Hollywood producers want the AMPTP to change its name

For the past six months or so, the writers and actors of Hollywood have successfully rallied most of the general public against the Bad Guys who are actively trying to eliminate “writer” and “actor” as viable career paths for all but the wealthiest people and most poorly programmed artificial intelligence apps. Those Bad Guys are better known as the Association Of Motion Picture And Television Producers—a.k.a. the AMPTP—an organization composed of the biggest and most powerful TV and movie studios (Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery). Despite the name, what the organization does not include, though, is producers. As in, people in Hollywood whose job is to produce things.

“Producer” is often a difficult job to define, especially for people who aren’t in The Industry, but it is a job that people do, and it’s a job that doesn’t have a strong union backing it up like what the writers and actors have. So, in order to avoid being lumped in with an organization that does not represent them, a bunch of producers are formally calling on the AMPTP to change its name and drop the “P” from the end of the acronym. This comes from Deadline, which says “AMPTS” (for “Studios” or “Streamers”) and “AMPTC” (for “Companies”) have been floated, but for now, the producers have joined forces to present a petition addressed to infamous AMPTP president Carol Lombardini to ask the organization to consider changing its name out of respect to what producers do and in order to make it clear that producers are not represented by the AMPTP or “formally aligned” with its goals.

That bit, straight from the petition, is part of a claim that these “misrepresentations” about producers being involved with the AMPTP has led to “confusion within the industry and beyond” that can “negatively affect producers in multiple ways beyond their control.” (In other words, people are mad at the AMPTP, and it’s not fair for producers to be lumped into that.) The petition currently has 2,400 or so signatures.

This is all part of a larger push to get better working conditions for producers, who don’t get health insurance or pensions since they don’t really have a union (Deadline notes that the job is officially considered a “management” position, and it also notes that the Producers Guild is more of an advocacy group than a proper union). The Woman King producer Catchy Schulman told Deadline that producers are used to being alone in their corner, but, “watching our colleagues come together and stand shoulder to shoulder to fight for what’s right has motivated us to be active in our own rescue.”

In other words, in addition to the other evidence we have about just how bad the AMPTP beefed everything this summer, it now has producers realizing they should be more like the actors and writers by banding together against these gigantic corporations that want nothing more than to exploit them and bleed them dry until—as Schulman put it—only a “billionaire or a dilettante or a nepo baby” can actually become a producer.