DOWN TO THE WIRE ON DIRECTORS’ DRAMA

It had promised to be a new exciting docudrama, produced in Los Angeles and coming soon to a location near you.

It boasted a budget of $2 million--modest for a major Hollywood project employing exclusively union talent. It had a star-studded cast, passion and drama, finance and politics, and the possibility of infinite sequels and spin-off products from T-shirts to sun visors. In a creative and unusual move, the power behind this project decided not to use any producers at all--but it had about 4,600 directors.

The working title: “DGA on Strike.”

Now, it looks as if the show may not go on. Negotiators for the Directors Guild of America went to their rank-and-file late Wednesday with an agreement designed to avert the union’s first walkout in 51 years.

Until then, however, preparations for “DGA on Strike” continued, and the directors readied themselves for a spectacular Hollywood strike.

As one guild member promised: A directors’ strike would be an event “unlike this town has ever seen before.”

Even the guild’s thick, green, soft-covered manuals--filled with computer-generated planning sheets and maps to be distributed to strike-team captains--look a little like shooting scripts with “DGA on Strike” emblazoned on the covers.

“We’re getting very organized, and we hope to strike with the same precision scalpel with which we work, the detail with which we prepare a major motion picture,” said Chase Newhart, one of the strike force’s designated picket captains. “We have every studio in town thoroughly mapped; we plan to picket every entrance and every truck gate. We’re arranging a strike in the classical sense--that is, a work stoppage.”

Robert Butler, a free-lance director and chairman of the union’s strike services committee, said film directors are ideally suited to organizing the ideal strike. “Normally we call this period pre-production, and it has to do with photography,” he said. “Now we’re calling it something else, and it has to do with a strike.

“This is very much like producing a motion picture, and that’s what we do for a living. What we do best is organize and execute this precise sort of thing.”

Although the guild prepared for possible walkouts during contract negotiations in 1981 and 1984, strike coordinator Marcel Giacusa said the current preparations far exceed anything done in the past. “The membership is really pumped up for this,” he said. “Management is under the impression this is not a cohesive union, but it is.”

The guild has set aside a strike fund of $2 million, to cover the costs of producing the strike and to provide financial help to needy members in the event of a long walkout.

The strike services committee is made up of 30 to 40 co-chairpersons and has eight or nine subcommittees, Butler said. Each co-chairperson is charged with such duties as computer communications, telecommunications, first aid (80 union members have been trained in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) and concession management.

The guild has already sold several thousand dollars worth of “DGA on Strike” paraphernalia mostly to its own members, including fluorescent bumper stickers advertising the support of fellow unions, caps and visors, and T-shirts (available in red, white or blue) featuring the guild’s flying eagle logo.

The group plans to have plenty of these souvenirs available for sale at strike sites.

Color-coded picketing teams (red, blue, yellow, green and tan) will be culled from the 4,600 guild members who live in Southern California. Group leaders plan two types of picketing: “blanket,” two members or so at each entrance to a site, and “mass,” a show of force involving many pickets, chanting and other peaceful efforts to encourage others not to cross picket lines.

And picketing groups will not be random gatherings of ragtag protesters with hand-lettered signs, said Giacusa while strolling through what he called the union’s “war room”--a trailer with 20 telephones parked behind guild headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. Picket signs have been printed, and “some of our ‘picket captains’ were carefully cast; we chose some of our most visible members,” Giacusa said.

(Some notable captains: Kate Jackson, Debbie Allen, Howard Morris and Dan Petrie.)

The guild set the scene for a high-visibility strike Saturday by labeling an organizational meeting at union headquarters as a “photo opportunity” in a news release.

Prominent guild members and supporters, including Patty Duke, Milton Berle and Paul Mazursky, milled the lobby and made themselves available to photographers and news crews.

One group leader was overheard giving his own crew a pep talk: “Captains, we’ve got to keep pressure on the producers. Keep morale high; keep it congenial. Follow the rules. Follow the law. Conduct this action in a businesslike manner.”

Are there possibly a few too many directors involved in this well-directed strike? Butler believes that guild members can learn to curb their natural urge to take charge when the script calls for restraint.

“We’re loaded with chiefs,” he said, laughing. “But we’re learning to be Indians as well.”

Times Staff Writer Michael Cieply contributed to this report