Contract Deal Gets Applause From Actors

Actors and studio executives, both lacking the stomach for a strike, breathed a collective sigh of relief Wednesday after negotiators for actors’ unions and movie and TV producers reached tentative agreement on a new three-year contract.

Actors particularly were gratified that they will be getting more money for shows rerun on cable TV. They also were pleased that Fox Broadcasting Co., which had been paying lower fees based on its earlier status as a fledgling network, will end up paying the same residuals as the other major networks.

Studio executives and talent agents, meanwhile, said production schedules--which had slowed recently amid concern about a possible strike--should return to normal soon, although the timing will vary by studio.

“Our job right now is to work with our clients and with [the] studios to put some movies together, to get them started by September or October and wrap by the beginning of next year,” said Jeremy Zimmer, head of the motion picture literary division at United Talent Agency. “I think things will ramp up fairly quickly, [but] there’ll be a little bit of a lull.”

The settlement, reached Tuesday night after six weeks of negotiations, must now be ratified by both sides: the two unions--Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists--and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

Following an agreement reached earlier this year by the Writers Guild of America, the settlement ends the threat of strikes that would have had dire consequences for the entertainment industry and Southern California economy.

Actress Allyce Beasley was particularly pleased with provisions calling for higher pay for cable reruns. She said she considers herself “the poster child for cable abuses” in the way actors have been paid when network TV series are rerun by cable channels.

From 1985 to 1989, she was a regular on the ABC series “Moonlighting.” “It’s never been [re]run on anything but cable,” Beasley, 46, said. “That’s five years of my life’s work. At this point, quarterly residuals for cable networks don’t amount to more than a couple thousand dollars. So the cable increases are very meaningful to me.”

The contract also includes a special $5,000 payment for lower-paid actors in film roles and better pay for middle-income actors who appear as guest stars on TV shows.

“Mostly in the last couple of years, I’ve done at least one feature film a summer, one small part that winds up in the promos,” Beasley said. “I have a small part in ‘Legally Blonde.’ It’s my one scene in the movie. In recent days, I couldn’t get my quote [usual fee]. I couldn’t get anything more than scale on any feature films I did. That $5,000 would mean something to me. . . . Since video-sales residuals are computed on how much time you’re on film, you don’t get much residuals. This $5,000 increase is very valid and fair.”

Cheryl Francis Harrington, who voiced an animated character on the series “The PJs” and will appear next season in the series “Philly,” agreed. “That’s almost half of what you need to have to get medical benefits. . . . That [plus] those residuals mean that in a bad year, you can make your medical benefits.”

Beasley said, “I directly credit SAG for the fact that I could stand and talk to you today. Three years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I wasn’t doing well in my career. SAG paid over a half a million dollars in medical costs both for experimental and standard procedures. Fox and cable weren’t paying into that [pension and health fund]. Now that’s going to change.”

Beasley, an Emmy and Golden Globe nominee who also appeared on “Taxi” and “Cheers,” continued, “I’m thrilled to death that the Fox network is being held responsible within a three-year period for being a real network. It’s high time they got brought into paying network prices for union actors. They’ve been getting away with murder for years.”

Harrington, however, was not completely satisfied with the Fox provision. “I realize they had to come up with something so there would be no strike,” she said. “Why is it going to take Fox three years to finally pay the same residuals? It’s going to take two years to do all the paperwork?”

“I think it was smart that they worked until they reached some sort of resolution,” said Jason Kravits, co-star of the ABC drama “The Practice” until May, when his character was killed off.

Fueling Kravits’ relief at the settlement was the fallout from the six-month commercial actors’ strike last year. “Commercial work has never really recovered for the actor,” he said, adding that friends still report a sluggish market in the wake of that walkout.

The settlement, Kravits said, shows “everybody wanted something to work out. In a way, that was the difference between this negotiation and the commercial negotiation. Everybody wanted a resolution.”

Mo Rocca, who has been a political correspondent on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” since October 1998, said the new contract won’t have an effect on his salary since the late-night program is nonunion. But as a member of both the Writers Guild and SAG, Rocca said his future ventures on cable television suddenly look more promising.

“I get to keep wandering in the basic cable hinterlands, and it looks like I actually might strike oil. All this time, I thought the territory was worthless. I feel like Jed Clampett,” Rocca said from his apartment in TriBeCa. “This makes it less embarrassing to be puttering around on a show that’s somewhere up in the 80s on most people’s television dials.”

Veteran comedic actor Dom DeLuise heard about the deal on the radio Wednesday morning, just before 40 friends came over for a holiday barbecue. He said he was heartened by the insurance the new deal offered working actors who are not necessarily stars.

“We’re worried about the people who really live on what they make,” he said. “When Loni Anderson does her contracts, she gets her hair, the gowns, the jewels. The stars don’t need protections, but other actors do. They can’t negotiate for themselves.”

DeLuise said Hollywood has always been fickle. “Laurel and Hardy died penniless. . . . You can be a star of television one day and cooking in a monastery the next year.”

To Hal Sparks, star of the Showtime original series “Queer as Folk,” the new deal won important gains for struggling actors but failed to address an ever-more troubling issue--the migration of acting work to Canada, where many movies and TV series are shot outside union jurisdiction.

This includes “Queer as Folk.” The series, about gay life in Pittsburgh, is actually shot in Toronto. “It seems more and more actors are being caught in the red tape” of productions shot north of the border.

Sparks had a role in last year’s comedy feature “Dude, Where’s My Car?” which paid into his SAG health benefits.

With Hollywood’s labor uncertainty behind it, the question now will focus on how quickly the production cycle can return to some semblance of normalcy.

“Business as usual is going to be different for every studio,” said Michael De Luca, recently appointed head of production at DreamWorks SKG and former president of production at New Line Cinema.

Unlike some studios, “DreamWorks didn’t rush a lot of films into production” to beat contract deadlines, De Luca said.

“The only deadline I’m facing is seeing what we can shoot before [the normal] breaking for Christmas,” De Luca said. “Jackie Chan’s ‘The Tuxedo’ is prepping. We plan to start it in the next couple of months. Other stuff may come together by the fall.”

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his story was reported by Times staff writers Rachel Abramowitz, Paul Brownfield, Dana Calvo, Brian Lowry and contributor Richard Natale, and written by Kinsey Lowe and Kelly Scott.