The same Friday in mid-July that the Screen Actors Guild declared its strike, the heads of some of the biggest film festivals of fall 2023 jumped on an emergency Zoom call.

It was a coming together of symbiotic rivals, a temporary truce among the four houses — Venice, Telluride, Toronto, New York — dialing in from three different time zones. Normally these festivals, which all take place in September and October and are seen as the first stop on the road to the Oscars, are fierce competitors, jockeying over world premieres and who will get the bragging rights of being the first place to show the next best-picture winner.

But in the first days of the strike, says Venice International Film Festival director Alberto Barbera, those Zoom calls turned into a support group. They were each facing down the same existential crisis: How, exactly, does a splashy, global celebration of movies survive without movie stars?

“Immediately we were in a panic because nobody knew what could happen, really,” said Barbera, who was suddenly getting ghosted by studios and production companies whose movies had already RSVP’d to premiere at Venice. Other festivals were experiencing the same, at a time when they were just getting back on their feet from the pandemic, which shut many festivals down for a year. It was like a set of girlfriends gathering at a bar and finding out they had all recently been dumped. Solidarity. Unconditional support. Metaphorical vodka shots.

When most people think of the strike — prompted by union contract negotiations breaking down between the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the AMPTP, which represents movie studios, TV networks and streaming services such as Amazon, Apple, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros. Discovery) — they picture actors refusing to show up to set, shutting down productions. But under union rules, actors also are prohibited from promoting films they’ve already made, unless that film production has negotiated an interim agreement with SAG. That means no red carpets, no interviews, no post-screening Q&As, no social media that could be perceived as promoting an AMPTP project. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. The Post’s interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon’s board.)

Part of an actor’s job is selling their work to viewers. Warner Bros. spent $150 million on marketing for “Barbie,” and were lucky enough to get weeks of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling bantering with each other on movie sites and talk shows around the world (at least the ones not shut down by the simultaneous, historic Writers Guild of America strike) before the actors strike began. Without Robbie showing up at events dressed like vintage Barbies, creating photographs that continue circulating on TikTok, would that movie still be on its way to making $1 billion worldwide?