Actors and Moguls Quit Talks

If the writers strike made for a long winter of Hollywood discontent, the malaise has now officially spread to springtime, and perhaps beyond.

Day's end in the sluggish and largely secret negotiations between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (A.M.P.T.P.) and The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) brought dueling announcements that the talks were kaput for now.

Though another negotiating window has been offered by the studios beginning May 28, this breakdown set the stage for the A.M.P.T.P. to open negotiations on Wednesday with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Aftra).

Beneath those simple equations and unlovely acronyms lies, of course, a heap of troubles to come. The A.M.P.T.P.'s statement might be summed up in the first two sentences of its second paragraph:

"Over the course of 18 days of negotiations, both parties made compromises and concessions. Unfortunately, SAG's negotiators continued to insist on some of the Guild's most unreasonable demands in both traditional and new media areas."

Mentioning the Alliance's successful resolutions with the Writers Guild of America (W.G.A.), The Directors Guild (D.G.A.) and the section of Aftra known as Network Code (basically, daytime programming), the statement added:

"...we hope that these three weeks of work have helped lay the groundwork for an agreement hat can eventually be reached prior to the June 30, 2008 expiration of the current SAG-AMPTP contract."

The SAG statement emphasized its willingness to keep talks going — not without a nod to one important territory the union is fixated on, new media. It quotes SAG President Alan Rosenberg saying:

"It is unfortunate and deeply troubling that the A.M.P.T.P. would suspend our negotiations at this critical juncture. We have modified our proposals over the last three weeks in effort to bargain a fair contract for our members. We are committed to preserving rights that have been in place for decades and not giving the studios the right to use excerpts of our work in new media without our consent and negotiation."

One supposed sticking point in the negotiations is the producers' wish to use short film clips (generally defined as under 10 minutes in length) without obtaining actors' consent or offering payments. This would seem to be a non-starter for a group for whom guarding one's image is paramount.

A failure to find agreement by the existing SAG contract's June 30 deadline, could mean bad news for the TV and movie industries; there will be a very large pothole on the television side within a couple months, and on the feature film side (fortunately, and due to the nature and foresight of that business in keeping the movie pipelines filled well in advance) sometime in mid to late 2009.

And that foreseeable if hardly inevitable dearth of entertainment product may not be the ugliest part. Aftra may strike a deal with the major studios and then start to pillage some of SAG's territory.

Traditionally the smaller Aftra has had control over videotaped shows, SAG over filmed ones, but the current impasse could mean some shows that have been SAG signatories but might be brought over to the Aftra roster.

The agonizing obduracy of the talks thus far — a process which entertainment attorney and former Writers Guild associate counsel Jonathan Handel likens to the evacuation of Dunkirk — is different from the bitter sideshow of the writers strike in several ways.

One crucial difference, he notes, is that the WGA had the solidarity and prospective clout of the 120,000-strong SAG union waiting, as actors will do, in the wings. Given the writers' settlement of earlier this year, which provided that they would not be striking in sympathy with SAG, the actors lack the muscle a coalition brings.

(The DGA, which settled sooner than the writers but provided a workable template for their agreement, has seldom shown the feistiness of their writing and acting comrades.)

Further, the solidarity created by some of the producers' early threats to demand a rollback of certain concessions to the writers that had already been in place from previous battles immediately generated a fierce and lasting solidarity among the WGA rank and file.

Even the protracted strike — which hurt many writers and a wide range of production-dependent workers deeply in the pocketbook — never quite broke that bond, nor did it pry the all-important and powerful show runners out of their comradeship with the humbler writers.

A.M.P.T.P.'s chief negotiator, Nick Counter, seemingly never could shrug off his role as the villain in that scenario, and ultimately the writers strike had to be settled via an end run in which Fox C.E.O. Peter Chernin and Disney chief executive Bob Iger got in the room with the W.G.A.'s West coast president, Patric Verrone; firebrand David Young; and the diplomatic John Bowman to hammer out an accord.

Another complicating factor is the overlap between SAG's massive membership and Aftra's; about 44,000 people belong to both unions. Those highly employable types could be in an uncomfortable position of choosing loyalties — and avoiding breaches of contracts — if Aftra settles and SAG does not.

Adding more hurt to the emotional blowback of a damaging labor dispute is the class war within SAG. Carried out partly in the media and in the comments sections of various actor-centric blogs, this is a rift that could widen as what's generally called the rank and file (but seen by one wag as "120,000 waitresses") is happy to see a strike since it has little to lose anyway.

Then the actors making north of $10 million will be forced to contemplate just how many paydays they want to skip in what can often be a short window of peak bankability.

A strike authorization vote, which SAG leaders (Rosenberg and Doug Allen) may soon be motivated to call for, would naturally give them added clout to bring to renewed talks. But given what's being call a de facto features strike, the key pressure is on the moguls to tend to the late 2009 slates.

One well-placed agent told me today that he's aware of optimistic conversations about features that could jump of in late summer after a presumed strike settlement. In fact, as outlined in today's Hollywood Reporter, there is an upside for both small-scale indie productions and even tentpole-scale films.

But depending on the Aftra negotiations, which stand a good chance of making the SAG-A.M.P.T.P. conversation all the more bitter, mainstream Hollywood faces a potential long walk through a feature production wilderness.

Photograph of SAG President Alan Rosenberg, center, with wife Marg Helgenberger and her C.S.I. co-star William Petersen at the SAG Awards in January by Kevin Winter/Getty Images