Screen Antagonists' Guild

As the film industry's key talent groups--the Directors, Writers and Screen Actors guilds--marshal their forces against the producers and studios for a tough fall negotiating season that may usher in a strike, the personalities are assembling in the arena. (Meanwhile, somewhat behind the scenes, producers, networks and studios are stockpiling scripts and green lighting projects at an avid pace to churn out product, with a March start necessary for the bigger film projects to get made before a potential June strike or lockout. I recently had a production manager tell me that any below the line workers who don't have a gig now are really not trying hard enough.)

No part of the playing field is more fun to watch than the leadership struggle within the wide swath the actors occupy, as the Los Angeles Times' Richard Verrier makes clear in his piece of today, "Bare-Knuckle Battle In SAG". It sets the stage for the Guild's election on September 20, as veteran Seymour Cassell (visited on the set of his 146th film), with a reputation for feistiness that can turn threatening, is running for the Guild presidency against the also-uncuddly Alan Rosenberg, who clashed publicly and loudly with his predecessor as Guild president, Melissa Gilbert.

A Passaic, New Jersey product who was once billed in the SAG magazine by his college nickname of "Street Fighting Man", Rosenberg has leveraged power by positioning himself as the friend to the middle ranks of SAG's 120,000 members, most of whom would starve on what they can make as actors. Even the working ones suffer, he's said, from "Salary compression...just like in the rest of America, like other businesses, our middle class is dying.''

Rosenberg, perhaps most familiar as Eli Levinson on L.A. Law over a decade ago, was the push rod for a crucial up tick for actors who supply voice-overs from behind the scenes in shows like Spongebob Squarepants. The concessions made in March of last year make for an X-ray of how actors pay the rent:

The new residuals formula for shows made directly for basic cable would jump from 12 percent to 17 percent of a voice performer's minimum, which is currently $716 for a four-hour session.
The residual pay would go down to 1.5 percent of that minimum for the 13th airing and each airing after that, but the payout could be considerable for performers since episodes of the more popular animated programs on basic cable can run 100 times or more in a single year.

A sidelight covered by Verrier is the dueling busts--Rosenberg's for pot possession in 1991 (a two-year suspended sentence) and Cassell's much more serious coke charge in 1981--a six-month sentence for intending to distribute. Though it's no joke--Cassell says he's been sober for 20 years--back in 1981, a lot of Hollywood people thought holding extra bindles of coke was show business code for "good in a room."

Rosenberg, 56, praised Cassell, 72, with faint damns this way:

I admire Seymour as an actor and I think he's sincere...but having him be president would be like having Billy Carter run the guild instead of Jimmy Carter. He's not a team player. He's a loose cannon.

Cassell grumbles back: "He's a politician and I'm not. I don't take a lot of bull."

It's going to be a bumpy ride.