Rancor Moves to Center Stage in Actors’ Strike

Irwin Keyes has the type of rubbery, comic-strip features that Hollywood casting agents refer to as a “great look.” His square-jawed, pop-eyed visage has served him well over 25-odd years as a commercial actor, landing him parts as a nose-picking cowboy thug, a lunkheaded Neanderthal who gets bonked from the sky by a keg of Budweiser and a gluttonous Goliath slain by David for refusing to share his Subway sandwich.

A couple of years ago he even won a Clio, the TV commercial industry’s top award, for his gothic-Method portrayal of a 14th century hunchbacked messenger in the Dark Ages before Southwestern Bell. “It was really cute,” says Keyes’ actor-wife, Vicki.

But the Keyeses, like thousands of fellow performers across the country, now find themselves assigned the role of anonymous bit players in a rancorous Information Age epic where the possibility of a happy ending grows fainter by the day.

As the Hollywood commercial actors’ strike against the advertising industry grinds into its fifth month--one of the longest actors’ strikes in U.S. history--anger and anxiety are spilling over on all sides of the picket line. With the actors’ unions and their ad industry opponents hunkering down, the labor dispute that began May 1 over the industry’s desire to pay actors a flat fee with no residuals for appearances in network and cable TV ads has curdled into a sour cocktail of bitter accusations and wounded friendships.

In Greater Los Angeles, home to about 60,000 of the Screen Actors Guild’s 97,000 members, the strike’s hyper-real emotional atmosphere has bled into the personal realm, touching actors, producers, casting agents, camera operators, electricians, even caterers. Heated rows break out at West Hollywood dinner parties. Longtime colleagues refuse to speak with one another. Friends who attended each other’s weddings now go out of their way to avoid contact.

Although advertisers so far have hesitated to yank their big-name Hollywood pitchmen in favor of no-name replacements, the strike’s foot soldiers must rely on strength in numbers, while growing painfully aware that the ad industry apparently doesn’t prize their talents as much as they themselves do.

“In the last two weeks the anger has been building. You can see it in people’s eyes, you can see it in their actions,” says casting director Tom Reudy, who, like many in his business, professes to be “stuck in the middle” of the strike. “It’s very difficult because no one expected this strike to go on like this.”

The two sides are scheduled to meet in New York on Sept. 13, their first formal encounter since two days of fruitless talks in late July, but no one involved sounds remotely hopeful of a truce. Instead, many are dreading a grueling rerun of the 22-week Writers Guild strike against producers in 1988, which was blamed for hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Hollywood buzzes with speculation that the strike could presage an even more costly dispute next spring when contracts expire for the 12,000-member Writers Guild of America and the TV and film industry.

The strike’s asphalt-pounding choreography has transformed people like Irwin and Vicki Keyes, who keep house in Santa Monica with their cat Squeaky and never paid much heed to union affairs before, into activists, fighting for what they see as their right to make a fair-wage living in a fast-changing industry. While a handful of marquee Hollywood talent, including Elliot Gould, William Baldwin and Charlton Heston, have marched and leafleted, the strike is largely being waged by rank-and-file grunts like the Keyeses who wish more of their glamorous colleagues would go grab a picket sign and hit the streets.

“We still have not given in, and I’m proud of us,” said Vicki last week while taking part with her husband in a candlelight vigil that was intended to, but failed, to catch Al Gore’s eye. “This is not an easy thing. Strikes are just the pits.”

Which isn’t to say the current dispute has bottomed out yet. Officials of the two striking unions, SAG and the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists (AFTRA), cite figures that the ad industry is losing between $1 million and $2 million a day on the strike, while the permit-issuing Entertainment Industry Development Corp. reckons commercial production in L.A. County has dropped 66%. But the industry asserts that it’s countering the strike by simply shifting production to other parts of the country and Canada to elude picketers.

“The industry is producing a full complement of excellent commercials,” says Ira Shepard, labor counsel for the committee that represents the Assn. of National Advertisers and the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies. “The victims of the strike are people blindly following the union’s leadership.”

For young nonunion actors like Ryan, 22, who asked that his surname not be used, the strike has been a bonanza. Based in Manhattan, Ryan flew here last week to shoot a nonunion TV ad and says he has 10 more auditions this week. “I don’t know what’s in my future with like celebrity and TV stardom, but I’m very anxious to get into the film industry,” he says.

Ryan isn’t intimidated by disapproving friends or by a union that has vowed to deny future membership to strikebreakers. He’s hoping SAG will be disbanded and “cleansed,” he says, then regroup as an entity more accommodating to ambitious newcomers trying to get a foot in the Hollywood door.

For middle-aged, card-carrying unionists like the Keyeses, accustomed to acting’s financial ups and downs, fervor alternates with daily frustration, determination with occasional discouragement. While the strike has nipped at their bank account, the couple say, it has deepened their bond with like-minded colleagues and opened their eyes to what Vicki calls “corporate greed.”

So far, they’re keeping ahead of their debts. “Luckily,” Irwin says, “I did a movie in June, ‘House of 1,000 Corpses.’ Horror film.” He also draws residual checks for past performances in films like “Death Wish IV” and the first “Flintstones” movie, the kind of character roles non-stars rely on to pay their bills. SAG says 80% of its members earn less than $5,000 a year, which they augment with TV, film and theater work, plus other jobs ranging from waiting tables to law enforcement (SAG’s ranks encompass several LAPD officers).

