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After appearing at Max & Helen’s on Monday night alongside co-creator Rachel Sennott to discuss their new Netflix series Big Mistakes, Dan Levy turned up on the East Coast Tuesday to promote the crime caper on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.

The promo tour marks Levy’s first since the passing of Catherine O’Hara, an “extended family” member and beloved Schitt’s Creek co-star. Fallon noted that the first time Levy appeared on his show was with his Schitt’s Creek family including O’Hara. “I’ve just gotta say I’m so sorry about the passing,” said Fallon.

“Listen, it’s like a collective loss, I think,” Levy said in response. “She was the greatest. She’s irreplaceable. The great comfort for me has just been to see how loved she was — the outpouring. Everyone felt like they kind of knew her.”

Fallon praised her as “one of the funniest comedians I’ve ever seen. Can do characters. Gorgeous.” Levy added, “Unbelievably talented at improvising. One of the great, great, great queens.”

O’Hara passed away at 71 in January following a brief illness. In the wake of her death, many of her friends and former co-stars took to social media to share the love and offer condolences to her family. “What a gift to have gotten to dance in the warm glow of Catherine O’Hara’s brilliance for all those years. Having spent over fifty years collaborating with my Dad, Catherine was extended family before she ever played my family. It’s hard to imagine a world without her in it. I will cherish every funny memory I was fortunate enough to make with her,” Levy posted at the time. “My heart goes out to Bo, Matthew, Luke and every member of her big, beautiful family.”

His father, Eugene Levy, shared at the time, “Words seem inadequate to express the loss I feel today. I had the honor of knowing and working with the great Catherine O’Hara for over fifty years. From our beginnings on the Second City stage, to SCTV, to the movies we did with Chris Guest, to our six glorious years on Schitt’s Creek, I cherished our working relationship, but most of all our friendship. And I will miss her. My heart goes out to Bo, Matthew, Luke, and the entire O’Hara family.”

Over her more than four decades in in the film business, Kathleen Kennedy has been at the vanguard of tech, whether via her work on the Star Wars universe or all those Steven Spielberg ones. Jurassic Park alone makes you a pioneer.

You might expect the uber-veteran, then, to be similarly enthused about AI in filmmaking. But Kennedy sounded a more skeptical note Tuesday — even while speaking to an AI founder at an event he hosted.

“Taste is so fundamental to the process of creating things,” she said, in an on-stage conversation with Runway co-funder Cristóbal Valenzuela as part of an AI summit that the New York-based startup hosted in Manhattan Tuesday. “It’s life experiences; it’s educational. The best directors of films and photography came out of art, they studied art,” she said. She suggested AI-driven films by definition couldn’t have that experience.

The event saw a litany of high profile personalities talk about the promise of AI in cinema, a cause Runway has dedicated itself to pursuing. Valenzuela gave a keynote titled “normalizing magic” to a packed ballroom of hundreds, and executives from Adobe, Promise AI and Paramount all hailed the artistic potential of the tech with thoughts like “Human creativity will [now] not be constrained by time,” (Adobe’sVP of GenAI New Business Ventures Hannah Elsakr).

Kennedy, who left her role as head of Lucasfilm in January, didn’t entirely dismiss the technology, saying it could help for the kind of nuts-and-bolts tasks that nearly everyone agrees it could be useful for — 
“previz, planning, budgeting, scheduling.” But this was faint praise as she questioned more sweeping applications.

“Once you get into execution,” she said, a model could falter at the essence of filmmaking. “What are you trying to do? What’s the painting you’re trying to create?” Kennedy said. “There’s [beautiful] unpredictability in the creative process that’s going to be tricky to preserve because AI is so predictable.”

At one point she also stood up for the Hollywood creative community, leveling a charge, if mutedly, against parts of the tech world for how it was carrying forth the AI movement.

“I think what’s missing in the discussion right now is transparency,” she said, “I think people [in Hollywood] feel that there’s a lot they don’t know about what’s going on. When there’s conversation around how these language models are being trained, for instance…. I think if we can reach a point where there’s more transparency in those discussions —  and, frankly, more transparency, consequently, in people using these tools,” she added, “then I think that will help greatly to dissipate [the distrust].”

