Hollywood studio heads have balked at Friday’s handshake agreement between Canadian actors and producers to end the ACTRA strike, leaving CFTPA and ACTRA representatives to find a face-saving formula on new media residuals for the major studios so a new IPA deal can be finalized this week.

On Friday at 2:30 p.m., bargainers for ACTRA and the CFTPA and their mediator thought they had a deal on a new IPA, to the point that they shook hands and began writing a joint press release.

ACTRA members had earned a 9% wage increase over three years, plus a 1% rise in retirement benefits in the first year and a surprise deal on new media residuals.

For webisodes and other made-for-new media product, producers must pay Canadian actors their full daily rate for a first six-months use period, followed by 3.6% of gross distribution revenues for continued streaming of their performances. For old media converted to new media use, the actors would receive a similar percentage of distribution revenues, this time from the first dollar.

Word seeped out from the IPA talks that a tentative deal was in hand and that celebrations should begin.

But the music stopped at some point after 3 p.m., when Hollywood studio CEOs in Los Angeles gathered for a conference call to hear the terms of the new IPA.

By 4:30 p.m., CFTPA chief negotiator John Barrack rang Stephen Waddell, his ACTRA counterpart, to tell him there was a ‘hiccup.’

The major studios had balked at the IPA terms for new media residuals.

Nick Counter, president of the AMPTP, representing U.S. studios, subsequently told ACTRA representatives that the studio heads were nervous about the clauses on Internet compensation, and most of all didn’t want a precedent-setting Canadian deal boxing them in during their own contract talks with Los Angeles unions and guilds, beginning later this year.

The studios wanted an ‘understanding’ that would help them ratify the IPA without prejudicing their own U.S. labor negotiations.

On Monday morning, Waddell and Barrack began working out a face-saving formula to ensure the IPA’s terms on new media residuals do not apply to AMPTP members or their affiliates shooting in Canada until the major studios conclude a new contract deal with the Screen Actors Guild.

‘We have to make sure everyone is satisfied,’ Barrack told Playback Daily on the weekend, insisting there was no deal until everyone, including the major studios, ratified the new IPA.

It’s a tightrope act. The CFTPA can’t be seen to be cutting a special deal for the major studios that would disadvantage its Canadian members.

Hollywood studio CEOs flinching over payments for Internet rights on Friday caused widespread frustration among the Canadian bargainers.

For months, the industry has questioned why humble Canada had to hammer out a deal on Internet compensation before Hollywood took a crack at it.

For weeks, ACTRA urged that the issue should be side-barred to a joint committee for up to a year, likely until the SAG talks began. But the producers insisted they needed certainty, and so pushed for a deal on new media residuals.

And when they had one, the studios balked.

All sides in the dispute insist they share a will to finalize terms on a new IPA agreement in the coming days, and are working in an atmosphere of goodwill to that end.

The ACTRA strike — now in its seventh week — will remain in effect until those terms are settled and a new IPA is ratified.