By day, Ryan Quinlan handles the desk lamps, sconces and chandeliers that appear in films and television shows. At night, he rents out props from his Brooklyn warehouse, like an Egyptian sarcophagus and a taxidermy leopard. On the side, he acts and does stunts.
All of that work came to an abrupt halt last week, when the Hollywood actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, with 36,000 members in the New York area, announced a strike for the first time in 43 years, in pursuit of better pay and safeguards against artificial intelligence. It joined the screenwriters union, the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since May.
“This shut down all of my streams of income,” Mr. Quinlan, 44, said. “There is nobody not touched.”
While Los Angeles is the epicenter for film and TV in the United States, New York has long staked its claim as Hollywood East, and the standoff is already taking a toll on tens of thousands of workers in one of the…