Valenzuela mostly deferred to Kennedy and did not challenge her, even as the AI community of which he’s a part believes there has been transparency and largely sees AI-skeptic filmmakers as hyper-traditionalists who need to get on board. He sometimes did bring up popular counterpoints, such as the idea that AI tools will lower the barrier to entry for filmmakers.

Companies like Runway see themselves as a bridge between the Silicon Valley hypesters and Hollywood skeptics, catering to filmmakers with tools and eschewing social applications like ByteDance’s Seesaw (The Brad Pitt-Tom Cruise fight people).

Kennedy did embrace some potentially novel use cases of AI in filmmaking, like getting simulated opinions from a host of actors on a script without needing to pry it from them (the idea would be to get new points of view on material). She also said that, thanks to AI, “we are on the precipice of something that might look and feel quite different than a two-hour movie experience…or television,” likely in short-form.

But she largely seemed wary of integrating AI into the filmmaking process, even raising an eyebrow at 3D printing, saying that it didn’t create props as durable as those made by conventional human means. 

“The interesting thing that happened with the props is that after about take 3 many of them started to break, and we realized that when so many things we do are hand-done, then the materials that are used and choices that are made…was something decided by a human being. And when we were doing this with the new technology, we didn’t have the benefit of that.”

Kennedy’s most philosophical response to the AI camp came when she described the value of human experience in film.

“I’m going to sound like a traditionalist,” she said, “but I have a deep appreciation for learned experiences that then contribute to the collaboration and the creative process. And it’s just like when we’re working with a composer, if you know that somebody’s classically trained, but they’re still doing a very modern rock-and-roll type score, you’re just going to get a depth to the decisionmaking along the way that I think is really valuable.”

Ditto, she said, with lighting.

“It’s one of the trickier tools in art because it permeates everything we do,” she said. “And you need to see many examples in order to do it the right way.”

Seven weeks into their strike, unionized staffers at the Writers Guild of America West will lose their health care benefits on Wednesday.

WGA West staffers can be covered by the Producer-Writers Guild of America (PWGA) Health Plan, the same plan that is offered to the Hollywood union’s members. Staffers accrue coverage on a month-to-month basis as long as they work 31 hours per week the previous month.

Staffers unionized with the Writers Guild Staff Union (WGSU), who have been out on strike since Feb. 17, say they learned on Tuesday that they will lose eligibility starting Wednesday.

Missy Brown, the co-chair of the WGSU, said in an interview that union members didn’t learn until Tuesday afternoon about the loss of coverage, and that was only after she found a PWGA Health Plan staffer who would speak with her. “I just find this very crazy that we weren’t notified of this,” she says.

Brown said that she left repeated voicemails with multiple staffers at the PWGA Health Plan offices over the last few days to determine the future of striking members’ coverage. She eventually “begged a receptionist to please find me a human being” at the offices and the staffer she was connected with then informed her that she and other striking guild members will be losing coverage April 1.

The WGA West confirmed the loss of coverage on Tuesday. “Striking employees can elect COBRA continuation coverage if they wish to be covered by the PWGA Health Fund in April. The WGAW cannot make contributions on behalf of staff employees who did not work in March and have no earnings,” the union said in a statement.

In addition to the alleged lack of communication around their loss of coverage, WGSU members are lamenting that their employer has not tried to rectify the situation. In an Instagram post, the union stated that “during the 2023 writers strike, WGAW and AMPTP negotiated to extend health coverage for writers throughout the strike.”

There has been no such extension for striking WGSU members, though they are in a different position than the writers in 2023 — the PWGA Health Plan is jointly administered by studio and union leaders and staffers are only negotiating with the union side. The WGA West negotiated its health coverage extension as part of its strike settlement agreement, rather than mid-strike.

Contends Brown, ”I’m sure there was something that could have been worked out to retain our healthcare.”

The latest dispute marks an escalation of already-high tensions between the WGSU and the WGA West. For weeks the staff union has been picketing outside the building where WGA West negotiators are locked in high-stakes negotiations with studios and streamers. A video published by Variety on March 27 showed protestors chanting “shame!” as WGA West negotiating committee members and leaders entered the building for negotiations.

Meanwhile, the WGA West and the WGSU remain at loggerheads over key elements of the union’s first contract. The two sides are stuck on issues like the role of seniority in layoffs and a wage scale for union members.