But for many strikers hemorrhaging away their savings while pressed with rent and car payments, the situation is dire. While Hollywood is watching the dispute with mounting apprehension, much of America appears to be tuning it out. “We’re not the garbage collectors, so there’s not garbage piling up in the street, we’re not the hotel workers, so you don’t have the sympathy for the disenfranchised,” says actor Doug Traer, 46. “People think of actors, they think we’re all spoiled rich people. We’re working actors. We’re the bottom men on the food chain.”

Many actors blame the media for allegedly paying scant attention to the strike. But they also concede that many of their own colleagues are viewing the action from the sidelines, despite SAG leaders’ assertions that union participation in the strike is close to 100%. “A lot of people think, ‘This doesn’t affect me,’ ” says Traer’s wife, strike captain Julie Sanford, 46. “They ask, ‘How’s the strike going?’ as they’re strutting around the gym.”

Strikers Confront Nonunion Actors

On a sweaty August afternoon on a Hollywood side street, the workaday world of TV commercial-making proceeds apace. But all is not normal. Since 3 p.m., a dozen striking actors have been leafleting outside JGF, a production company that is holding auditions for a nonunion deodorant commercial.

As auditioners stream into the building, strikers try persuading them to turn back. When that fails, several strikers begin shouting taunts and profanities and taking snapshots of line-crossers to post on the burgeoning “Wall of Shame” at SAG’s Wilshire Boulevard headquarters. “Your grandparents died to join a union!” one screams. “Scab, take 50! Scab, take 70!” another mocks.

Union leaders say they’ve been urging members to minimize in-your-face confrontations. “One of the things we’re trying to emphasize is decorum, decorum, decorum,” says Gordon Drake, SAG’s national strike coordinator. “It’s a little harder to control, and I must say we’ve given people a little more leeway to get their anger out.”

But some feel the unions need to be more, not less, aggressive. “This is a strike that is invisible,” laments casting agent Phil Brock, a strike supporter. “I think sometimes the union leadership has been a bit too reticent. This is a war. You go to war to win. I don’t think they realized they were in a war until the last week or so.”

On the picket line, the battle is already in full swing. Amber, a ponytailed 18-year-old in a gold-and-purple cheerleader outfit (the deodorant spot has a football theme), leaves the audition and races to her silver Mitsubishi. “I think it’s ridiculous what they’re doing,” she says of the strikers. “They’re just wasting their time and pissing people off.”

As Amber vents, striker Silas Cooper walks up and begins questioning her calmly. Has anyone explained to you what this strike is about, he asks? Do you know what taking this job could mean to your future as an actor? Amber listens quietly for a few minutes before driving away. Cooper responds with a who-knows-if-that’ll-work shrug.

Like his fellow strikers, Cooper, 40, emphatically rejects the advertisers’ proposal to pay actors a flat rate for commercial appearances regardless of how many times the ad runs. Actors say this shortchanges them because of the proliferation of cable advertising and uncertainty over the future role the Internet may play in the advertising industry. They also contend it leads to “overexposure,” in which actors become so closely associated with a particular brand name that competing product makers won’t hire them.

Advertisers argue that the fractured nature of modern television viewership means ads reach fewer customers per showing than they did in the days when the networks dominated. They support replacing the current pay-per-play system with one-time flat-fee “buyouts.”

Even before the strike, flesh-and-blood actors were steadily being displaced by animated pixels and hiply ironic computer graphics. Peter Cohen, a New York producer, says the unions’ demands are unrealistic and “unaffordable” for corporations accountable to stockholders. He blames the impasse on a “militant” union leadership’s “sense of entitlement.”

“This is not Harlan County we’re talking about here,” says Cohen, referring to the brutal mid-’70s Kentucky coal miners’ strike. “I think sometimes these union people try to wrap themselves in the mantle of the downtrodden.”

As the afternoon grows louder and stickier, what little “decorum” remains on the picket line is waning. When a young black woman exits her parked car and strides past the strikers, Peaches Johnson, who is African American, lights into her. “Have you forgotten your people’s struggle? Don’t you know Martin Luther King was down in Memphis supporting the garbage workers’ strike when he was shot?”

The woman whips her head around without breaking stride. “Don’t you tell me about Martin Luther King!” she snaps. “You guys are crazy!”

“Well, of course we are!” Johnson retorts, managing a chuckle. A South-Central native whose mother pressed clothes for a living, Johnson, 42, says she’s adopted a “bad cop” attitude on the picket line because “nobody ever tells the Teamsters to be nice. It just drives me crazy that people think we’re supposed to sit back and lose our careers.”

Several line-crossers give back as good as they get, jeering, swearing and flashing their middle fingers. “Why don’t you go back to your job waiting tables?” hollers Paul Tackleu, a tall, heavyset 21-year-old. Tackleu says he’s wanted to be an actor since performing in school and church plays as a kid. He now works a night shift at Federal Express so he can attend daytime auditions.

Ron, a non-SAG actor from Chicago, tells a similar tale of a long, hard slog through the acting ranks: from playing the Artful Dodger in “Oliver!” to studying at the Second City comedy theater, then waiting tables for 11 years trying to catch a break. The strikers’ insults don’t faze him, Ron says, and they won’t stop him from pursuing his dream--the dream of every actor, striker or nonstriker, to stand out artfully and memorably from the crowd.

“I’m 30 years old with student loans,” he says. “I feel bad for these people [the strikers]. I know three or four of them haven’t worked in years. This is a very unforgiving town. And in the end, everyone’s replaceable, and no one cares. And that’s what they’re bitter about.”

Irwin Keyes doesn’t sound bitter, only slightly bemused, as he contemplates where the strike is heading and the powerful but elusive opponent that he and his colleagues are confronting. “This is like huge mega-corporations that are invisible,” he says. “They’re everywhere and nowhere.”