The Strike Worked
TKONKLE
Not worthy humans huh?
Insignificant and replacable pee ons you think?
Wrong.
The impact of the commercial actors strike is being felt by more than the
strikers -- and this walkout may be a dress rehearsal for two more disputes.
By AMY BARRETT
REALITY TV
When Ann Carlton Bose used to catch commercials, she saw . . .commercials. Now
she sees trouble. The owner of the L.A.-based Estate Funding Inc. gets about a
third of her revenues, some $10 million last year, from entertainment clients.
"When the
entertainment guys are insecure about their future, they don't buy houses," she
says. What's making them insecure -- and what has pushed Hollywood studios to
accelerate film production lately -- is the strike that began on May 1 by
commercial actors in the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of
Television and Radio Artists. The actors are protesting advertisers' plans to
replace their pay-per-play royalties with a flat quarterly fee, which they say
neither rewards them for a
successful commercial nor compensates them for any typecasting aftereffects.
SAG also says that the new plan would cut actors' pay an average of 5 percent,
thereby reducing the number of actors eligible for health care coverage. The
advertisers counter that the union's bottom half, earnings-wise, would actually
make 30 percent more. They claim the current payment system is outdated because
the
proliferation of cable channels now requires that commercials air more
frequently to reach as many viewers as before.
Both sides are meeting this week in New York (for only the third time since
May), but they're not the only ones with a strong rooting interest in the
outcome. The Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild both have contracts with
the studios that
expire in the first half of next year, and the focus of the renegotiations is
likely to seem familiar -- how to pay the talent in a world of cable, Internet
and overseas outlets. Those actors and writers and all their many dependents
can't be comforted
by what they've seen this summer. Commercial producers and advertisers have
circumvented SAG and its requirements with nonunion hires and by finding actors
and support personnel abroad -- especially in Canada. (Sometimes the talent is
exported: Tiger Woods, a SAG member thanks to all his commercial work, earned
the union's ire when he went to Toronto in July to shoot a Buick commercial.)
Commercial production days in the U.S. fell to 215 in August, compared with 549
last year, according to Entertainment Industry Development Corp. Because
avertisers spend at least $150,000 a day to produce commercials, some $50
million may have already left the country. A broader film and television strike
would be
crippling to many, to judge from the financial toll the commercial strike has
inflicted on hairdressers, film developers, equipment renters and others.
WHERE IT REALLY HURTS
Los Angeles is losing around $1 million a day during the strike (at least $90
million to date), according to Entertainment Industry Development. That figure
accounts only for actors' salaries and certain production costs, leaving out
such hard-to-count post-production expenditures as film developing and special
effects. New York is probably losing more than $500,000 a day. (Between them,
Los Angeles and New York own 90 percent of the commercial production market,
but New York's share is half that of Los Angeles's, where an estimated 6.6
percent of the county's work force is in the entertainment industry.) Here are
the sorts of businesses affected:
* Talent agencies. At Cunningham Escott Dipene, which
represents commercial actors, revenues have dropped 40
percent since the strike began. Agents once making $80,000 a
year, for example, now make $64,000. On the whole, agents
have lost around $20 million, according to the Association of
Talent Agents.
* Recording studios. Managers at World Wide Wadio, a radio
production company in Los Angeles, have taken 20 percent pay
cuts. "I've talked to people at 30 other recording studios around
the country," says Wadio's senior vice president, Stewart Sloke,
"and everyone is suffering."
* Post-production facilities. One New York company, with annual
revenues around $22 million, says its business was off 18
percent in July, compared with July last year.
* Commercial editing companies. Business is down 25 percent. If
the strike goes on, "we will all have to be very clever and find
alternate sources of business," says Jeanne Bonansinga, president of
the National Association of Independent Creative Editors.
* Props suppliers. The television commercial business at Props
for Today, one of the largest props businesses outside of
California, is down at least 15 percent.
* Film processing. Technicolor East Coast's commercial footage
business is down 60 percent from prestrike levels.
* Equipment renters. Panavision New York, which rents cameras,
has seen its business fall 30 percent.