By Ryan Nakashima
LOS ANGELES (AP) --The Screen Actors Guild’s negotiating committee voted Wednesday to support a strike authorization vote, a tactic meant to break stalled contract talks with Hollywood studios.
The recommendation, approved 11-2, now goes to the guild’s national board for review, and would ultimately need approval of 75 percent of the some 120,000 voting guild members.
“My personal opinion is, yes, we will achieve a strike authorization,” said Anne Marie Johnson, a spokeswoman for Membership First, a faction of actors that had controlled SAG’s national board until it narrowly lost its majority in elections last month.
“Membership First has always been a strong advocate of having a strike authorization with us while we’re negotiating,” Johnson said. “That’s really a wise way to negotiate.”
Contract talks dealing with prime-time TV shows and movies have been at a standstill since the previous contract expired June 30.
Actors have be en working under the terms of the old deal in hopes of avoiding a repeat of a 100-day writers strike that ended in February. The strike shut down production of dozens of TV shows and cost the Los Angeles area economy an estimated $2.5 billion.
The studios, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, said the economy is in trouble and urged actors not to strike.
“It is unrealistic for SAG negotiators now to expect even better terms during this grim financial climate,” the AMPTP said in a statement. “This is the harsh economic reality, and no strike will change that reality.”
The SAG’s national board, a 71-member body, is scheduled to meet Oct. 18. A simple majority is needed to approve the call for a strike vote.
The guild on Monday called for talks to resume, sending the request in a letter addressed to the alliance, The Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger and News Corp.’s Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin.
The producers’ chief negotiator, J. Nicholas Counter III, said he declined to resume talks because SAG continues to insist on terms the companies have rejected.
The guild wants union coverage of all shows made for the Internet, regardless of budget, and residual payments for actors on made-for-Internet shows that are reused on the Internet. It also demands protections for actors during work stoppages.
The alliance has stuck by a final offer it made June 30, which it said mirrored deals accepted by directors, a smaller actors union called the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and writers following their strike.
The producers have said the proposal is worth $250 million in additional compensation over three years, a figure SAG disputes.
As of Aug. 15, the alliance withdrew an offer to backdate the increases to July 1, and, according to its Web site, actors had lost some $21 million in increases by Wednesday night by not approving th e deal.
Last month, 87 percent of the 10,300 actors who responded to a guild survey backed its leaders’ drive for a better deal. The producers alliance called the survey materials “hopelessly one-sided.”
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More