Actors, Advertisers to Resume Contract Talks

Representatives of actors and advertisers confirmed Monday that they will meet again next week in New York to try to jump-start contract negotiations that broke down late last month.

Meetings are set to start Oct. 19, with both sides promising that they will remain at the bargaining table if progress is made.

Separately, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists plan to formally launch a boycott today of Procter & Gamble, one of the nation’s biggest advertisers, in an effort to pressure advertisers into signing a new contract.

The unions have scheduled a rally in New York featuring such stars as Julia Roberts and Richard Dreyfuss, along with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

Actors also plan to picket a Procter & Gamble paper-products plant in Oxnard and will protest at Procter & Gamble’s annual meeting in Cincinnati.

P&G; has said that it is sticking by industry negotiators and that it believes the latest contract proposal from actors is too expensive.

SAG and AFTRA went on strike May 1 in what has become the longest strike ever by a Hollywood labor guild.

After a long stalemate, negotiations continued intensively for two weeks before unraveling Sept. 27, largely over how much actors should receive for ads that run on cable TV and whether a new contract should cover commercials made exclusively for the Internet.

Actors in ads that run on cable now receive a maximum flat fee of $1,014. The unions have proposed a series of increases over a three-year period to a maximum of $2,460 for unlimited use of the ads. The industry has proposed increases topping out at a maximum of $1,850.

Actors dropped their demand to be paid each time an ad runs on cable, while advertisers dropped a proposal to pay a flat fee for ads running on network TV instead of paying actors each time those ads run.