Just Another Labor Dispute Behind Oz’s Curtain
There was, admittedly, the show biz factor. These may have been the industry’s bit players, but this was still the war room for an actors’ strike. “Ooh! I love these!” the spike-haired guy manning the coffee shrieked, waving a pair of coasters inscribed with a Screen Actors Guild insignia. “Aren’t they darling?” He held them up to his chest like a little bra. “Whaddaya think?”
“I’ve HAD it! I’m SORRY!”
A large woman stormed grandly into the room, thick arms flailing. “I SIMPLY CANNOT WORK LIKE THIS!!”
Up at the phone bank, two elderly actresses ignored both performances, opting instead to be the grannies they appear to have played on commercials since Howdy Doody was a sapling.
“They think we’re all making the big buckeroos!” snapped one with the bifocals.
“But they’re wrong!” This was the one with the jaunty neck scarf.
“There have been times when I’ve been out of work three years running.”
“I drove into town 80 times last year for auditions.”
“It’s chicken one day and feathers the next in this business!”
“Chicken and feathers!”
“And now they don’t want to give us cable residuals? Down with tightwad advertisers! But don’t quote me.”
“No, dear, really. This is a very tough town.”
By “town,” understand, the striking grannies did not precisely mean the metropolis they live in. One of the more enduring myths about Greater Los Angeles is that to live here is to be one with Hollywood. In fact, Hollywood is like every other L.A. locale--it keeps to itself unless there’s an earthquake. Show business loses its magic if the audience gets too much backstage information, and industry people, even the little people, accept that. They work in their own walled-off compounds, speak their own language, eat at their own restaurants, which they then abandon if too many civilians get reservations. They bat in their own softball leagues, engage in their own class wars.
“We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood,” Cecilia Brady said in “The Last Tycoon,” summing up a relationship that has endured.
This has been an unusual moment for local show people, however. There has, in fact, been a sort of earthquake, and it has been driving backstage Hollywood out into the arms of strangers all week. People who see Greater L.A. as the home of some vast show biz juggernaut don’t understand that, despite all the glamour and star power, entertainment here is essentially a workplace issue. From the boardroom to the dressing room, the “company town” side of this city has been torqued to its roots by new media and technology.
So even the most venerable holders of SAG cards took to Wilshire Boulevard on Monday, calling for Internet residuals. So Time Warner cable was reduced to holding Channel 7 hostage in random suburbs while a suddenly populist Disney ran around whispering: Psst! Wanna buy a satellite dish? Never has local footage of a union rally been so bright with vaguely familiar, Midwestern-looking faces. Never has South Pasadena heard so much about Regis Philbin. Not since the writers’ strike of the late 1980s has Hollywood seemed so suddenly here.
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Not that Greater L.A. is likely to get all misty about it. It’s safe to say Cardinal Mahony won’t be saying Mass for that red-haired guy on the Ameritech ad, as he did for the striking janitors. Still, the week’s developments point up something about Hollywood that tends to get overlooked here: The show biz factor, however insular, is a huge component of life in this metropolis.
The big shots may cluster in Bel-Air, but thousands upon thousands of other locals work in less public roles, and they live all over this place. The actors manning the guild phone bank this week included a Wonderbread mom from Canoga Park, a Mar Vista guy last seen as a dad in a Tarzan action figure commercial and a stunt SUV driver from Sunland. In short, people who not only look like, but also are, us.
“I live in Chino,” confided Charles McCowan, a 52-year-old actor who got hit with a beer can for an Ikea ad in his last job. “Not Chino Hills, either. Just Chino. I drive a 1985 Toyota pickup. People think you’re dripping with dough just because they saw you on TV.” McCowan--a tall, balding black man with a fatherly face that has gotten him lots of work lately--laughed.
It was his signature chuckle, but the actor’s eyes were serious, and, like the public scuffling of Time Warner and Disney over where on the cable spectrum the Magic Kingdom’s offerings will reside, that was a risk. These company town upheavals are giving the audience a lot of backstage information. Here’s hoping the magic doesn’t end up the worse for it.
Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.