Bare-knuckle battle in SAG

He’s played hustlers, gangsters, an aging hippie and a deaf mute.

Now, Seymour Cassel is auditioning for what could be his toughest role yet: president of Hollywood’s most powerful union, the Screen Actors Guild.

A character actor whose career was nearly derailed more than two decades ago by a little-known stint in federal prison, Cassel has launched an unexpectedly strong challenge to incumbent Alan Rosenberg leading up to the Sept. 20 election. Drawing upon his years in the business, the 72-year-old actor has enlisted the support of such stars as Nicolas Cage, Ethan Hawke, James Caan and Dennis Hopper.

The street-smart actor, his supporters say, is just the kind of blunt-spoken leader the union needs as it confronts Hollywood studios in bare-knuckle negotiations to renew a contract that expires next year. The studios already have accelerated production of movies and television shows as a safeguard against a potential strike by the nearly 120,000-member union.

Yet critics say Cassel’s firebrand style could be a liability. Opponents say that during Cassel’s six years as a SAG board member he has had a history of disruptive conduct, making him unsuitable for a job once held by the likes of James Cagney and Ronald Reagan.

“I found his behavior very troubling and erratic,” said former SAG board member David Berman, an actor on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” “He was one of the reasons I chose not to run again.”

But if Cassel has a short fuse, he didn’t show it during a recent interview.

“I’m running because most people know me and have seen me for 40-plus years,” he said, puffing on a cigar in his trailer outside a Burbank soundstage, where he was shooting his 146th movie, “Alvin W.”

He admitted to having some rough edges, referring to himself in the third person: “This guy speaks his mind. He may not have all the finesse that somebody else does, but it comes from the heart.”

As for his six-month prison sentence in 1981 for possessing and intending to distribute cocaine, Cassel said flatly, “It was stupid. It’s irrelevant now. I’ve been sober for 20 years.”

Cassel was once one of Rosenberg’s biggest supporters. But in the topsy-turvy world of SAG politics the two are now archenemies, reflecting a schism within the faction that swept control of the union two years ago on a platform of getting tough with the studios.

Yet the two are separated more by style than substance. Both vow in upcoming talks to secure fair compensation for work that is distributed via the Internet and to protect the decades-old residual payment system that studio executives want to overhaul. Each says he’s prepared to take the union on strike if necessary.

While Cassel and Rosenberg are considered front-runners, two others are also running for the post: background actor Barry Simmonds and Charley M. De La Pena, who is active on the guild’s disabilities committee.

Rosenberg, whose backers include Ed Asner, Meryl Streep and Tim Allen, touts his track record negotiating increases in cable TV pay and improving relations between Hollywood and the union’s regional branches.

Rosenberg’s supporters credit him for guiding the union through two of its most turbulent years. “He has the intelligence and courage to captain us through the next two years,” Asner said.

Rosenberg says Cassel is too explosive for the job.

“I admire Seymour as an actor and I think he’s sincere,” said Rosenberg, 56, whose credits include “The Guardian” and “L.A. Law.” “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.”

Countered Cassel: “Alan is a politician and I’m not. I don’t take a lot of bull.”

Such bravado comes from having to fend for himself on the streets of New York and Detroit, where he was the only child of a mother who was a traveling dancer and a father he never knew.

Cassel was waiting tables in New York when he spotted an ad for a scholarship to study acting with the late John Cassavetes. He didn’t get the scholarship, but he did land a part in and helped produce Cassavetes’ 1959 film, “Shadows.”

The two would work together on a string of independent films, including “Faces,” for which Cassel was nominated for an Academy Award for his supporting role in 1968. Cassel would go on to become one of the most prolific film and TV actors in the business, appearing in scores of TV shows and movies, from “Convoy” to “Rushmore.”

But his off-screen life took a turbulent turn in June 1981 when he was sentenced to six months in prison for the drug charge, court records show.

Several years later, Cassel tested positive for illegal narcotics, violating the terms of his probation. He subsequently completed treatment and counseling for his addiction and “began to put his life back together,” according to a court memo.

Rosenberg said he didn’t think Cassel’s criminal past was relevant and disclosed in an interview his own brush with the law in 1991, when he received a two-year suspended sentence for possessing marijuana.

“We all have skeletons in our closet,” he said. “He paid his price and he served his time.”

A SAG member since 1959, Cassel was elected to the board in 2001, as a high-profile backer of former SAG President Bill Daniels, who led the union through a six-month strike over the commercials contract in 2000.

Daniels says Cassel’s connections and his toughness would prove key assets at the bargaining table.

“Seymour is who we need as president,” he said. “We’ve been living for six years now in the valley of the meek.”

Cassel is anything but meek.

He acknowledged once trading blows with John Connolly, the former president of the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, during heated discussions about a proposed consolidation of the two unions. Actress Morgan Fairchild (“Falcon Crest” ) helped break up the fight. Cassel blamed Connolly for starting the altercation. Connolly could not be reached for comment.

Then there was the run-in with former “Little House on the Prairie” star Melissa Gilbert.

The former SAG president, who had repeatedly sparred with Cassel and other Hollywood division board members, said he once confronted her in a hotel lobby after a meeting in which the board decided to fire then-Executive Director Greg Hessinger. “He looked at me straight in the eyes and said, ‘You’re a very bad lady and if I was 10 years younger I’d slap you in the face,’ ” according to Gilbert.

Cassel said Gilbert had been publicly abusive toward him at an earlier meeting and his remarks were taken out of context. “People say a lot of things they don’t mean,” he said.

“I didn’t slap her and I wouldn’t have because she’s a woman,” he said. “I’m not the kind of guy who goes up and whacks some guy. I did that when I was 14.”

Cassel’s supporters say Rosenberg can also be volatile. They cited an incident earlier this year when Rosenberg cursed at Daniels’ wife, Bonnie Bartlett, at Du-Par’s Restaurant during a meeting of select SAG members. “He burst out at me like a mad dog,” said Bartlett, who won two Emmy awards for her role as Ellen Craig on the TV series “St. Elsewhere.”

Rosenberg said he became angry because Bartlett questioned why his campaign manager, Anne-Marie Johnson, had joined him at the meeting. Johnson herself has tangled with Cassel. The star of TV’s “In the Heat of the Night” said Cassel charged at her last year during negotiations on a new cable TV contract. She said she accused him of violating protocol by remaining in a room after a break in the talks and scowling at the producers’ lead negotiator.

“It was like he was treating these negotiations as a street-yard battle,” she said.

Cassel said of Johnson, a former first vice president of the union. “I never charged her. She’s a whiner.”

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richard.verrier@latimes.com