Reprinted from Deadline Hollywood by David Robb on November 17, 2020.
CAA asked a federal judge Tuesday to issue a preliminary injunction that would force the WGA East and WGA West to drop their group boycott against the agency. The move comes just two months after CAA said that it thought it had a deal with the guilds to end their long-running legal battle over packaging fees and its affiliation with wipp, its corporately related production entity. The WGA guilds, however, said no such deal had been reached, citing outstanding issues over the agency’s reduction of its ownership of wiip.
Now CAA wants US District Court Judge André Birotte Jr. to end the standoff by ordering the guild to allow CAA’s writer clients to return to the agency, and to order the WGA to refrain “from utilizing or threatening any form of union sanctions or discipline against any Guild member for engaging CAA as a talent agent.”
In an effort to become re-franchised by the guild, CAA managing partner Bryan Lourd revealed in a declaration filed with the court today that the agency has put wiip into a blind trust, saying that the trustees of the trust have been given the “clear direction to sell-down CAA’s present interest in wiip such that the combined holdings of CAA will not exceed the 20% ceiling established by the WGA’s operative franchise agreement for all talent agencies.” …
