Unions Get Tough : With Confrontational Tactics and a New Attitude, Organized Labor Makes Inroads Into Film and TV

The crew of Cannon Pictures’ “Tipperary” had waited all day for this light, and it was fading fast.

The actors were in place: Kris Kristofferson as Garvey and Drew Barrymore as Tinsel waited for their cues.

At the same time, the Teamsters, massed outside the old McMahan Furniture factory on Alameda Street, where the shoot was taking place, waited for their cues.

Action!

Teamsters organizer Mike Connolly gave the signal and five dozen police whistles bit the still, pink-purple air of Los Angeles at dusk, making it impossible to film.

An hour later, the Teamsters had another contract.

Such is the reality of union organizing in the motion picture and television industry these days, where get-tough union tactics are responsible for keeping much of the production in Southern California under union contracts.

Although precise figures are difficult to pinpoint, union leaders say the number of contract productions versus the number of non-union productions is on the rise--a trend that runs counter to national statistics for organized labor in general.

But to achieve this, the unions have adopted some tactics that they themselves have called “despicable.” The unions fighting the hardest fight are the Teamsters and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees representing the workers known in the industry as “below the liners”--drivers, makeup artists, editors and others who do the dozens of glamour-less jobs that make the stars sparkle. Whereas virtually every major film is made using actors, writers and directors who have strong guilds representing them, producers in the last several years have increasingly attempted to begin production without the Teamsters or the alliance.

Neither the 1989 Oscar-winning best picture, “Driving Miss Daisy,” nor a strong contender for best picture of 1990, “Dances With Wolves,” were shot using alliance crew members.

Armed with tactics like those used on the set of “Tipperary,” the two unions have begun to make some headway.

One example was on the “Twin Peaks” set. The ABC series had begun production in Seattle without any below-the-line union involvement. After a visit by the Teamsters’ Connolly and a few of his key lieutenants, however, the Teamsters were signed on last year.

The alliance didn’t get a contract with the show until November, after threatening to set up picket lines not only at the set but at the network’s offices.

“Those guys can get pretty nasty,” said “Twin Peaks” supervising producer Gregg Fienberg after the contract was signed.

With successful contracts like “Tipperary” and “Twin Peaks,” the two unions are managing to make some headway.

The Teamsters estimate that after two years of get-tough organizing tactics, close to 70% of all film making is done with Teamster members, while the 70,000-member alliance says it has boosted the number of Los Angeles-based union productions from 40% to 50% in the last year. Alliance spokesman Mac St. Johns said that in the last two years, 60 productions were organized that otherwise would have been non-union. And to keep on that track, St. Johns said the alliance in the last month has hired four employees whose full-time jobs will be organizing efforts on non-union productions.

It is no secret that labor unions have been in a serious state of decline across the United States for more than a decade. Company after company has broken its unions and lowered wages and benefits. In Hollywood, the quest has taken on a particular zeal as producers strive to complete films on limited budgets while still paying million-dollar salaries to writers, actors and other celebrities.

In some cases, producers have begun taking entire films underground until shooting is finished. Actors, directors, below-the-liners, even publicists are often spirited out of California--away from the prying eyes of union organizers and supportive labor laws. Or, if a crew remains in the state, they film at locations that are kept secret until hours before the shoot.

Publicists are put under orders to squelch any mention of the film in the trade or mainstream press, and workers are asked to keep the nature and location of the project under wraps.

“One of the ways you save money is to get away from the unions,” said a source on “Little Man Tate,” the Orion film on which Jodie Foster makes her directorial debut. “If they can’t find you, then you can save money.”

That project was shot in Cincinnati without the Teamsters or the alliance. As is the case with most of the “hidden movies,” contracts have been signed with the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America. When shooting started on “Little Man Tate” this summer, publicists at Orion asked a reporter to avoid writing about the film--or mentioning that it was an Orion project--saying that it was a non-union shoot and that they didn’t want the Teamsters and alliance to find out where they were.

But the unions, increasingly, are fighting back. Connolly, the organizer for North Hollywood-based Teamsters Local 399, which represents truck drivers in the entertainment industry, has a computer at his desk that, at the flick of a switch and the press of a button, can tell him almost everything the productions companies don’t want him to know: who their backers are, how big their budget is and where they’re shooting.

He says that, with cooperation from officials at the alliance, he can find just about any production--no matter where it’s hiding.

Connolly’s methods are deceptively simple.

