Here’s a Hollywood question for you: if Tom
Hanks, a superstar with an everyman bent and a reputation for fairness, is
not on your side, do you still have a shot?
That’s the issue confronting the leadership of the Screen
Actors Guild, which is in the middle of a rough week trying to build support
for a coming vote to authorize a strike. Other unions in Hollywood have settled
with the studios that employ them, but the actors, led by Alan Rosenberg,
continue to insist that more be put on their table, particularly in the form of
revenues from films and television programs made for online distribution.
Make that some of the actors. A simmering conflict within the guild over the
wisdom of authorizing a strike against the backdrop of a national recession
boiled over into open rebellion this week. On Monday a legion of A-list actors
spoke out against a strike in a letter, and an emotional, crowded town-hall
meeting with New York members ended in public acrimony.
The 120,000-member union has a history of internal strife, but the current
fractiousness would seem to suggest that a vote authorizing a strike is up
against star-studded opposition. (The vote is scheduled for a three-week period
beginning on Jan. 2.) Of those who vote, 75 percent must approve the
authorization for it to pass.
Monday’s letter, organized in part by the actress Rhea
Perlman and the actor Richard
Masur, a former president of the guild, was signed by 130 of the bigger
names in the business. It said, in part, “We support our union and we support
the issues we’re fighting for, but we do not believe in all good conscience that
now is the time to be putting people out of work.” Beneath that was what might
have been the cast list for a tentpole blockbuster: George
Clooney, Glenn
Close, Cameron
Diaz, Charlize
Theron, Matt
Damon, Morgan
Freeman and Mr. Hanks.
Other high-profile actors, including Mel
Gibson, Holly
Hunter, Martin
Sheen and Sandra
Oh, have sided with the union, principally over the issue of residuals for
new-media productions, but in Hollywood Mr. Hanks is formidable opposition
indeed. His nice-guy reputation in and out of the industry makes it difficult
for his opponents to say they are on the side of the angels.
“Tom believes that he has been very blessed and cares a great deal about
working actors who have not been so lucky, but he doesn’t think this is the time
to talk about a strike,” said a friend of Mr. Hanks, a well-known producer who
asked that his name not be published because he did not want to be seen as
speaking on Mr. Hanks’s behalf or as putting himself in the middle of the
actors’ fight.
Meanwhile, the public is left to scratch its head and wonder what’s actually
going on (besides the mildly intriguing spectacle of movie stars fighting with
one another).
“Many of the members would clearly like to accept the contract that is on the
table and come back in three years when they aren’t confronting a historic
recession,” said Jonathan Handel, a labor lawyer who has done work on the side
that supports an authorization to strike.
Of all the unions in the entertainment business, the actors’ guild is the
only one remaining that has not reached terms with the studios. The union’s
president, Mr. Rosenberg, continues to argue that it has to set a precedent on
revenues from programming developed for the Internet before the entire business
pivots onto the Web and leaves actors out in the cold.
The Screen Actors Guild has been engaged in full-fledged civil war before. It
is organized in a manner that almost ensures chaos, with regional boards and
national boards and dozens of committees all pulling on opposite ends of almost
every major issue. Unlike most other unions, SAG has members who range from
waiters and baristas whose acting credentials could fit on a napkin, to Will
Smith and Angelina
Jolie. And having a membership that makes a living being dramatic doesn’t
help ease tensions when it is time to settle conflicts.
But the issues in the current fight are much more critical than they have
ever been. Many of the smartest people in Hollywood say a strike will split the
union in half, with the tiny sliver of the guild that works splintering off from
the big chunk that would seem to have nothing better to do than strike.
The Screen Actors Guild is already losing ground to the American
Federation of Television and Radio Artists, a smaller union of small-screen
performers that cut a deal with studios last spring. NBC’s
decision last week to give Jay
Leno a prime-time slot means that there will be an additional five nights of
Aftra-controlled variety programming on NBC each week instead of SAG-staffed
shows that are scripted.
Beyond that, the studios, preparing to start pilot season early next year
(which is when SAG would strike), have set up more network projects under Aftra
contracts than under SAG contracts, partly as a defensive measure.
Over the years the disparity between the upper echelons of the union (the
glittering names on the petition) and the vast majority (about 90 percent of
SAG’s members make less than $28,000 a year from acting work) has grown. Not
only are the A-list names hauling home money by the wheelbarrow, they also have
increasingly become their own production companies, with more in common with
studios than with the bit actor who works occasionally.
Studios are happily stoking the blaze by focusing on what appear to be
increasingly erratic statements from Mr. Rosenberg. This week the Alliance of
Motion Picture and Television Producers, the organization that negotiates on
behalf of the studios, took out ads in the Hollywood trade publications under
the headline, “Seriously??? Alan Rosenberg’s Rhetoric Versus the Facts.”
In an interview, Mr. Rosenberg responded: “I’m certainly not crazy. I think
anybody who hears me talk in these meetings will find that I’m quite rational.
There is something in me that once I’m in a fight, and once I know I’m on the
right side, I can’t give it up.”
More ominously, though, the digital entertainment business, which was once
thought to be a life raft for declining studios, is losing air. At a business
conference last week, Jeff
Zucker, the president and chief executive of NBC
Universal, said, “The most surprising thing to us is how fast the digital
marketplace has come to a standstill in the fourth quarter.” That does not leave
a lot of cover for Mr. Rosenberg and his associates in their insistence that
studios are rolling in new-media cash.
“I really don’t know what will happen with the vote,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “It
will be close.”
During the writers’ strike last year, Hollywood learned well that the public
will find a way to entertain itself regardless of what work is being
accomplished in Los Angeles. The actors’ union and the studios may be at each
other’s throats, but once the contract is settled, the real fight begins:
maintaining an audience, no matter what screen it appears
on.