Actors’ strike flirts with an ending, but will the climax be worthy of Hollywood?

Image of the week: Final act?

With signs including “F**k you, pay me” and “Pay up, greedy f**ks”, it feels safe to say the novelty of being on strike might have been wearing off for members of US actors’ union Sag-Aftra by the time November arrived and organisers staged a giant “unity picket” at the Disney studio lot in Burbank, north of Hollywood.

Talks between the union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) – which represents Walt Disney, Netflix and other film and TV companies – intensified this week amid hopes that the stand-off drama was gearing up to a resolution of sorts.

Actors walked off sets in July in a dispute with producers over pay, working conditions and the use of artificial intelligence, with the union seeking limitations on the use of AI to recreate actors’ likenesses and performances and the AMPTP pursuing a system of informed consent and remuneration whenever actors are digitally replicated – which, it seems, they increasingly will be.

Sag-Aftra president Fran Drescher, who has taken a heart-shaped plush toy gifted to her by a fan into negotiations and was said by the Hollywood Reporter to have “a penchant for reciting Buddhist inspirational quotes” during talks, may already be rehearsing for her next part. She posted a video this week declaring she did not need “to emulate male energy to lead” and could also, crucially, “still rock a red lip”.

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In numbers: Hard landing

$47 billion

Private valuation reached by WeWork in January 2019 after a series of investments in the real estate company led by Japan’s SoftBank. This was the peak of ... something.

$121 million

Valuation the company was hovering at on Wednesday after reports that it would file for bankruptcy protection in the US next week sent its share price tumbling even lower. It has lost 98 per cent of its value this year.

777

Locations where WeWork – one of the biggest office tenants in Dublin – had leases around the world, at the end of June. That’s a lot of lease renegotiating to do.

Getting to know: Helen MacNamara

“I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building,” wrote Boris Johnson’s erstwhile adviser Dominic Cummings of former senior civil servant Helen MacNamara in a WhatsApp message read out during Tuesday’s male-energy session of the UK’s Covid inquiry.

But for all his expletives, it was MacNamara’s quietly damning testimony the following day that was the more compelling. The former deputy cabinet secretary spoke of a “macho” and “toxic” culture at Number 10 where women were on the receiving end of “very obvious sexist treatment”. Meetings in early 2020 were “unbelievably bullish” and characterised a “de facto assumption that we were going to be great”, not like those lockdown-imposing Italians.

Any woman who made it to the decision-making table was routinely ignored as ego-contaminated men gave no thought to issues such as childcare, domestic abuse or advice to pregnant women, with a “disproportionate amount of attention” afforded instead to how restrictions might affect football. Johnson’s “monomaniacal focus” on Brexit since he became UK prime minister in July 2019, meanwhile, was one reason why there was no pandemic plan in place, she suggested.

MacNamara, who was fined for attending one of the “Partygate” leaving parties (to which she brought a karaoke machine), also spoke of the “horrible” moment in mid-March 2020 when she realised Downing Street’s bid to avoid lockdown would not work and the delay in issuing a stay-at-home order would “kill thousands of people”. They were, she said at the time, “absolutely f***ked”.

The list: Bletchley Park fraternity

With a level of global attention that would have freaked out the civil servants and military intelligence types who kept the activities at Bletchley Park on the down-low for decades, high-fliers dropped in on the once top-secret wartime codebreaking headquarters this week for Rishi Sunak’s world-beating AI summit. So who was on the guest list?

1. Kamala Harris: the US vice-president was on hand in Washington as Joe Biden signed an executive order on AI cybersecurity, then she flew to Sunak’s shindig to unveil a $200 million AI investment from private foundations.

2. Elon Musk: X, formerly Twitter, has more than halved in value since Musk bought it a year ago. What better genius to have a matey chat with the British prime minister about AI eliminating jobs?

3. António Guterres: The secretary-general of the United Nations recently took a break from being right about climate change and the crisis in Gaza to warn that the interaction between AI and nuclear weapons, biotechnology, neurotechnology and robotics was “deeply alarming”.

4. Wu Zhaohui: China’s vice-minister of science and technology flew in, although the UK’s move to invite Chinese officials was not without controversy, with the Americans said to be particularly unhappy.

5. Sam Altman: The chief executive of OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, is effectively the top frontman for generative AI or what the UK government is calling “frontier AI”.