If Mrs. Kotter Doesn't Want An Actors' Strike, Who Can Argue?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 15, 2008 at 6:13 PM - 1 Comment

Shallow and superficial I may be, but when a bunch of prominent Hollywood actors signed a petition opposing the authorization of a Screen Actors’ Guild Strike, the thing I was most interested in was not their arguments why a strike would be a bad idea at this point in time, but which actors signed the letter.

Some of the bigger names on the list have already turned up in news stories about actors who are urging a “no” vote on a strike authorization: George Clooney, Steve Carell, Tom Hanks, Glenn Close, Alec Baldwin. But it’s fun to look at which names turn up on the list and in which combinations. Alan Alda and Mike Farrell are on the list — but not Wayne Rogers! Donald Sutherland, but not Kiefer! You’ve even got your married couples who both affixed their names, like Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. And then there are the people who used to be kind of famous, like Heather Graham, star of the tremendous hit Emily’s Reasons Why Not, and, as the subject says, Marcia Strassman of Welcome Back Kotter. But I didn’t see a single Sweathog’s name on that petition.

Being ignorant about such things, I wonder exactly how these names get there — do they just send it around to anybody who’s interested and might be famous enough to sway a rank-and-file SAG member, or is there a method to which names wind up on the document? Well, whatever the process, any document signed by Helen Mirren and Marilu Henner must be treated with a certain respect.

It's Not Cricket To Picket, Not Cricket

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 10, 2008 at 11:36 AM - 1 Comment

According to Nikki Finke, the Screen Actors’ Guild strike authorization vote will take place in January (75% required to pass) and the results will be in on January 23.

Again, if the actors vote to authorize a strike, that doesn’t mean there will be a strike immediately, just that the union’s leaders will have the power to call a strike if they want to. This means that if a strike does happen, it’ll probably be some time after the end of January — since negotiations will have to break down completely before that can happen. This suggests the possibility of a weird sort of stalling process; if the producers don’t think SAG’s demands are acceptable, it’s still in their interest to draw out negotiations as long as possible so they can get as much material in the can as possible. An actors’ strike is more immediately damaging than a writers’ strike, because there’s no possibility of continuing production after the strike begins (so if the actors go on strike in, say, March, shows can still write the scripts for the rest of the season, but a fat lot of good it’ll do them), but it won’t be quite as damaging if TV shows have a chance to complete their season orders before it happens, so I could see a scenario where you get a lot of false starts and stops to the negotiations, until they finally break down in April or something.

The most disruptive actors’ strike in recent memory was the 1980 strike, which started after the end of the TV season but ran into the fall, delaying the beginning of the TV season and causing every show to end up with smaller-than-usual episode orders. That strike was about, you guessed it, new media — the actors demanded a cut of the proceeds from commercial videotapes and pay TV re-broadcasts.Of course that strike was easier to sustain because AFTRA, the other actors’ union, was in on it, whereas this time it won’t be.

Of course, if there is an actors’ strike in 2009, the picket lines will be on the whole a lot prettier than the writer pickets of 2008.

Always The First Actor To Get Fired

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 17, 2008 at 11:17 AM - 1 Comment

Does it seem to you that Sydney Tamlia Poitier (his daughter) has become one of the unluckiest actors in TV? She’s been dumped from the revamped Knight Rider in its quest to re-revamp itself. Her last regular role was on Veronica Mars, where she was added to the cast after the pilot and then removed from the cast almost immediately. Before that, she had a recurring role on Joan of Arcadia in the first season, but did not appear in the second and final season. (Before that, she had her own sitcom on UPN, which was canceled after only 10 episodes, too soon for them to fire her and replace her with Sandy Duncan or something.)

This says nothing bad about Poitier, except that she has bad luck; when you’re given a superfluous character to play, there’s nothing you can do to make them useful. (Veronica Mars didn’t need a regular teacher character — Keith Mars was the only sympathetic adult figure it needed on a regular basis — and Knight Rider‘s only shot at survival is to get rid of the counterterrorism stuff and get back to having KITT help out random schmucks like in the ’80s.) But getting signed up as a regular and being dropped after a few episodes must be one of the most painful experiences for a TV actor, second only to playing a part in the pilot that gets re-cast when the series is picked up.

Deals, Deals, Deals

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 2:25 PM - 0 Comments

Some entertainment-related labour news:

1. The Writers’ Guild of Canada will vote on July 17 on whether to extend its contract through 2009.

2. In “Will there be an actors’ strike?” news, AFTRA (the other Hollywood actors’ union) voted to accept an agreement similar to the WGA and DGA deals. The Screen Actors’ Guild lobbied hard to convince AFTRA members to vote down the deal, but they succeeded only in ensuring that the vote passed by a a relatively low margin. This leaves SAG in a bad position, not only because AFTRA won’t be negotiating jointly with them, but because in the all-important PR war, this gives the studios the ability to make SAG look unreasonable for not wanting a deal that was already accepted by others. (The lobbying wasn’t completely for nothing, though, since the studios would have had even more leverage if AFTRA had approved the deal overwhelmingly. SAG can at least point to the fact that AFTRA’s acceptance was rather weak.) that with the current situation, SAG will probably have to accept something similar to AFTRA’s, with maybe a bone thrown to them by the studios to soothe their pride. It’s not a very good situation, since it creates the potential for a lot of hostility and resentment all around.

AFTRA is to SAG as DGA is to WGA, IMHO

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 4:39 PM - 0 Comments

The studios have come to a deal with AFTRA, the “other” actors’ union (the less powerful one) for the terms of a three-year contract. The terms on online content are essentially the same as in the deals the studios made with the directors’ guild and the writers’ guild earlier this year. The studios’ strategy is also familiar: the idea is to break off talks with the more powerful union (WGA, SAG), turn their full attention to a deal with the union that’s more pliable (DGA, AFTRA) and then use that as the basis for a deal with the bigger union. And while a SAG strike has not necessarily been avoided, this deal certainly seems to make it less likely.

The thing about all this, of course, is that the terms of any deal on online content would pretty much be the same in any case, or at least very similar. (Things that AFTRA didn’t get are things that nobody’s likely to get this time around, like an increase in residuals for home video; it’s not that that issue is “off the table,” it’s just on the list of issues that the unions are willing to put aside for now to get the online stuff.) You have to wonder, as with a lot of negotiations, if the studios’ strategy is less about the actual terms and more about appearances: it just looks better if they’re the ones handing a deal to WGA/SAG, rather than being seen to accept a deal. It’s a cynical way to look at it, I know, but appearances mean a lot, especially in Hollywood.

For less cynical and motive-based analysis, Mark Evanier explains what this deal does and does not mean.

Yowp

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 11:00 PM - 0 Comments

The current talks between the studios and the Screen Actors’ Guild have broken off without a deal. The SAG contract doesn’t expire until June 30, so this doesn’t mean there will be a strike; as someone says in the article, two months is a long time in negotiation-land. It means, for now, that warning clouds are on the horizon, a storm’s a-brewin’, and any other meteorological cliché I’ve left out.

I’m not going to try and predict if there will be another strike or not — I have my doubts, if only because the studios’ “make a deal with a smaller union” strategy worked during the writers’ strike (the deal with the directors was in large measure what the WGA might have accepted before the strike), and they’re planning to try it again with the the other actors’ union, AFTRA. Also, the studios really did seem to be acting like they wanted a strike back in November, if only to teach the unions a lesson and get an excuse to re-structure; I don’t get the same impression now, though I may be wrong. But we can all predict that the next month or so is going to be pretty tense.