Learning How to Flex Their Muscles : Labor relations: Production companies will sign with the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild as a matter of course. Thus, the blue collar unions that have less clout have to play tougher.

A Teamster on a motorcycle drew lazy circles with his bike, round and round next to the set of Cannon Pictures’ “Tipperary,” a film starring Kris Kristofferson and Drew Barrymore. Meanwhile other Teamster members were hooting, blowing wolf-whistles and zooming around the street to disrupt the shooting.

The other movie and television unions don’t have to do this, complained Teamster organizer Mike Connolly. Their big-name talent is enough to give them clout when dealing with producers.

Production companies will sign with the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild as a matter of course. But the blue collar unions--the Teamsters and the 70,000-member International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE)--tend to be left out.

But a new get-tough approach among the unions is attempting to change that. So far, the unions say they have had modest success. Teamsters say 70% of all productions are under a Teamster contract, while IATSE reports that Los Angeles-based union productions have risen from 40% to 50% in the last two years.

“You can’t get actors who aren’t SAG, you can’t get writers who aren’t WGA, you can’t get directors who aren’t DGA,” said Gregg Fienberg, supervising producer of the ABC television series, “Twin Peaks.” “But there are a lot of people in this town who would work without the IATSE.”

Disney’s 1989 summer blockbuster, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” for example, was shot in Mexico under the name “The Teenie Weenies.” While the film used SAG actors, and its director was part of the Directors Guild, the company did not hire union drivers or other organized below-the-liners.

“It’s fair to say that the first union contract that any producer will sign is a SAG contract,” said Mark Locher, national director of communications for the actors’ union. “In some cases it is the only union contract they will sign.”

Hiding from unions and disguising studio involvement in a nominally independent feature is “contemptible,” Locher said, but SAG has no plans to refuse to work on films whose producers have not signed with other unions.

“I’m just not sure that there’s any legal way that one union can insist that another union be engaged,” Locher said. “I think if it was allowable and all of the unions could negotiate it into their contracts, there might be an effort to do that.”

The SAG policy has meant that actors who consider themselves staunch unionists often find themselves working side by side with drivers, photographers, and even assistant directors who are either not union members at all, or union members working outside of a collective bargaining agreement.

Sometimes--and this is what the Teamsters and IATSE are banking on--the relationship can prove embarrassing.

Kristofferson, for example, felt compelled to leave the set of Cannon’s “Tipperary” and explain to the picketing, whistle-blowing Teamsters that he didn’t know the crew was non-union.

“I’m a union man,” Kristofferson told them.

“There seem to be more and more productions where they try to take advantage of as many people as they can,” the actor sighed in a sidewalk interview a few moments later. “I had no idea how bad the problem was until I talked to these guys here,” he went on, nodding toward the pickets.

Often, the same people will work for a non-union shoot as for a union shoot. Some clear the work through their unions, and some simply go to work and hope that they’re not found. Union discipline for working on a non-union picture without permission ranges from a reprimand or a fine to expulsion.

Actor Aldo Ray, for example, was expelled from the Screen Actors Guild for appearing in too many non-union movies.

“The cold, hard realities of trying to make a living force a lot of people to do non-union work,” said actor John Stuart Wildman, who was recently disciplined by the Screen Actors Guild for working on a non-union picture. “In my case, I was just starting out and I was pretty ignorant of all the rules.”

Then 21, the Florida native accepted a role in a grade B horror picture called “Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama” produced by the now defunct Empire Pictures.

“I realized after I got my check that something was wrong--I couldn’t have been making so low of an amount,” Wildman said. “It was like a third of what scale was at the time.”

A year after the film was made, SAG found out about it, and Wildman was called in to explain himself.

“I was called into a hearing in front of a panel of Screen Actors Guild members that investigate this kind of thing,” Wildman said. “They asked me what happened and how aware I was of the rules.”

In the end, Wildman received a fine and a reprimand and was told not to break ranks again.

SAG spokesman Locher said that, in the case of very low-budget films like this one, there wasn’t much the union was inclined to do beyond a slap on the wrist.

Union members, whether they are actors, directors or technicians, work non-union jobs because they need the money and because they are trying to get experience--any experience--in the dog-eat-dog world of Hollywood, he said.

But SAG is in a unique position among Hollywood’s unions: it is the one labor organization--even more than the directors’ or writers’ guilds--in which membership is a virtual necessity for most work. The union draws its clout from its star members, who have insisted that the union be represented on any film on which they agree to work.

The Directors Guild is fairly successful as well. Glenn Gumpel, executive director of the Directors Guild, said that only about 10% of films are made without union directors.

Of that 10%, just a few are considered major movies, distributed by a large studio, according to Directors Guild assistant executive secretary Warren Adler, who has researched non-guild movies.

Of these, Adler said, the most notable in the past year are films made by director Spike Lee, which are distributed by Universal Studios, and the James Dearden film, “A Kiss Before Dying,” which the British director shot partially in the U.S., but without using guild assistant directors.

Like SAG, the Directors Guild can typically demand union directors because the vast majority of Hollywood’s most influential directors are members.

The below-the-line organizations, by comparison, have no such clout. Their power rests solely in the old-fashioned strengths of labor: unity, the ability to disrupt production if their needs are not considered, and claims that union members have a certain level of professionalism and training not found in other workers.

IATSE relies on the ingenuity of its organizers--Dale Paule found Peter Bogdonavich in North Texas and organized “Texasville” after a week on the set--but the union has not met with the same fear-inspired acquiescence as the Teamsters. IATSE has signed up more films in the past two years than the Teamsters, but that is in part because of the union’s willingness to go a little easier on some issues.

In attempt to win even more films, IATSE recently revised its contract with the major studios, making concessions in wages and other areas. Shortly after the contract was revised, for example, the union signed the Ridley Scott film “Thelma and Louise,” starring Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, which had begun production without the union several weeks before.

The Teamsters, on the other hand, come with a reputation--deserved or otherwise--for toughness that has not only won them contracts but made them among the few blue collar unions which have not been forced to accept many concessions.

When a reporter sought to write about a low-budget film starring Apollonia and “Star Wars” lead Mark Hamill, for example, a publicist assigned to the film urged The Times not to write that the picture was in production.

“We don’t want the Teamsters to find us,” the publicist said. “They’ll slash our tires.”

Tire-slashing, according to Teamster organizer Connolly, is against the rules, and so is another technique the Teamsters are occasionally accused of using: shooting infra-red rays into location trucks to ruin film.

“Since I came on this job (in January, 1989), no one has shot any infra-red rays into any film,” Connolly said. “It has been suggested to me many times, but there’s no way I would condone doing anything like that.”

Why be liable for destroying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of film, Connolly said, and make the union vulnerable to lawsuits, when marching around blowing whistles can do the same job?

It costs between $40,000 and $100,000 a day to shoot a movie, Connolly said, and each day that the production is disrupted means a greater loss.

It took just two days to sign up the NBC television movie “Aftermath” in Denver this summer. And “Tales from the Crypt,” the HBO production shot in Culver City last year, was organized in three and a half hours.

“These picket lines aren’t 12 nurses walking around,” Connolly said. “This isn’t five fat guys sitting around eating doughnuts. This is meant to bring you to your knees.”

“It’s kind of a despicable way to do business,” Connolly added later, as a Teamster on a motorcycle roared around the set of “Tipperary.” “But they force you to do it.”