He scans Hollywood trade magazines for any mention of new production and subscribes to industry and craft newsletters. Because members must petition the union for permission to work on non-union shoots, he is able to keep a pretty good tab on productions in Southern California. And when film companies go out of town, the local papers tend to get so excited about having Hollywood crews in the area that their presence generally merits a story. Teamsters and alliance members who live in those cities send clippings, or simply report that they have been asked--or not asked--to work on a particular shoot.

Connolly feeds all of the information into his computer, along with the names of the producers and production companies involved.

He subscribes to Wall Street investment services, such as Dun and Bradstreet, and uses them to check the corporate affiliations of the production companies and the size of their budgets.

“It’s not very difficult to push that button there and find out who’s done what,” Connolly said.

Organizing generally begins with a phone call to the producer.

“I call these guys every month,” Connolly said. “They used to be really surprised to hear from me, but they’re not anymore.”

Using the clipped speech, deep voice and military-style phrasing that he adopts for organizing, Connolly, in that first call, is cordial.

He tells them that he’s heard about the project, that it sounds interesting, and he suggests lunch.

With the Teamsters tough reputation behind him, that call and the subsequent lunch are often enough.

Sometimes they’re not.

“If we meet with resistance, then we have to make a determination as to whether there is going to be a job action,” Connolly said ominously. “We wait until the production company is in the street and they’re vulnerable. And we meet them with our troops.”

Producer Sanford Hampton met the brunt of the Teamsters’ wrath while shooting “Beastmaster II: Through the Portal of Time.”

After a few hours of shouting, whistle-blowing pickets--Connolly claims that his members keep their whistles within legally allowed decibel levels--he signed.

“It cost about $40,000 more to use the Teamsters on the film,” Hampton said. (“Beastmaster II” had a total budget of about $7 million, according to data in Connolly’s computer.)

“It costs about $40,000 a day to shoot, so it was cheaper to make a deal and have these professional drivers on the show than to lose a day of shooting because of their obnoxious shenanigans.”

Producer Frank Mancuso Jr. had a run-in with the Teamsters during the production of “Internal Affairs.”

“They brought air compressors that they ran to obstruct the soundtrack, they shined mirrors into the lens of the camera, they shouted verbal abuse, people were screaming and yelling,” said Mancuso. “It’s not one of the things that has become more sophisticated with time.”

For producers, the biggest reason to avoid union involvement is simple: money.

“It was a question of budget,” said “Tipperary” producer Alan Amiel about his initial decision to shoot the film without the more powerful guilds. “I’m forced to live within the budget.”

Using Teamster drivers can add $40,000 or $50,000 to the cost of a film whose budget is in the $7-million range, and more to the cost of a multimillion-dollar blockbuster, according to producers and union organizers interviewed.

And unions require a certain division of labor that many employers feel is not efficient.

The problem, of course, is that those who attempt to shoot without union crews risk attention such as that foisted on “Tipperary” by the Teamsters.

Hence, the decision to hide.

“In the early days, when I was doing the ‘Friday the 13th’ pictures, we would never call them ‘Friday the 13th’ when we were naming them,” said Mancuso. “We would come up with esoteric names, like the titles of unreleased David Bowie songs.”

The clandestine shooting not only protected the pictures from the unions, it kept the press and public away too.

“It really served to cloak us in a complete way,” Mancuso said. “The movies were creating so much attention.”

Oddly, non-union crews are not always paid less than union crews. In fact, they are sometimes paid a little bit more.

But producers save money because without the contract they don’t have to contribute to the Motion Picture Pension, Health and Welfare Fund, set up by the unions to provide fringe benefits. Under most contracts, producers must pay an additional 12.5% of the workers’ salaries for health insurance and retirement benefits.

Mancuso is disdainful of producers who give in to the unions’ rough tactics, saying that if they have the money to be able to afford the unions, as evidenced by the fact that they agree to sign, then they should have used union workers in the first place.

If the project calls for more professional drivers and has the budget, use the Teamsters, Mancuso said. Otherwise, stick to your guns.

For the filming of “He Said, She Said,” the Kevin Bacon-Elizabeth Perkins film he shot over the summer in Baltimore, Mancuso used both the Teamsters and alliance.

“We’ve been working with Teamsters in Baltimore and they’ve been nothing but dreams,” Mancuso said. “We wouldn’t be able to make the movie we’re making were it not for them.”