What does the WGA strike mean for SAG?

It’s been touching to see all of those pretty actors on the picket lines showing face and muttering the word “solidarity” out of the kindness of their hearts, but the truth is they too have a lot at stake. You see, whatever the writers get in their negotiation with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers will set the precedent for what the actors and directors guilds will expect the AMPTP to pony up for their own contracts next June.

So, at this stage, what is it that the actors want? Even though home
video royalties have been at the forefront of the negotiating table for
more than 20 years — a battle the studios always seem to win — perhaps
the WGA’s move to take the DVD issue off the negotiating table Nov. 4
is a sign that all of the guilds have bigger fish to fry: the
inexhaustible power of Internet distribution. (Currently, writers and
directors get about 4 cents per DVD sale to an actors’ 12 cents, and
none of the talent gets anything for streaming video.)

Delineating who gets paid for what
is not an easy task. It’s been said that some creatives have
independent deals with the studios, but nobody’s revealing the
going-rate — for competitive reasons, of course.

To get a feel for what the concerns are, Hollywood Insider recently
sat down with a few actors, who also happen to be New York-based Screen
Actor’s Guild officials, for a casual lunch to “unofficially” talk
about their concerns. “In a sense, the WGA is negotiating for all of us
right now because they’re setting the temperature and tenor,” says Sam
Freed, who has a role in American Gangster and is the current
SAG-NY president. “And again, this is speculation: a lot of the things
the WGA is going after are the Guild’s concerns. The critical issue is
new media.” So if writers were to, hypothetically, get 1.2 percent of
Internet streaming revenue, by golly, actors are not going to ask for
less.

With rising production costs, the prospect of doling out more money
to talent does not make for a happy studio exec. If they had it their
way, they’d probably be in favor of emblazoning Mount Lee’s Hollywood
sign with the late Lew Wasserman’s motto: “My plumber doesn’t charge me
every time I flush the toilet.” In truth, today’s execs have
Wasserman’s generation to thank for the advent of the residuals model.
According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications,
the idea of royalties goes back to the early days of live radio when
performers had to put on a show twice a day, once for the East coast,
and again for the West coast. As recording technology evolved in the
’50s and ’60s, so did artists’ fears that they wouldn’t be able to put
food on the table without pay from that second act.

What the SAG folks are worried about in 2007 is that the corporate
heavy-hitters running the show today are more out of touch than
Wasserman was and think talent is dispensable. “There’s the reality
that you’re not talking with Warner Bros at the table, you’re talking
with General Electric [or] Viacom,” says Freed. “Those are the people
who are ultimately making the decisions. And when they’re looking at
their large books, they can take a little hit from the strike.”

The last time SAG had a theatrical walkout was a three-month strike
in 1980 over Pay-TV and those clunky rectangular boxes called video
cassette tapes. (There was also a commercials actors strike in 2000
that lasted six months.) Because writers, directors, and actors haven’t
gotten any hikes on DVD residuals since the model was implemented in
1985, they’re hell-bent on not getting burned again. “The landscape has
changed,” says former SAG-NY prez Paul Christie, who still serves on
the guild’s board. “You’re going to have to change [so] why not now?
Eventually you’re going to have to work this out.”

With the industry on lockdown, and no scheduled talks between the
WGA and AMPTP, Hollywood’s year-long forecast looks bleak. “There are
some people on the other side who are chomping at the bit to take us
out because they’re annoyed that they have to pay us at all,” explains
Freed. “In the same way, there are more aggressive folks on our side of
the table. What you don’t want to do is have those people driving the
argument.”

Given that the only thing all sides can agree on is a bigger cut
than they’re getting now, the entire business could be on the picket
line come next June (though the directors have only struck once in
their history — for a whopping three hours and five minutes back in
1987). “I don’t think there’s any sane actor in the country that wants
to go on strike,” says Christie. But it’s a potential scenario that
even writer-director-actor David Duchovny (pictured with Robin Williams) half-joked about last week
while picketing in front of New York’s Time Warner Center: “The guilds
are interrelated. If the actors and directors strike, I’ll be picketing
12 hours a day. Triple duty.”

Additional reporting by Missy Schwartz.