since 1960. - The SAG-AFTRA strike ended on 9 November 2023 with a tentative agreement reached on 8 November, ratified on 5 December 2023. The TV/Theatrical/Streaming agreement introduced digital-replica provisions requiring informed consent, a minimum of 48 hours' notice, and compensation for the creation and use of a performer's digital replica, whether generated on set or licensed. - A separate SAG-AFTRA Interactive Media (video game) dispute over AI ran from July 2024 to a ratified agreement in July 2025. Nollywood as an alternative creative economy - Nigeria's film industry, Nollywood, produces around 2,500 films a year, ranking second in the world by output behind India and ahead of the United States. The term was coined around 2002 by the New York Times journalist Norimitsu Onishi. - The industry grew from a 1990s grassroots video movement with roots in the Yoruba travelling-theatre tradition. It is built on independent contractors and distributor-financiers rather than studios, employs over a million people, and operates largely without the union protections built up over a century in Australia and the United States. The Turkish dizi industry - Turkey's television-drama industry (dizi) became one of the world's largest exporters of scripted television, sold into more than 140 countries; by 2024 it was variously ranked the second or third-largest TV-fiction exporter globally. - Under the AKP government, content has been regulated and sanctioned through the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) and shaped through the state broadcaster (TRT), while scholars have documented significant creative-labour precarity in dizi production. REFERENCES [1] Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, "MEAA Equity," https://www.meaa.org/meaa-equity/ (Accessed: 28 May 2026); on the 1920 origins and 1992 merger, see "Actors Equity of Australia," Australian Trade Union Archives. [2] Equity Foundation, "About Us: MEAA Equity," https://www.equityfoundation.org.au/about-us/meaa-equity/ (Accessed: 28 May 2026). [3] Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Intimacy Guidelines for Stage and Screen (Sydney: MEAA, 2020), https://www.meaa.org/campaigns/intimacy-guidelines/; on the member survey and the #MeToo context, see "Sex on Screens: Why You Need an Intimacy Coordinator," Variety Australia, 2022. [4] Stuart Hall, "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973); reprinted as "Encoding/Decoding" in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 90-103. [5] Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University, 1997). [6] Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 65-107; reprinted as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181. [7] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). [8] Anita Heiss, Dhuuluu-Yala (To Talk Straight): Publishing Indigenous Literature (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003); see also Anita Heiss, Am I Black Enough for You? (North Sydney: Bantam Australia, 2012). [9] International Trade Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, "Nigeria: Media and Entertainment," https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/nigeria-media-and-entertainment (Accessed: 28 May 2026); supporting: Emily Witt, Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2017). [10] Ergin Bulut, "Globally Connected, Nationally Restrained: Platform Ambiguities and Censorship in Turkey's Drama Production," International Journal of Cultural Studies (2025), https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779241254541; Yeşim Kaptan and Ece Algan, eds., Television in Turkey: Local Production, Transnational Expansion and Political Aspirations (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); "The Third-Largest Exporter of Television Is Not Who You Might Expect," The Economist, 15 February 2024. [11] Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, "2023 TV/Theatrical Contracts: Artificial Intelligence," https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources/contracts/2023-tvtheatrical-contracts (Accessed: 28 May 2026). [12] Perkins Coie, "Generative AI in Movies and TV: How the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA Contracts Address Generative AI," 2024, https://perkinscoie.com/insights/blog/generative-ai-movies-and-tv-how-2023-sag-aftra-and-wga-contracts-address-generative; supporting: World Economic Forum, "AI and Hollywood: 5 Questions for SAG-AFTRA's Chief Negotiator," March 2024. FURTHER READING Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). A political-economy account of what artificial intelligence extracts and from whom, useful for thinking about whose labour a digital replica is built on. Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). On the precarity built into creative and aspirational labour, and who absorbs the risk in industries organised around passion. Mark Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). A study of how cultural labour is organised, valued, and contested, the wider field in which performer organising sits. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012). On the commodification of self-presentation and persona, relevant to the question of who owns a likeness once it is captured. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997). Haraway's extended account of how scientific and commercial systems lay claim to bodies and life. Anita Heiss, ed., Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia (Carlton: Black Inc., 2018). An anthology that puts Aboriginal voices in control of their own representation, the principle at the centre of Heiss's argument about control over how a people is depicted. Jade L. Miller, Nollywood Central (London: British Film Institute and Bloomsbury, 2016). A study of the distribution and political economy of the Nigerian film industry as a creative economy outside the Hollywood model. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. About the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser working with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic forces that shape their work. She is based in Melbourne. To talk through a situation of your own, book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com
